Where we're at, and how we got here.

It's the day before elementary and middle school start up for the year. Usually by this time, I'm SOOOO beyond ready to send these kids back to school, but this year is different. This year I've already sent one off to college (Sam's living on campus but only six miles away so my adjustment has been rather mild). I decided to give my younger kids the summer vacation of their dreams and let them do literally nothing. No camps. No events. No sitters battling them with sunscreen to get them outside until they're wrung out and grouchy when their dad and I get home. I let Cullen & Maybe run their summer themselves, with a teenage babysitter coming in a few hours a day, a few days a week, to make sure they were sufficiently fed & watered & mopping up their bleeding eyes from their anticipated eight straight hours of Kindles, Minecraft, and X-Box. 

A weird thing happened though. They gorged on screens for the first few days, and then both announced that they felt like crap all day afterwards. My response was"No shit! That's what happens when you spend all day staring at a screen. It's really not good for you, I'm not making this up." And they self regulated. They went for late afternoon excursions to get ice cream, play kickball, make iPhone movies, or go to the pool. They hate the sun, and hate sunscreen even more, so they preferred to hit the park or pool after we got home, in the late evening when it was cooler and the sun was low. They were calmer, they were less cranky. They spent too much time in front of screens some days. Maybe read the same Dork Diaries book three times. They learned every single word to Smash Mouth "Allstar." (WHY). They ate microwaved mac & cheese, frozen pizza bagels, and way too many goldfish and corn chips. But they fought less, and they were much more pleasant to be around when we got home at night. Everyone won. I set my own parenting expectations aside, my revulsion towards the microwavable lunch junk that I bought, cringing and judging myself at the grocery store. In line I'd remind the kids for the 100th time "this food is just for summer, so don't get used to it" hoping that the folks in front of or behind me could hear and understand that I wasn't a lazy parent, because that's how I felt - by giving them independence to make their own lunches on days that they had no sitter, I felt SO much guilt. I think I let go of a fraction of that particular brand of guilt this summer? Who knows - next summer when I buy that 24 pack of microwavable plastic mac & cheese bowls I'm sure I'll convince myself that the plastic waste will unilaterally ruin the environment and the kids' nutritional habits will be forever ruined. But that's a worry for another day.

I mean, we did stuff. We camped in the backyard, we went whalewatching, we went to touristy museums on the waterfront that we'd avoided for years. We lazed at the pool, we visited family, we went to the library. But we did it on our terms, perhaps even on their terms. The summer taught me a lot about tempering those expectations of perfection.

So for now, today, the day before the new school year, I'm sad to see it go. The sense of control they felt over their days will be gone, the envelope of petty cash in the kitchen that they'd carefully meter out over the week to cover their ice cream and pizza trips will hold the last few stray dollars and coins for the next several weeks. 

The dog days of summer always made me sad, I think I had a panic attack for the first time at age 7 - I remember playing in the way back of our property, and it was like someone flipped a switch. The anxiety, sadness, vague and confusing sense of utter & overwhelming dread to go along with the stale, breezeless air, the smell of parched water-deprived grass, and the buzz of cicadas that accompanied it follows me still, and it's passed itself down - Maybe has already shown me the signs that she's following suite, which is a topic all it's own.

But this summer was a good one, and I'll hang onto that when I battle them to bed at a decent hour tonight, and reluctantly wake them up to the return of routine in the morning.