Instead of spending money on camp or day care, I kept my daughter home this summer. We got more quality time, but it was harder to work.

• This summer, instead of sending our oldest to summer camp or day care, we kept her home.
• I got a lot of quality time with her and it was nice to have a slower pace to our days.

Sometime in mid-spring of this year, my wife and I started to panic.

"We have no plans for the kids this summer! What the heck are we going to do?"

We'd been too overwhelmed to track down summer camps and get on registration wait lists, and spots were starting to fill up. We had to make some decisions, and fast.

Then we had a crazy idea. What if we just… did nothing?

No summer camp, no formal childcare at all. Would we all turn on each other by the end of the summer? Or could we somehow find a way to survive while working from home? We decided to give it a shot and find out.

We decided to keep our oldest at home this summer

We have two daughters, a 9-year-old and a 3-year-old. Though our younger one would still be in day care all week, we decided to keep our oldest home and keep her schedule relatively clear.

There were a few reasons this made sense for our family.

First was the cost. Most day camps in our area run at least $200 for a week (and that's being conservative). Add up a few of those, and the expense of day care can really get out of hand, especially at a time when our budget was already hurting.

To make matters worse, our daughter just didn't seem overly thrilled about most of the camp options out there. Many of the affordable ones are glorified daycares. Specialty camps that suited her interests better, like marine science camp, were even more expensive. She'd rather hang out with her own friends, so it seemed silly to break the bank on camps she didn't even want to go to.

Finally, as she's gotten older, she's become super involved in sports. This summer, she was on the swim team at our community pool and had soccer practice a few evenings a week. Ensuring she was rested up for sports and not exhausted from go-go-going all day was another big factor in this grand experiment.

My daughter and I got more quality time together than we'd usually get

This plan worked well because I got plenty of time with my daughter this summer.

One idea that's always stuck with me is the myth of quality time, which says that you can't schedule important moments with your loved ones; you have to just be around them a lot and be ready for those meaningful moments when they happen naturally.

I got that with my daughter this summer. Not every day was a magical bonding experience. Still, when I look back, I'll remember laughing while playing video games together in the afternoon, having lunch with her every day, sneaking off to the pool after wrapping up work, and those few-and-far-between moments where she actually wanted to talk.

It was also nice to have a slower pace to our days. With no set time to arrive at preschool for our little one and no camps to rush off to, everyone in the household could sleep in just a little bit longer. We also had plenty of time to get ready for evening soccer practice and prepare dinner.

It was a nice break for us and, more importantly, for her. She works hard during the year with school, sports, and clubs. Even when she was bored and stuck watching TV, she repeatedly told me she was happy to have the downtime.

To make it all work, we also enlisted some help from the grandparents. Once or twice a week, one of my daughter's grandmas would take her out shopping or to lunch for a few hours so I could get some focused work time. I know they all loved getting the time together that's so hard to get during the school year.

Not everything worked smoothly

I went to a few summer camps as a kid, but I also spent a lot of summers running around the neighborhood with friends "until the streetlights came on," as the old cliché goes.

In theory, I thought my daughter would do a lot of that this summer. But it didn't quite work out that way.

One thing I forgot is that we live in Atlanta — and it's WAY too hot to be outside most of the time during the summer. The other part of the theory that didn't translate into practice was that most of my daughter's friends would be in camp themselves, or otherwise on vacation. There were a few play dates, but a lot of the time, no one was really around.

It kind of defeats the purpose of having an old-school summer when no one else is having one.

So, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that my daughter ended up watching a lot more TV and having more iPad time than we initially planned for. After all, I have a flexible job as a blogger, freelance writer, and author; but at some point, even I had to buckle down and get some work done. With no friends around and blazing temperatures outside, TV became a big help.

I also have to admit that while I cherished some of the quality time we had together, there is such a thing as too much time with your kids. I got frustrated and claustrophobic at times, having my daughter on my hip all summer when I was trying to juggle work and other household responsibilities.

Ultimately, our family didn't totally thrive during our summer of no childcare, but we did survive. And we saved a fortune by avoiding summer camps — which only worked for our household because my wife and I both work from home, and I have a lot of flexibility.

The ups and downs of this summer already seem like a distant memory as we get re-acclimated to the hectic school schedule. Next year, both of my girls will be out of school, and we'll face the same conundrum again — only double! I don't know yet exactly how we'll handle it, but this summer experiment was a great learning experience for our family.