“Let’s Go Bring Back Summer!”
When my daughter was two, the movie Frozen was all the rage. It was the first film she’d ever seen in a theater and she soon became one of the millions of little girls obsessed with Anna, Elsa, and their band of ragtag friends. As soon as the movie became available to purchase, we bought it. Always the early riser, Providence would wake up well before 6 am every morning. My husband or I would stumble downstairs, half asleep, put on Frozen, then promptly pass out on the couch while Providence sat, mesmerized and unmoving for exactly one hour and forty-nine minutes. This was our routine, morning after morning. After watching Frozen for at least the tenth time, the way Providence woke us up each day also became a routine. Quoting Olaf, (arguably the real star of the movie), Providence would shriek, “C’mon guys! Let’s go bring back SUMMER!” as she bounded into our room before dawn’s early light.
This week my kids are wrapping up their school year and the vast expanse of summer lies before us. Like most moms of young children, I have a love/hate relationship with summer break. By Memorial Day weekend I already miss the routine of the school year, the hours of “me time,” the ease with which I can stay on top of housecleaning, the early bedtimes, and my high levels of productivity. I miss the opportunities I had to miss my children, (God love them), while they were at school all day. Summer affords us no routine and I struggle with that. It’s like one absurdly long weekend and anyone who knows me knows how much I dread weekends; two days void of schedules, lists, and responsibilities. All you Type A, Enneagram 1 people understand the internal battle I face when Saturday morning rolls around. Since we don’t have to rush out the door for school, my kids expect me to cook a full breakfast, not just throw some bread in the toaster or pour a bowl of cereal. My demanding little customers want homemade waffles, bacon, or scrambled egg tacos for goodness sake. As someone who only requires coffee in the morning, all that prepping and cooking seems awfully unnecessary.
Yet there are some things I love about summer. I love that I don’t need to set an alarm in the morning. I love the freedom from packing school lunches, setting out clothes, and dividing my days up by drop-off and pick-up schedules. I love tackling summer reading lists with my kids, making homemade ice cream, setting off fireworks in the street, and roasting marshmallows over the fire pit while watching our favorite movies in the backyard. I love lounging by the pool with a good book as my husband cooks ribs on the smoker. I love the abundance of family days, late nights, and lazy mornings. I love watching my kids’ skin turn as dark as mocha by early July and the way their eyes light up when I step outside holding popsicles for everyone. I especially love not dealing with meltdowns over homework struggles or receiving a last-minute notice for school project supplies. I quite enjoy the break from washing out lunch boxes, signing reading logs, and sweeping up wood chips from the school playground off my kitchen floor.
In our family, even in summer, half of us live for the daily grind while the offer half happily enjoy over two months of uninhibited living, so we strive to make summer break a nice balance of both freedom and routine. One week is set aside for our annual trip to visit family in California. We split our time between both sets of grandparents and uncles. For our kids, it’s the most important thing we do all summer. They swim, they sightsee, they soak up every second with their only cousin, and they reconnect with old friends. They look forward to our time there more than anything else all year long. We also set aside a small handful of days to take a trip just as a family of four. We don’t usually go far. Sometimes we make the 5-hour drive to San Diego, or less than 2 hours north to Phoenix. This year we’re driving up to the Grand Canyon, but the location is never as important as the undivided time together. It’s both sad and sweet when we get into the van all together and the kids exclaim with widened eyes, “We’re ALL going? Our whole family?!?” It’s too rare. So we engage with everything we have and dive into family time, treating it like the precious gift it is.
We also set aside one week a month for downtime. This means we don’t travel, we don’t sign up for camps, and we just chill with an occasional play date or a trip to the pool. We intentionally slow down and soak up the summer vibes. I’ll admit, these are my hardest weeks. I like waking up knowing we have something to do and somewhere to go. I have to suppress the urge to plan things for every part of our day. I don’t like just hanging out, watching the hours tick by. The days seem to drag on without a plan to kill the time. That, and, like most siblings, my kids aren’t as “good,” when they’re left with a lot of free time. They get on each other’s nerves, they make bigger messes and my son, certainly, is far more mischievous. But here’s the thing: the problem is me, not them.
It’s okay to let them spin their wheels some days. It’s good for them to have unplanned days in which they need to think creatively and independently. They must understand it’s not my job to keep them entertained. I must understand that too, hard as it is. Summer is ten weeks of opportunity for me to practice everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve written about and talked about; shutting up, putting down my phone and tearing up my to-do lists, doing less, living simpler, and being more intentional. This summer I can practice what I preach.
The rest of our weeks are filled with camps of all kinds. I promise it’s not just for my sake. Both my children genuinely love experiencing different kinds of camps throughout the summer. They meet new friends, learn new things, and they don’t go stir-crazy inside the house. I feel good about not letting their brains turn to mush while they’re out of school and it gives me a chance to breathe a little while they’re off doing gymnastics or going behind the scenes at the zoo. We all win. When we have free days we consult our Summer Idea List, a list we created of “bucket list” items we don’t have a chance to do during the busy school year. The list includes things like bowling, crafts, and sightseeing. While we don’t check off everything, we usually make a good dent in it by summer’s end.
The balance to all the fun is the reintroduction of chores. One of my kids can’t wait to earn his life savings back. (He lost nearly all of it when we made him pay 10% of the auto body bill for a piece of the van he broke, after weeks of warnings.) The other throws daggers with her eyes whenever the dreaded chore chart is mentioned. This past year I was pretty lax about enforcing any chores on my children during the school year, aside from the basics: make your bed, get yourself dressed, brush your teeth, and put your lunchboxes and water bottles in your backpack. (And really, those hardly count as “chores,” as much as just being a functioning human being.) The school year was so challenging for all of us thanks to Covid, and this was the first year both kids were in school full-day, so I eased up on them and didn’t add much more to their workload in terms of housework. Most weeks I had plenty of time to stay on top of the chores while they were at school anyway. But with summer peeking around the corner, it’s time to redistribute the workload. I explained to both children that with all of us at home for the next two months, I would need some help keeping our house in order. Plus they need to learn responsibility, independence, earn their keep, blah blah blah, you know the lecture. They’ll be responsible for their bedrooms, their laundry, their bathroom, the playroom, and the parts of our lives that are communal, such as helping make dinner and doing the dishes. We’ve created a good system that only enlists them for 30 minutes of “work” each day, and Saturdays are a chore-free day for everyone. I’ll pay them once a week and for any chore that wasn’t completed on its assigned day, they will owe me money. (Something tells me my Starbucks habit will stay fully funded.) We’ll throw on some fun music and turn the volume up as loud as we can stand. We’ll have themed dinners and reward ourselves with ice cream for a job well done. It won’t be so bad. Someone convince my 9-year-old.
Tomorrow is the last day of school. Every year I try to hype things up with some fun surprises for my kids. This year I’m filling up the pool and hundreds of water balloons to lie in wait for their final return home. We’ll soak each other to our heart’s content and indulge in pizza and ice cream cake by the day’s end. We’ll kick off ten weeks of simpler, more carefree days. The days may feel long but the months are short. August will be here before I know it and the house will fall silent again. I refuse to wish it away. I can’t wait to bring back summer.