Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Summer 2012 – a pyrrhic victory


Today is the first day of school here in the GTSA.  I could not be happier.  Reflecting on summer break 2012, I’m calling it a pyrrhic victory.  Here’s why.
First Day of Second Grade.
 This is take 2 by the way...
The summer began with lots of idyllic goals.  We were going to go on picnics.  We were going to read lots of books and be regulars at the library.  Bruce was going to learn things at home through all these fun, learning crafts and experiments I was going to organize.  He was going to go to camps and such and have friends over.  Oh, and do all this while having the house on the market.  Yeah.  Right.  By week 2 I accepted defeat and knew that most of those goals would never EVER be met.  So I changed tack.  I went into pure survival mode.  My new, more achievable goal was to emerge from summer vacation WITH my sanity intact and WITHOUT having murdered my children. 
To put it mildly, Reed is a bit of a challenge right now.  I hate to go across the street with him, much less to the library or the children’s museum.  When everything has to be planned around a nap time, the 7 year old often got the shaft.  With his newly acquired smart mouth from all the crap television he’s been watching, he never hesitated to let me know how pitiful he life is. 
This is take 1.  He's mad that I'm so
happy it's the first day of school.
So this summer, I gave the kids McDonald’s way too much.  We drive past there and Reed shouts “FRIES!!!”  I yelled every day.  I didn’t regulate the amount of TV or video games.  Running errands was hell as Reed would scream and Bruce would scream in an effort to get Reed to stop screaming.  We didn’t get to church enough.  When we went I’m pretty sure it was only for the childcare.  I lied and lied about what happened to the dog, Katy, after she died.  I realized that I don’t have a key to my own house.  I locked us out of the house.  I went to the wine store with an alarming frequency.  After the 4th of July, we’re probably not welcome at First Baptist Church.  We were screened by the TSA and shaken down by customs.  I guarantee that if they had not let us through customs, they would have quickly changed their minds because only the parents would put up with Reed at an airport. 
There were black eyes, skinned knees, burns, courses of antibiotics, bruises, sun burns and bug bites time outs, whippings swats and tears.  And now it’s over.  I survived.  Next summer will be the summer of libraries and homemade popsicles and science experiments.  It will.  I promise….

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