Is it over? Is summer done? Are the children back in school? Is the temperature back to a comfortable 78 degrees instead a scorching 96? No? Oh great. Well, patience is a virtue, right? I guess Life is trying, yet again, to drum into my hard head that patience is something I need to acquire -- one of my many Life Lessons this time around. I never seem to get it. I'm always itching to move on to the next thing, the next phase--itching for school. to. start!
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate having time with my boys in the summer. And I don't, necessarily, look forward to getting up at 6:00 (or earlier) every morning to get everyone, including myself, dressed and fed and ready to leave the house for school at exactly 7:30. I don't look forward to making lunches every night after I've already made dinner and cleaned up dinner and picked up toys left behind in the family room and squeezed out half-drunk juice pouches into the sink and put in a last minute load of laundry so the boys will have something clean to wear the next day. I don't look forward to trying to cajole (i.e., beg, plead, threaten) Boogah (the almost 1st grader) to do his homework before dinner--and believe me, the way the 'summer homework' has gone, I know I will be doing a lot of cajoling! I don't look forward to keeping Blue (the three and a half year old) from bugging his brother once I've finally accomplished the dreaded cajoling. And I don't really look forward to the craziness that fall brings with back to school nights to sit through, soccer games to attend (first time for Blue this fall) EVERY Saturday morning, and the holidays looming ominously over my shoulder. No, I'm not jumping for joy in anticipation of all those things, but the summer is getting to that certain stage when I'm just about ready for it to be over, when the fall/back to school chaos seems more appealing, or at least, more interesting than more long summer days at home with the kids. Come August every year, we seem to enter a mind-numbing stage of summer when I think to myself, 'do I really have to go to the pool AGAIN?' (I'm grateful for the pool, but it, like anything else, gets old after a while.)
We have approximately three big things remaining on the calendar of summer fun: a visit to some old friends, who we haven't seen in a while and who I miss so much; a visit to my parents house, which the boys will love (my parents live on a beautiful lake in a beautiful house and are beautiful to their grandchildren); and Boogah's 7th birthday--with a party at one of those huge inflatable jumpy places (oh joy). These are great plans, but in between these plans are long gaps of weekday tedium. We'll have large chunks of time that will be ripe with the possibility for bored children to begin fighting and not stop until they've ripped the flesh from each other's bones--or until their mother's head explodes.
Thank goodness Nickelodeon recently announced "All new episodes of Spongebob" because that small, yellow animated fellow has been my saving grace this summer. (Despite the fact that I swore when Boogah was a toddler that my kids would never watch that 'grown-up kid cartoon' before they were at least ten. Never say never.) He mesmerizes my children into a calm, peaceful, happy state that keeps my head from exploding. This is very nice because I really don't want my head to explode. So, to him I say: "Thank you Spongebob. Thank you, for saving my life 'lo these last couple of months. Without you, I would be headless! I am forever in your debt. I know I'd win the Suckiest Mom award if I let you 'keep' the children for too long on the days when we have (or can think of) nothing better to do, so you won't have to be on duty too much more, but if you could stop by every once in a while over the next four weeks, I and my still intact brain would be most grateful!"
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