It’s been a painful reality, discovering that the days of the week still exist during summer.

And that the Fourth of July is not a weekend holiday, as it once used to feel like … because what did it matter when every day from mid June through August felt like a Saturday?

I knew this was coming, my first summer where it wasn’t called “summer break,” that summer was soon to become just one out of four seasons we experience over the course of a year.

Sitting in my dad’s car when I was a junior in high school, I turned to him and randomly blurted out, “Dad, when I graduate from college there won’t be any more summer vacation, will there?”

He confirmed my suspicion, as well as the series of questions that followed about the disappearance of sleepovers and sitting around the kids table at Thanksgiving.

You grow up and things change. Responsibility, maintaining a livelihood, supporting yourself and others around you – we all know these things happen and in many ways, I am so excited that I’ve graduated to that level in life.

But if you know me, you know that I can revert back to fourth grader’s sense of humor. That laughing is one of my favorite hobbies and how I don’t shy away from making prank phone calls.

I’m a kid at heart and always will be. I dance, I prance, I play -I love to play- and I hope everyone still takes the time to play, whether you’re 7 or 77.

I hope that you break out the Chutes and Ladders game every now and then. I hope you go get ice cream -not the fat-free, low cal kind. The real kind- and close your eyes, spin around and point the flavor that you’re going to order.

I hope that you take your dress shoes off and walk through the grass instead of keeping to the sidewalk and that you go to the beach and don’t care about getting your clothes all wet and your hair covered in sand.

No matter how much responsibility you have, I hope that summertime will always be special, even if there is no vacation time or break in sight. The “little you” has never left you, nor will he or she. Your childlike faith is one of the greatest blessings – don’t ever let it go.