School's Out

Ok, so it’s official. I can no longer call it simply “the weekend” or even “the long holiday weekend”. Starting today, it’s summer break, and mostly I love summer break.

Mostly.

I love day after day of being able to get up when I want, with no agenda but the one I make. I love being able to go with the flow of my preferred body’s schedule of doing things. First thing is taking care of last night’s dishes, sorting clothes to get the laundry going, or adding a few things to the weekly grocery list. Next is breakfast while doing a little reading—my current Bible study, my daily Bible reading, or an old but much-loved book from years ago that I happened upon the night before and took a renewed interest in.

If I’m going to exercise, it’s going to happen in the summer. During the school year, I refuse to get up early and deprive my body of sleep to exercise, and I also hate doing it after I have already showered later in the afternoon. But in the summer, I’m able to accommodate my 10:00-11:00 AM tolerance window for exercise, and usually talk myself into working some in.

After a shower is lunch; then the afternoon is mine to design as I choose, usually among a variety of long-term projects that I have running, like catching up on the family scrapbook, organizing the kids school-year binders, or more recently, researching and writing articles and lesson plans for mission trip work in Malawi.

Supper is much more laid-back in the summer. I still make menus and cook, but now I’m not juggling multiple people getting home to eat it at multiple times. When Dad gets home, we eat. Then we do whatever strikes our fancy. Maybe we play the Wii, or a board game. Maybe we go for a walk. Or maybe everybody just retreats to their own area of the house for awhile.

Bedtime is...flexible…in the summer. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say “nonexistent”. Who knows what time the kids really go to sleep? If we don’t have anywhere to go the next morning, I don’t care. Tyler takes up permanent residence on the upstairs couch in the summers. Why? Because he can, I suppose. And because it’s the closest place to sleep to his computer.

So that leaves the parts that I don’t like about summer break.

One, is the constant hazardous waste zone that is called our house. I’m a neat freak. (Not to be confused with a clean freak, which I definitely am NOT). Things can be dirty, as long as they are in their place. But in the summer, nothing is in it’s place. The swim bag and beach towels take permanent residence in the floor. Wet swim suits are wadded up in the most inconvenient of places. Dirty lunch plates, empty coke cans and a multitude of toys litter the family rooms. Every light is on, every TV is running, and every computer is playing some ditty over and over and over until I want to scream.

Two, summer means the swimming pool is open. And other than my daily shower and ice cold bottles to drink, I’m not a water fan. So I try to put the kids off as long as possible by offering water balloons and turning on the sprinklers in the back yard. When that gets old, I throw out the “the water is still cold” card. Of course that one only works for so long.

Three, when the kids are all home, the decibel level in the house is astronomical. Even if they aren’t fussing and arguing, which they usually are, with 4 children at least talking (and possibly screaming), plus 4 computers running, plus a couple of TV’s, plus a kazoo or two…well you get the point. It’s the one time a year I’m actually glad that I seem to be losing my hearing at an early age.

But overall, summer is awesome. Schedules are lax, bedtime is whenever, and baths are optional (the sprinkler counts, right?) And one day very, very far away (meaning the next time I blink) and I’m all old and the days all run together and I don’t know what time it is and I can’t hear anything at all and the kids are all gone living their own lives with their own kids and they only come and visit me once a year or when they need something—well, THEN I’ll probably miss these days. And I’ll have to fight off the temptation to turn on every light in the house and leave all the TV’s running and possibly throw all of my underwear all over the floor and leave it there for a week.

Or maybe not.