“Hello friends,” says a wee voice from somewhere off the face of the earth.

~

Here I am, alive and kicking, sweating and bitching about the heat, and gratefully enjoying this summer with my boys more than any other summer season on record.  There have been notable highs, seasonable lows, with scattered life lessons and only a 20% chance of irritability on any given day.  Not bad, overall.

A Summer Recap:

June:  always my motherly month of endless possibilities and ambitious plans.  I will take the boys to many culturally enriching events.  We will eat balanced meals (three of them) each day.  What fun we will have, planning our menus and grocery shopping together, skipping down the aisles and the youngest will not crash the cart this time — oh, no, not this summer! — because we are going to have a grand time.  I will lovingly help The Little One stay fresh on his homework skills by doing worksheets each day, and I will review them and put smiley face stickers on them and he will look up at me with grateful brown eyes, content in the knowledge that his school year will have such a smooth start…

*Will someone just go ahead and cue the foreboding music already so we can end this fantasy passage???*

June is so full of hope. And, camps.  Camps keep people busy (and gone).  Gone is good.

July:  Oh, July, you prankster, by now I know all your sneaky games —  the sunshine that looks bright and sparkly until I open the door and the wave of humidity hits like a slap on the face, a punch in the stomach, and many more similes I need not mention;  the pre-vacation preparation and corresponding post-vacation fun hangover, no, you will not catch me by surprise — not this year! — We will go to the nice, cool library every week and check out books and frolic (very quietly) through the stacks and come home and read together in the nice, extremely air-conditioned house.  And then I will make the children go outside and run around.

July is so full of reality.  And mosquito bites.  And that nameless feeling that time is passing too slow, yet somehow much, much too fast, all at the same time.

So, here we are at August.  I will hazard a forecast that we will shop for that looonnnnngg list of school supplies, and early, before all the composition notebooks are sold out.  (Really, retailers, there are 18,000 kids in this school district — could you stock up on the composition notebooks?  We will need 36,000 of them.  Thanks in advance.) We will have purchased shoes that fit, prior to the night before the first day of school.  We will play another 37 games of Trouble, make more juice popsicles, camp in the living room, go out for ice cream, splash in the pool, and somewhere in between we can pull an all-nighter of math worksheets.

Summer is looking good.