School starts for our sons on Monday. At this point, I wouldn’t say we are counting down to the first day of school. Instead, we are avoiding talking about school and making the most of this time.
Now and then I mention that we might want to think of getting on a school schedule, but it’s summertime. We are drifting into our beds late and stumbling out of them early.
Maybe I’ll regret that approach when school starts on Monday. Nah. Monday is going to be hard either way. We might as well treat summertime as summertime and not as some time to ramp up for the school year that lies ahead.
Don’t get me wrong. We love our school. But summer vacation has flown by. And, did I mention that our school day is starting 15 minutes earlier this year? Did I also mention that we just barely made it on time most days last year?
Next week I’ll care. Maybe I’ll even start caring on Sunday night.
That’s when I’ll be concerned that one boy has two pairs of uniform pants that fit and the other has 12.
That’s when I’ll wish I had cleaned last year’s (now this year’s) lunchboxes thoroughly and left them to dry in the sun.
That’s when I’ll regret that I haven’t taken the summer homework assignments more seriously.
(That’s Goldilocks at Clark’s Elioak Farm.)
Except I won’t have any regrets. Because that first day of school will come regardless of what we do now. And I didn’t take this week off from work to scrub out lunchboxes. I took the time to enjoy with our sons. Will we win any awards for being prepared for school? Of course not. Some battles are lost before they’re begun.
The only battle I have the energy to fight is the one where we make the most of these last days of summer.
So we’re eating breakfast late.
We’re rooting on the Orioles late into the evening.
We’re catching a few more Pokemon.
We’re enjoying the best weather of the summer.
We’re reading books no one assigned and playing made-up games no one really understands and eating frozen desserts whenever we want.
I’m not sure we’ll be ready to leave this attitude behind even when the school year starts. That, of course, is why school should start after Labor Day. But that may be another topic for another day.
For now we are on summer vacation. And we are summering as hard as we can.