ahh summer

It's the one thing we absolutely looked forward to as kids. No bedtime. No being awakened by my mother clacking her very obvious fake plastic nails on my door. No homework that made me tax my mental faculties farther than I cared to allow. Going to spend the night in the middle of the week. Playing in the yard till well after dark. Building forts with the hodge podge of things dad found at work and brought home for us. We loved it.

I too will love the lack of set wake up times. I can play online later into the wee hours of stupidity and not be the reason my daughter is late for school. As a parent, I have come to feel that year-round school may not be all bad. I know some will wrinkle their noses at me. My dad would eschew it in favor of the traditional-back-in-his-day Labor Day to Memorial Day school year. I suspect some of my sentiment is sheer laziness. But I gotta tell ya...unless you spent MASS quantities of time with my kids up under YOUR posterior days upon days ad nauseum please don't tell me what I should be feeling about my kids. I love spending time with them individually and en masse. The thing is, I am one of those moms that absolutely require mental health breaks from my people. I just don't do well living my life in constant contact with my spawn. Having started my family younger than most people, I did not get that free spirited fun of my 20's. Two in diapers for a while kills the buzz, and potty training them was no amusement park ride either. Plus, the older they get, the more like me and their co-spawner they become. Except that clone of mine, I swear she gets whinier as the minutes pass. She PMS's enough for the two of us some days. Being vastly different personalities, my children pose entertainment risks. What thrills one, bores the next and tortures the third. Meanwhile pretty much all of it renders me a shrill. There are many things I don't deal with very well at all. Internally overheating, squabbling kids, and overly obnoxious spawn are some of my triggers. Welcome to Florida where it is so hot the grownups are comatose and the kids can't decide who to torture first and most, so they make a concerted effort to torture as many as possible in one fell swoop and do it in the most comprehensive way they can to accomplish this feat.

Also my children are interested in almost every thing I do. I learned to crochet, they wanted in on it. I learned to knit...they thought about it and grabbed the crochet hooks. I learned to make rosaries, and they want to use up all my wire making odd creations. I resorted to getting the girl her own beading tools JUST so I could work on making the rosaries and not have to keep asking for my tools back just to get ONE bead wired. Literally, if I put a tool down for a split second, she grabbed it for her own use. Well now I am likely to need to buy the boy his own tools too. He'll have to wait for coupon and paycheck to coincide for it to happen though.

Prediction: My blog will become a virtual insane asylum, complete with folks in white coats brandishing syringes as summer progresses. I do prefer to be wrong on this prediction however. This is not one of those moments where I have this strong urge to be right about something. I've been known to be wrong before and I can admit as much. I will happily admit my inaccuracies about this should it be merited.

.... I may jump on Persnickety's Steel Magnolias wagon Friday