Karen Booth
Summer vacation and the best intentions
There are only a few more days until summer vacation is over for my kids and they head back to school. Emily is getting ready to start middle school, so she’s excited about new clothes, getting a locker, and a new crop of boys to chase. Ryan will be in the 4th grade and his excitement level is considerably lower than his sister’s.
When the concept of summer vacation was first introduced in the US, it was so that kids could work on the farm all summer. Certainly, those kids did not feel like they were on vacation. These days, almost nobody’s kids work on a farm and most of them spend three months allowing their brains to turn to mush. I try to prevent the inevitable slide, I buy things like workbooks before the end of the school year and we plan to go to the library twice a week but then other stuff happens–we opt for the pool or the mall, they want to have friends over, I crave the solitude of grocery shopping by myself.
I enjoy the lack of structure we have in the summer and any day I don’t have to pack a lunch is a good day. Still, that lack of structure almost always leads to boredom. My kids have to pay me a dollar every time they say “I’m bored”, but they worked around it by coming up with code words for boredom. We all know that boredom leads to siblings trying to kill each other. It’s survival of the fittest. The biggest kid with the best right hook gets to use the computer. I tell myself the kids don’t really want to kill each other, they’re just bored, but I do worry about it every time that blood is shed.
I often come up with a list of activities at the beginning of summer vacation. We plan to visit museums, make cookies for the elderly, or all learn to read braille. By the end of the summer, we have visited one museum and the kids complained about it because I picked the one they’ve been to 100 times. We have made cookies but we didn’t share them with anyone and honestly, I don’t have the patience to learn braille.
So, my kids are heading back to school with mushy brains but we still had fun. We traveled to see a few of the grandparents, we went to the Asian grocery store for Pocky (that counts as culture, right?) and everybody stayed up way past their bedtime.
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