What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I struggle with summer.  OK, I'll give you a second to pick yourself up off the floor with that revelation.  No, I seriously struggle with summer and what to do with my kids.  The week before school let out my husband came to me with the idea of a trampoline.  We've watched the kids on friends' trampolines and they all, EVEN the boy, have a ball on them.  However, funsucker that I am, I kept recalling the pediatrician who visited a Mom's Club meeting, way back when I went to Mom's Club meetings, who said that the number one cause of ER visits during the summer is trampolines.

I, however, was overruled.  This now occupies the spot next to the deck:

I wish I could say that it has solved numerous problems of keeping the kids busy during the day, but I can't.  Beanie doesn't want to be on it unless someone else is on it with her and the others don't want to be on it with anyone else.  Yeah me!

In an attempt to try and keep myself organized (so NOT me) I made out a calendar with the kids' activities, color coding the children.  Son is red (note the absence of ANY red on the calendar), oldest daughter is purple, middle daughter is green and youngest is blue. The calendar was made up about a month ago when I finalized (finalized=wrote out the plethora of checks) their activities so additional changes are written in.  Kinda makes it look a little more ghetto right?  I also decided that I was going to keep track of sleepovers and with whom so I can attempt to track SOS* which is noted by arrows from one day to next.  So, are you ready for this?

You would think this would be enough to keep them busy, right?  Well, no, apparently it is not.  It seems as though as well as keeping track of the activities, I am also to fill in the "down" hours with additional activities.  One wonders why exactly we have a swing set, bikes, scooters, rollerblades, sprinklers, parks, etc close at hand.  And what is the only thing my youngest wants to do?  She wants to spend her days at Holiday (gas station that has a wide variety of crap on which she wants to spend the money she hasn't earned), because, you know, I don't keep ANY SNACKS OR CANDY of any sort in this house. *snort*

The thing that bugs me most is the more we have, the less they want to do.  Unless it involves spending money.  And this is SO far removed from how I grew up.  We were out the door as soon as we finished our Apple Jacks in the morning and my parents rarely saw us until the street lights came on at night.  We made our own fun, mostly playing in the woods and catching tadpoles in the creek.  We had bikes that we rode across town (2-3 miles..without helmets) in blistering heat to get to the pool, where we swam all day before riding our bikes the 2-3 miles home.  Then went and played softball at night.  And if the 'skeeters weren't bad, we would sometimes drag our sleeping bags out into the yard and sleep in the yard. 

My girls call me from their friends house to pick them and their bikes up.  The friend lives less than half a mile away.  And they always seem to act surprised when we laugh into the phone before saying..."get your fanny on your bike and ride it home".

If I'm going to make it through this summer with my sanity in check, I'm going to have to start with Bloody Mary's in the morning.  Just sayin'.

*SOS=Sleep Over Syndrome...the attitude a child develops having stayed up most of the night and then, the next day thinks that the whole world is "off" and they're just fine.