We’re mid-summer and the kids are at camp. It makes for an abbreviated day since they start later and end earlier, though many of the other routines are the same. Same lunches filled with carrots and half-eaten sandwiches, same drives in the morning, and same harangues when we get home to practice piano and do their daily exercises in their math workbooks to try to stay a little in the game before school starts. What a difference than when I was a kid when we would just lie around pulling grass out of the lawn and staring a the clouds. At least, that’s the way I remember it; filled with the smell of freshly mowed grass and the sound of grass being mowed. Hot tar that would melt into your kickstand and lots of trips to the 7-11 to get cans of Coke. Rides around the neighborhood on my Sting Ray and its banana seat (another thing I wish I had kept). Driving to the Dairy Queen at dusk after dinner.
For our kids in San Francisco, it’s a lot different. There is very little down time even though they are still on fairly rigid diets of TV and computer screen time. The afternoon fog rolls in before they are even out of camp, so no one is lying in the cold grass for long in urban SF (inland 10 miles and it’s very different). No one leaves the house without being accounted for and with their phone ON. Frozen yogurt is an option, but we’re all cutting back on our sugar and desserts so that might only happen tonight for a Friday night treat.
Still, summer is special and a lot of it still yawns open for us to fill. It’s not too late to consider some big project, though I may be a little tardy to start a vegetable garden. Finally digitizing the kids’ baby movies and pictures still might happen though.