Isn’t there all kinds of songs about how laid back summer is? “Lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer,” “summertime, and the livin’ is easy,” “summer breeze, makes me feel fine,” even “summer days drifting away to oh, oh those summer nights.” Where exactly are these types of summer days? And am I the only one that feels like the summer days are even more hectic than all the other days?
I think we all pack so much into the summer because we’re SO excited to have sunny, warm weather and our kids home from school (yes, I actually AM excited to have my kids home from school…so far) that we overbook, we scramble and we kill ourselves with commitments. We have tried to not over-commit our kids to tons of summer activities until they were old enough to actually know what they wanted. But they have reached that age. This summer has been a blur of ball games, orchestra lessons, ball practices, band lessons, a failed attempt at a week-long summer school class, ball tournaments…did I mention that we had a little ball?
And then comes August. When the schedule finally clears of ball and lessons and such, we pack in as many fun, relaxing, family time events as humanly possible which, consequently, become stressful, tense and rushed. In order to spend a day relaxing, you have to spend two days beforehand shopping and prepping the necessary accoutrements and another day getting your work responsibilities taken care of and your schedule cleared. And of course, being the moderate neat freak that I am, our house needs to be clean because I hate coming home to any messes. Really, it would just be easier to skip it and stay home!
Tell me, what am I doing wrong? Does everyone have this problem or is it just me? I seem to fall more in line with The Cars who said “Summer, it turns me upside down. Summer, summer, summer. It’s like a merry-go-round.” Of course, they followed that up with “oh, oh it’s magic”…so basically, I’ve got an amazing family to spend it with so I just gotta suck it up and enjoy it while I can!
