Summer Time and the Living is Meh

Remember when you were a kid and it was summer vacation? The world was your oyster baby! No school, swimming all day long, watermelon, ice cream, fireworks, staying up late…and it seemed like it lasted forever. Long, endless days that stretched before you full of complete and utter summer bliss.

And then you grew up and realized that the real world doesn’t give you the summer off. Unless you’re a teacher and frankly, scoring the summer off isn’t enough incentive for me to deal with all those sticky handed, snot dripping, sass mouthed heathens. (I am qualified to assess my child tolerance levels based on the four sticky handed, snot dripping, sass mouthed heathens I gave birth to.) Until you have your own kids, summer is just that “Meh” time where you don’t have to wear a jacket to work. Most of that summer just joy gets sucked right out of your life. You go through your daily grind until the next holiday weekend or until your vacation, fondly thinking of the days of old when July and August were one endless party.

Then you have kids of your own and some of that joy comes back. You get to see those steamy, dreamy days of summer through your children’s eyes and vicariously relive the excitement and wonder that those two months bring. Unfortunately though, now YOU are the one who gets to finance the summer adventures and make sure they have something to look back and reminisce over. In between going to work and carrying on your regular, boring old 12-months-a-year-routine that is.

Unfortunately, my kids don’t seem to understand that functioning members of society require these pesky things called jobs in order to pay for their sun soaked adventures they’re concocting for the next two months. The three year old REALLY doesn’t seem to understand this as he we have the following exchange every morning when I’m getting him dressed:

3: Why do I haf to go to Nancy’s? (Daycare)

Me: Because Mommy has to go to work.

3: Why you haf to go to work?

Me: So we can have money.

3: Why do we haf money?

Me: So we can pay for things like food, and tv, and snacks and the iPad.

THIS he gets. You just have to speak their language. He could care less that we have to pay the mortgage or the lights or the car insurance. If I told him we wouldn’t be able to sleep in our house if we didn’t pay the mortgage he’d think , “Oh cool, we get to sleep outside.” To make it more relatable, you gotta hit him where it hurts most. (Mostly his stomach.) “Ok, so no work means no iPad. Got it. No money, no you tube kids, no blueberries, and no Bubble Guppies. Alrighty then. You just go on to work now Mom and make that money for me to enjoy my creature comforts. Oh and send Dad to work too because I could really use some more animal crackers and Matchbox cars.” (Until they start kindergarten, life is just one big summer for them. Lucky sons of a gun. (Sons of a guns? Son of a guns?)

Summer for kids is much different than summer for parents. Summer for parents means we now have to coordinate daycare, summer camps, plus try to find time to “make memories” that don’t involve rushing, swearing, and running 1,000 errands. (Which is literally our life in a nutshell most days.) We have to add an additional 10 minutes to any outdoor excursion to add sunscreen and bug spray. We have to bathe the filthy little ragamuffins every night. (Or at least hose them down in the backyard. What? It’s not like they’re going anywhere important for the next 8 weeks.) We have to stock up on bandages for the bug bites that will bleed because even though we’ve told them 30 times to stop scratching they won’t listen to us. We’ll buy ice cream and neat marshmallow sticks to make s’mores and slip n’ slides that they’ll think are so cool until they somehow slide on it the wrong way and give themselves red belly. We lose 30 minutes of sanity time every night because our kids get to stay up later on non-school nights. (Whose %$*!% idea was this anyway? It just makes ME more tired, not you. You’re still bouncing out of bed at 6:30 AM.) It means having half the neighborhood kids at your house sometimes and sometimes being able to send your kid to drive someone else’s parents nuts. It means we’ll make  a big deal out of small things like going to get ice cream, watching fireworks, or going to the park so that you believe it’s the best summer EVER and not just that your tired parents are trying to make you think you’re having an awesome summer.

Summer for parents is 45 reminders a day that you need to wear shoes outside so you don’t hurt your feet and about 20 of them your kid will actually hear. (Whether they’ll actually put shoes on is probably only like 10 of those 45 though.) We can become the cool parents by letting you have ice cream for dinner when its 90 degrees outside and by jumping in puddles in your bathing suit in summer rain storms and we will totally let you do that if only for the 20 minutes of restoration time we can get out of it. Summer is when we don’t have to pack school lunches but we have to buy A LOT of snacks because fresh air, sunshine and water make you hungry, hungry caterpillars. I know we will go to countless cookouts, picnics, and parties and it’ll be a struggle to feed all the kids because one is picky about food preparation, one is picky about who prepares it, and one is just plain picky and eats 10 things total (and none of them are on this table). They will eat too many popsicles, they won’t sleep as much as they should, and their feet will be permanently stained that dirt color. But that’s ok. Because one day they get to be the boring old parents, wishing they could be back in the leisurely days of summers past. So enjoy it kids. September is right around the corner.