Lazy summer days are wonderful if you are not a lazy. For the indolent, summer days equal slothfulness with a sunburn. When the schedule is wide-open and everything seems to be elective, it is easy to opt to do nothing. During the school year, we are slugs robed as overachievers, but without someone telling us when and where to go, we return to our natural languid ways. This is the problem my family faces every summer. I offer to sign-up the kids for baseball, soccer, math, chess, and science camps, but they always decline. I load our summer schedule with lunchtime concerts, storytimes, splash parks and hiking trails, and they refuse to leave the house. I am just their mom, not an institution with authority that they actually respect. Choosing to be go-getters during the summer seems counterintuitive to the whole concept of summer vacation, but by the end of summer, my kids start seeking structure and stimulation even if they do not admit. A few days before school started, my eleven-year-old son was taking practice ACT tests just for fun, and my eight-year-old daughter cleaned all three bathrooms without being asked (although this was probably more about my incompetence than actual boredom).
So when school started this week, there was no sadness. We love school and all the scheduling headaches that come along with it. The homework, the nightly sustained silent reading, math facts, name writing practice, digging up creative and interesting things for show-and-tell, soccer practices, football practices, chess club, horseback riding, Chinese class, piano lessons and swimming lessons. Scheduling conflicts and time management nightmares abound. How I am I suppose to be at soccer practice, football practice and working at the library all at the same time? Calendar chaos. This is what I love about the school year. I morph into the pushy, overbearing part-time working mother trying to create “well-balanced” children while simultaneously developing killer Facebook status updates to make all my mom friends feel completely inadequate. My children transform into those “hurried children” that appear on 20/20 and 60 Minutes exposés. For nine months of the year, my naturally lazy children are overachieving athletic and academic superstars.
This is why we love school.
