The End of the School Year

The school year’s come to another close, and I I was going to use this post to tell you Important and Fun Summer Activities to do with your kids, but instead I’m going to gloat. I have no at-home summer activities to do with your kids. I don’t care about summer organization anymore. Every single craft kit and Pinterest summer fun idea has either gone unused or been done in half the time it’s supposed to take. So why bother?

I’m not even wringing my hands at how little time my kids spend outside and how I can’t just push them out the door and tell them to come back at dusk. You know why? It’d be useless. There’s nobody to play with around here, so what are they supposed to do?  That’s simply the reality of the situation.  

So. This is my summer activity list:

Give kids a list of chores to do every day.Which includes reading though that doesn’t really count as a chore anymore than “eat chocolate” counts as a chore for me.

The end.

My kids are now 15, 12, and 8. Which means they should be able to do everything except drive places. Cook, clean, scrub the pool, walk the dog, everything. In fact, maybe I should just leave for the summer and let them Lord of the Flies it out.

I have to say I’m not dreading summer this time around. Could be because Little Girl is almost 9, which means she’s more like a tween, practically, which means she likes to sleep the hell in. Woot! She sleeps until 9, and the other kids just tend to sleep as long as possible, which is good for my work because if I get up early, I can get a lot done. But it’s bad for my evenings because the darn kids are hanging around preventing us from watching our shows. I know. So sad.

I’ve also signed 2/3 kids up for a couple weeks of day camp  AND we have a vacation already set up. It’s 100% unheard of. We’re going away with Cadillac’s extended family, minus a few, one of whom is house/dog sitting for us. And after all that’s over, it’ll be time to get ready for back to school, almost.

In the old days, Cadillac’s extended family (brothers and their kids and his parents) would go camping at Lee Vining. They’d take a motorhome and whatever extra kid friends were hanging around and go up there for a week or two. 

But Cadillac’s the youngest of his siblings, and their kids are generally a decade older than our kids, so my kids never got to do that kind of family vacation because his parents were over it by the time our kids showed up. So this will be a good way for our kids to make some neat familial memories with hopefully some shenanigans involved. Sure, there will be Grandma telling us we’re mortal sinners because we don’t go to Mass every week (which, as you can imagine, is a HIGHLY effective method of getting us to go) but at least we don’t have to camp like the old days. We’re renting a house. (Yessss!) There are advantages to missing out on some things and waiting for others.