School is out, let the fun begin

Posted in summer fun
by Lorain County Moms

By Marla Jo Fisher, The Orange County Register

It’s summer, that wonderful time of year when the kids are out of school and you can enjoy lots and lots of quality time with them.

Personally, I love being with my kids 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I mostly work at home these days, so I don’t have to miss a single opportunity for sharing family bliss.

It’s fun to listen to the bickering first thing in the morning over who used up all the hot water in the shower.

It’s fun to have them come flop on the couch at 10 a.m., asking to watch TV because “it’s hot outside and we’re tired.”

It’s even more fun to walk into the kitchen after a few hours of work, to discover that it looks like little green men have invaded from Mars and removed everything from the refrigerator, dismantled and ripped it open in their curiosity about what Earthlings consume in mass quantities.

It’s fun to have them up late with me every night, insisting they shouldn’t have a bedtime because they don’t have to go to school.

Every July, all that fun is interrupted at our house when it’s time for summer camp.

Just when I think I can’t really take any more kid-induced fun, I drive them up to the mountains, drop them off for a week, and come home to a blissfully quiet house.
Living in a clean, blissfully quiet house is fun for a few hours.

I have a glass of wine, call all my friends and have the kind of long conversations that I never get nowadays, since my kids think of 82 things they need to ask me urgently every time I get on the phone.

I make a date with a friend to see an R-rated movie for the first time all year. I watch something trashy on TV where people use cuss words and take off their clothes.
Then, invariably, there’s that fatal moment when I start wondering what the kids are doing at camp.

And I notice, for the first time, how extremely quiet my neighborhood is. Even the dogs that normally plague my existence have gone strangely silent.

The house seems eerily empty as I go to bed. No kids arguing in the bathroom over who used whose toothbrush. No demanding that I tuck them in.

The dog appears to be needing some Prozac, since there are no children to play with him. And the bathroom floor is unrecognizable, without being covered with wet towels.

Buddy and I discover as the week goes on how it’s really not fun at all to live in a house without Cheetah Boy or Curly Girl.

By the time I go pick them up six days later, I can’t wait to see them. Boy, oh boy, I think. Now, we’re really going to have some fun.

They climb in the car, vaguely down and monosyllabic about leaving camp and their friends behind.

At home, they just want to watch the TV that they’ve been deprived of for a week, before climbing into bed.

In the morning, they start bickering over who used up all the hot water in the shower.

Ah yes, the sounds of summer. We’re having some fun now.

Marla Jo Fisher was a workaholic before she adopted two foster kids several years ago. Now she juggles work and single parenting, while being exhorted from everywhere to be thinner, smarter, sexier, healthier, more frugal, a better mom, better dressed and a tidier housekeeper. Contact her at mfisher@ocregister.com. Read her blog at http://themomblog.freedomblogging.com/category/frumpy-middleaged-mom-ma rla-jo-fisher/.