great expectations of summer

I had great expectations for this summer. With two kids used to being in school all or part of the time, I knew I had to come up with a regular routine and enough activities to keep them from getting bored, and yet I also wanted to make sure to leave plenty of time for just being outside and playing with friends and general discovery and exploration.

Oh, what grand plans I had! Our only scheduled activities are swimming lessons every morning except Fridays and piano lessons once a week for Daniel. For the rest of our time, I have a stack of email addresses and cell phone numbers of the parents of my kids' friends. I have a list of state parks I wanted us to visit. We have a community garden plot to tend to. I signed us up for the summer reading club at the library. I bought some white t-shirts and packs of Dylon for tie-dyeing on a rainy day. My ideal summer day, I thought, would start off with some kind of organized activity in the morning like a cleaning or gardening project or something artistic, then reading and piano practice before swimming lessons, then lunch and then an afternoon spent at the park or with a friend or, on what I thought would be rare hot days, back at the pool or a local splash park.

Well. Summer hasn't quite gone the way I thought it would. It's not that something horrible has derailed us, like injury or illness, and for that I am thankful. But it has been unexpectedly difficult to set up play dates with friends because our free time hasn't overlapped with friends' schedules much. Daniel is a good reader, but he isn't much interested in doing it on his own and I have to force him to read out loud to me. Fortunately, piano is going fine for him and he likes practicing. Our garden plot is alive, just, but there is no joy in tending to it because it has been so hot. And there have been no rainy days to do any tie-dyeing. The last time it rained was in May.

The hot, dry weather here is awful and epic. It is devastating farmers and threatening our water supply, the heat has claimed a dozen lives and made outdoor sports downright dangerous, so it feels petty to complain that the weather has wrecked my fun, when it is wrecking people's lives and livelihoods.

It's not that I'm eager to get summer over with so school can start. I'm not quite there yet. I just wish it would rain. And rain. And rain. And maybe cool off enough so that we can go outside in the evening without feeling like we're suffocating.

Comments

JoyMama said…
Want to come hang at our house on Friday morning this week? Our A/C is working fine and it would be a change of scenery... :-)
Jessi said…
I really wish it would rain, too. This hot, dry weather is killing my delicate constitution.
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