5 Reasons I Suck At Summer

Labor Day is a few scant days away and even though it’s still technically summer, everyone knows that Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer event. (Hence all the big sales to commemorate it!) The end is nigh I say! 

Now that Summer ’17 is drawing to a close I give you my list of:

5 Reasons I Suck At Summer

1.) I take it for granted. Every year it’s the same thing: The end of school comes and the entire summer stretches out before me, an endless blank slate of possibilities. Oh, the things we’ll do! The places we’ll go! The people we’ll meet! And before you know it, it’s the end of August and you’re thinking, “Crap! We didn’t DO anything! We didn’t GO anywhere! How are the kids going to have special childhood memories of summers growing up?” Mom guilt, mom guilt, and more mom guilt. So I cram everything into the last two weeks of the summer so that if my kid gets saddled with one of those “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” assignments it doesn’t say he just played Minecraft and took field trips to the backyard where he made s’mores. Although he DID play Minecraft and I’m pretty sure that we’ve made more s’mores than a family of 5 ought to make in one summer, I want him to have a little more pizazz in his essay. I mean, he’s never going to be able to say we took our yacht down to the club, but he can at least say that we took our Ford Escape down to the ice cream place. (Fancy!)

2.) We stay put. We’re a pretty boring family in terms of vacation. We go to Florida on spring break in April and then count down the rest of the days until we go back to Florida in April the next year. Don’t get me wrong, we love our annual beach escape but there are plenty more places we want to see. Every year my husband and I talk about “little trips” we could take. Day trips. Small overnight trips. With kids. Without kids. Basically, we make a list of places we aren’t ever going to be able to go to so long as we are buying all this damn sports equipment/musical instruments/school clothes/medical coverage/food for a small army. We dream of going to cool places like Boston and doing cool things like eating lobster in Maine but in the end we run out of time and money and ambition. (Holy crap do I need some more ambition! Just a little though. Like a gallon. Or two. A day.)

3.) I work, he works, we all go to work work. Ugh, if only that pesky full time job that supports us and keeps us in clothes and food and fun things weren’t so…full time. I mean, really, who NEEDS to work 40 hours a week? Uh, I do. And so does my husband. Sadly, if we want to afford those things we can’t afford, we need to work. Both of us. At jobs that take us away from our lives 40 to 50 hours a week. And unless Powerball starts cooperating, we probably have to continue this trend for another 20 years. Oh my God that sounds so depressing. Remind me not to speak that heinous number out loud ever again. From now on, it shall be known as “the retirement countdown that shall not be named”. (Bonus points for any of you who caught that literary reference.) So, take away forty of the best hours a week and what are you left with? The crappy scraps of the week day hours and two measly days on the weekend. Someone should lobby for more frequent 3 day weekends. Can’t we fit a few more holidays in there? Like Margarita Monday, National Nap Like You Mean It Day, and We’re Really Glad Hitler Lost Day? Aren’t there more people we could celebrate? Let’s start with making Black Friday a national holiday, or as it shall be named forthwith: The Day We All Buttoned Our Pants Back Up and Went Shopping. Of course, it has to be online shopping since we’ll all be off. (Since robots are slowly taking over the world in a bid for total domination, maybe we can get them to start by taking our black Friday shifts.)

4.) I fill the time I’m NOT working with projects. To make matters worse, once you’re an adult, you do adulty things like home maintenance and landscaping and chores. (And we aren’t even getting an allowance for doing them!) Since we work all the damn time, we have to do these adulty things in our time off. So we aren’t working at work but we are working at home. Laundry, lawn mowing, grocery shopping, scrubbing toilets….we’re living the dream baby! Clorox in one hand and a sponge on the other! I tend to measure my summer in terms of progress. Like this summer I managed to paint the front porch and I’m 25% of the way through re-organizing the basement. It’s not as productive as I wanted to be, but on the other hand, I did something so I feel some measure of accomplishment. But guess what I’m NOT doing while I’m being all grown up and productive? Spending cool time with my kids catching lightening bugs in jars or pitching tents in the backyard. (Ok, ok, so if you know me, you know that tent thing was never happening anyway, but you get the picture.) Ugh, why did no one ever tell me that this adulating thing was so hard? Didn’t anyone make a pamphlet for this?

5.) I miss a lot of opportunities to make big deals out of the small deals. Here’s the deal: My kids don’t always know that I’m sucking at summer. Especially if I can pull a Houdini on them and make them think that I am freaking amazeballs at summer. Unfortunately, I often forget to make a big deal out of those smaller moments so that they are convinced that they have had the BEST TIME EVER!!! (And maybe I can even fool myself into thinking I’m winning this summer thing!) So when we take the youngest two to get ice cream and eat it at the beach, they think it’s awesome while my husband and I are just excited to sit down after completing a day of chores. Consider that: The beach is an adventure to them. You gotta take advantage of these times. They won’t always be impressed with your moves. They’ll start to grow up and your tricks will become old. They’ll roll their eyes and say, “Seen that one, Mom, what else you got?” They’ll stop thinking you’re cool because you bought new sand toys and start wanting things like iPads. They basically turn into walking, talking money sucking zombies who roll their eyes and perfect the ‘OMG, how stupid can my parents be?” look. 

So enjoy the 27th time this summer that they want to have a campfire, even if you have taken out stock in graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars. Let them think that going to the town wide garage sale is a treasure hunt. Let them have ice cream for dinner and tell them it’s only because it’s 912 degrees out. (This way they’ll get an appreciation for ice cream AND extreme exaggeration!) But for God’s sake people, don’t let an opportunity pass you by. You're faking memories here!