thoughts on summer

How do you see summer? Do you still think of it in terms of a big vacation, like when you were a kid and summer meant...doing absolutely nothing, or doing whatever you wanted, and it stretched out before you like an endless path?

As a stay-home mom I think of it like that. I've almost always lived by the school calendar, going from high school to college, then two years after that to graduate school, then on to teaching, and now I have a school-age child. My life is ruled by the school schedule, and I have come to really love and rely on the structure it brings.

Sadly, as a mom, summer is not a vacation, right? Gosh, I do still think of it that way, and long for warm, lazy afternoons sitting in a lawn chair with a good book and a glass of iced tea, or breezy mornings sitting on the patio working some cross stitch or knitting with my coffee. I make all these mental plans for what I'm going to accomplish, like finishing sweaters and starting on Christmas ornaments, creating involved cross-stitches to frame for my home, sewing quilts and garments, and getting a head start on next fall and winter's sewing and knitting.

HA!

My fantasy of my children happily playing in the sandbox or splashing around in the wading pool while I crafted serenely were quickly dashed this year. The children hop around from place to place, declaring the sandbox too hot, the wading pool too cold, and everything else, you guessed it, booooring. AJ mostly wants to follow his big sister like a shadow, so when she hops out of the pool and heads for the back door, he wants to go in too. This inevitably happens moments after I've gathered all the required towels, sunscreen, snacks, etc., and settled into my lawn chair for a few moments of knitting or stitching.

So to sum up, I'm getting absolutely nothing done. I spend my days refereeing the bickering of the children, chauffeuring Daughter to and from her library activities, serving up endless snacks, sweeping up sand and crumbs, and hiding in our air conditioned bedroom (yep, we are caught in the northeast heat wave, though thankfully on the low end with temps in the 90s). If not that, we're sitting in whatever pools we can find, or visiting grandma in her air conditioned house. It's too hot to hold knitting needles, too sticky for stitching, and I can't even turn on my bedside lamp to read at night because it throws too much heat. Yuck!

This too shall pass, I know, I know. In a few short years my children will be far better able to self-entertain. And I'm not complaining, really, about summer and heat. I vastly prefer being able to just run out the door with the kids when we want to go out, rather than bundling into winter gear...I guess I'm just making excuse that I don't have much to write about because this time is not really mine. It's all mommy all the time just now.