Goodbye Summer!
“How can summer almost be over already?” my kids complain. I feel ya kiddos! Summer always goes by so fast.
And I was just actually getting to know them again!
Let’s face it all of the summer family activities are practically straight out our idealistic visions of what having kids would be like – before we actually had them!
You remember don’t you? Don’t you remember thinking “Oh I’d love to have children! It would be sooo much fun! We could take the kids to the lake/beach/(fill-in-the-blank-RVA) festival! We could bake cookies together! We could go to the park! We could go to the swimming pool! We’ll be just like a happy TV commercial family!!!”
And you know that it’s those moments that are the ones that wind up in the family scrapbook. Nobody has a page celebrating an A on a math test, or a great parent/teacher meeting.
None of us ever thought “Oh I’d love to have kids! I’d love to embarrass myself trying to help them with math homework (because I can’t remember any of it anymore)! Oh I am so looking forward to driving them to swimming/gymnastics/piano over and over again! Won’t it be fun to sit through loooong, stuffy school assemblies so I can see my kids perform for five whole minutes!”
Summer, on the other hand, is when the kids can be kids again, and exhibit the full range of creativity, goofiness and shenanigans… and we actually have the time to enjoy it! The jokes, the creative insults, the impersonations, the cartooning… the occasional stuffed animal kidnapping… And travelling! It’s always so much fun to get their take on things when we go somewhere; for example, my son’s comment while in Toronto: “Basically everything in Canada is delicious!”
But then fall comes around again, and they suddenly transform into Dependent Units who constantly need to be fed/tutored/taxied and hustled from one thing to the next. So much for the long conversations and sharing. I’ll even miss those awkward conversations about stuff they are really too young to be asking me about.
And I just know that on the first day of school I will look forlornly around my quiet house and realize I no longer have any convenient excuses for not doing all the boring stuff I was supposed to be doing in the first place…
I’m sure gonna miss you, summer!
Ah memories!
