How One Mama is Making the Most of Summer's With Her Babies

Written by guest contributor: Kensley Taylore | @kensleyklausner

I feel like every kid should experience summer time in the South. I remember waking up every summer morning and being so excited to get outside! I was raised in Hueytown, Alabama (and yes -- it’s as small as it sounds.) My grandparents lived two doors down from me and would baby sit my cousins and I while our parents worked. It was the late 90s-early 2000s and life seemed so simple. Was it simple because it was the 90s? Or was it simple because I was a kid without a single worry in the world? I had a best friend that also lived a few doors down. We were like two peas in a pod! We rode bikes, played with Barbies, painted girls rule/boys drool all over her swing set, and we even thought we were undercover cops and would go through our neighbors mailboxes (we later realized that’s a felony… oops). Summers on Deer Run Lane were the best! Our Memaw made them pretty special by simply just letting us be kids.

I now have kids of my own. My husband and I met in college and quickly married a year later. We had our first son in 2021. Beckham, our oldest has Down syndrome. He’s a little delayed but we push him to live as typical of a life as possible. He’s hilarious, sweet, determined, and truly the BIGGEST blessing! Then Sully came along in 2022, and he’s the definition of “2nd child.” Wild, adventurous, also hilarious, and just so damn cute! It’s basically like having twins… (my sister has twins and she hates when I say that) but it’s true, they wear the same size clothing and I even dress them like twins from time to time.

As I write this, I think of an Instagram Reel that went viral not long ago. It was a woman explaining we only have 18 summers with our children, and we should make each one count. It got me thinking about my 18 summers and how I want to raise my own children. Although we can’t afford elaborate summer vacations, we can afford to:

• Let them run around barefoot in the back yard.
• Set up the sprinkler in the afternoon when daddy gets home from work.
• Buy the cheap popsicles.
• Let them ride their bikes down to the pond.
• Have water gun fights.
• Let them stay up past their bedtime from time to time
• Allow them help us in the garden.
• Play with sidewalk chalk.
• Go on long afternoon walks.
• Catch all of the fireflies, and blow all of the bubbles!

Because in reality, we probably have less than 18 summers… Here’s to getting back to our roots! Here’s to raising our kids outside, letting them get dirty, and simply just letting them be a kid!