Mindy Carlson

No more classes! No more books! No more teacher’s dirty looks!

We are all excited. The boys are ready to not be in school anymore and I am ready to not administrate the preschool for awhile. I am ready to just be with my guys. Yesterday I brainstormed a lot of craft projects and other educational things to do with them.  I do this every year. Some people write New Year’s Resolutions. I write Summer Vacation Resolutions.  Instead of things like I will work out; I will finally get the boys’ baby pictures into albums; and I will clean out the closets, I write things specifically for summer.  E and I will work on his math and writing workbooks. We will all read everyday. I will finish teaching H to read.  We will do art projects. We will go to a museum once a week. We will be at the pool everyday.  We will move to Switzerland.

Every year I make almost this exact same list.  Except for moving to Switzerland.  That one is new.

I’m sure we’ll start off strong. Have a schedule and a regimen.  But it will unspool by about week 3.  We will be going to the pool for sure.  E is on swim team and there is practice every day.  And because that is easy.  We might get to one museum and get a handful of art projects done.  And that will be okay. It will be fine.  After all, I didn’t have any kind of schedule or anything when I was in summer. It was wake up, eat breakfast, watch some PBS, and get kicked outside to play or settle down with a book.

I grew up on a 3000 acre farm in Iowa.  We had cow pastures, streams, gravel roads, and backyards to large it would make the rich here in DC drool.  The property was bounded by the homes of my uncles and our close friends. We knew everyone and everyone knew, and loved, us.  This is not my Iowa farm. Not by a long shot, but at least we have a back yard the kids can play in and we have a membership to a pool where we know a lot of the people and we look out for each other.

There seems to be a movement happening to give our children the childhood we had. The childhood of the 1970s. When the world was still basically good. Before little boys and girls were getting kidnapped on their way to school or from shopping carts in the grocery store.  As well intentioned as that is, I feel like we can’t just turn our children loose in the neighborhood anymore.  The tastes of freedom my kids get are unsupervised play in the basement, going into the backyard, and being at the pool with my Mom-group’s eyes trained on all 9 of our children.

But that’s childhood in the 2000-teens in the big city.

And the kids have fun and they are happy and when they are older they will pine for the summers of their childhood.  When life was simpler.