Tick tick tick BOOM

The countdown is on till summer vacation, and right now, I am not entirely dreading it. Not yet, anyway. This school year seems to have flown by, probably because we never really had winter and the school year was just a blur of 60 degree days. Not that I’m complaing about a winter with almost no snow, mind you. I grew up in a town that averages more than 100 inches of snow a year. I have seen enough snow. But ready or not, summer is upon us. My kids are done on June 15, so that leaves me just a few short weeks to figure out what I’m going to do with them. I love summer, but summer vacation can be a little, um, trying, with three kids. This year will be different! At least I hope it will … Here’s what we have ahead of us:

The Good:

Not getting up at 6am. I hate, hate, hate getting up early and even though “sleeping late” in my house means getting up around 7:30, I am happy to have the extra sleepytime.

Not packing lunches: I have one vegetarian kid, two kids who won’t take cheese to school, one kid who the only sandwich she’ll eat is peanut butter & honey, and a strict “no nuts of any kind” policy at school. Packing lunches is a colossal pain in the ass.

Easy daytrips. We live just outside of Boston, so trips to the beach, the mountains and the city are all easy to do, and usually fun for everybody. My husband and I may do a few surprise outings for the kids, where we just wake them up, tell them what to pack and get them in the car, but not tell them where we’re going. So mysterious!

Not-so-little kids. My kids are finally old enough to just “go out and play.” There are a lot of kids their age on our suburban, dead-end street (sorry — cul-de-sac) so the kids can ride their bikes or play capture the flag or just play with whoever happens to be around. My kids are all old enough that they don’t need to be watched every second. Hurray!

Vacations   Most of the trips we have taken in the summer have been to our time-share condo in New Hampshire, which is a short drive away, the kids love it, and it has a huge pool and lots of nearby outdoor attractions. The bad part is to me, it is not really a vacation. I am still doing laundry and making meals and breaking up fights, just like at home. It is great for my husband, who has a week of from his 60+ hour a week job, but for me, it is really just the same thing with different scenery. This summer, we are trading our time share for a week in Aruba, and hopefully (after spending a small fortune on plane tickets and passports) this will feel like a real vacation.

The Bad

Activities are crazy expensive: My town’s recreation department offers a lot of summer classes and camps that are reasonably inexpensive, but I have three kids and the cost can add up quick. The “real” day camps can cost hundreds of dollars a week. I work (when I work) out of my home, so I don’t really have to find supervised activities for them, but they will be mighty bored after a few weeks off from school. Every year my kids complain that they don’t have any school in the summer. My kids are weird.

The beaches nearby are really beautiful, but most of them cost $20 or more to just park my car. There are a few amusement parks nearby ($$$) and Boston is full of activities from museums to whale watches. They are all really fantastically fun, and really flippin’ expensive.

2 to 1 disagreement split: Pretty much anything I say to my kids on any given day from “Let’s go to the beach!” to “You have a dentist appointment” or even “let’s go out for ice cream!” is met with this:

Kid 1: YAY!

Kid 2: YAY!

Kid 3: AW, man … do we have to? (stomps off in a huff)

It isn’t always the same kid who doesn’t want to do whatever it is we are doing, but there is always someone who disagrees. Sometimes, the outlier kid gives in; sometimes it escalates into a full blown snit. I spend an awful lot of time dealing with children grumping about something everyone knows they will end up doing anyway. The prospect of doing that several times a day for two and a half months makes me wish for year-round school.

I never seem to get anything done in the summer: When we are all really busy with deadlines and school projects and dance classes and sports, I manage to be pretty productive because I know I have finite blocks of time to accomplish whatever it is I need to do. Summer vacation is full of unstructured time where we don’t have to do anything on most days. A few days of lazing around is relaxing. Many, many days of lazing around is something more like stagnant and unmotivating than relaxing. Sigh.

I need to make a real plan for what I am going to do this summer to head off some of these troubles before they start. I need to find out all the fun FREE stuff around here. I need to figure out how to get my kids to agree on something. I need to get crackin’ because time is running out!