I tend to romanticize summer. The movies and TV shows I grew up with made me think that the season was about adventure and big-time transformation.

I imagined myself building a tight-knit friend group and getting out of a pickle together, like in The Sandlot or Camp Nowhere. Or traveling across the world, say, to Greece, like Lena Kaligaris, a character in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, having a whirlwind summer romance and returning an entirely different person.

I’ve never actually had a summer like that.

Even when your expectations are more modest than mine, “so often, the summer just flies by, and we haven’t taken the picnics or gone for the day trip or whatever it was that we thought we were gonna do,” says happiness expert Gretchen Rubin.

Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and host of the podcast Happier With Gretchen Rubin, has been sharing ideas on social media about how to make the season more memorable and satisfying.

She walks through four exercises to help you get what you want — and more — out of the season. Print out our worksheet here, fill it out and stick it on your fridge to keep you accountable. Or take a screenshot and post it to Instagram (don’t forget to tag @NPRLifeKit!).

🍑 Give your summer a theme

Pick a single word or phrase that you want to embrace this season — something that captures the feeling you want to have over the next few months.

“My theme for the summer is ‘ketchup,'” Rubin says. “It has a kind of a summer feeling, because you think of putting ketchup on your burger.”

“It’s a metaphor,” she says. It means to look for “whatever I could add [this season] to make something elevated and more fun.”

Meanwhile, my theme word this summer is “juice.” I no longer think that I need to travel far or completely transform to have a delicious summer. I just need to take advantage of the abundance that the season offers: ripe peaches and tomatoes, juicy softball pitches and the opportunity to feel juicy in my body when I wear a bathing suit.

Print out our worksheet here, fill it out and stick it on your fridge to keep you accountable. Or take a screenshot and post it to Instagram (don’t forget to tag @NPRLifeKit!).

Malaka Gharib/NPR

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Malaka Gharib/NPR

🪣 Create a summer bucket list

What do you want to do this summer? On my bucket list: ride the Ferris wheel at a summer fair, have more barbecues at my parents’ house and see the sunrise at least once.