It’s the last full month of summer. And for parents, that likely means a strange dichotomy: A creeping feeling of loss that one of your kids’ childhood summers, those seminal experiences that are often among our defining memories of youth, is about to come to a close—and an insatiable urge to shove them right out the front door and back into the classroom. Sadness and relief all rolled into one, with a healthy dose of mom guilt sprinkled on top.
The reality is that summer holds all the emotions, for both parents and kids. Many of us may only really remember the high points of our childhood summers—the joy of being school-free, the vacations, the freedom of playing outside—but they’re also times where families are learning to navigate new (or altogether missing) routines, to grapple with kids’ boredom, to experience a major uptick in time spent together.
This was our first summer with a school-aged kid; before starting kindergarten last year, Jackson attended daycare on his normal three-day-a-week schedule throughout the summer. Given that I work from home and Ashlee’s nursing schedule gives her four days off a week, we decided to avoid enrolling Jackson in a full summer camp, opting instead for two weeks of camp and some creative work scheduling in order to give all three kiddos a summer to remember.
It’s been a ride, to say the least! Here’s what we learned so far:
Rules are meant to be broken, bent, followed, rewritten …
During the school year, we follow a rule that Jackson can’t have the TV on in the morning until he’s eaten breakfast, gotten dressed, brushed his teeth and is all packed and ready to go. The pull to the glow of the screen is just too much to get through the morning rush.
When the summer started, I said ambitiously to Ashlee, ‘We have to keep that rule up. Let’s not get him out of that routine.” I think that lasted two mornings.
Sometimes, the rules that work during the school year just don’t work in the summer.. Summertime brings a lot more free time for Jackson, but no less work or parenting time for me and Ashlee, so flexing the rules has helped us with the juggling act. That’s not to say it’s (complete) anarchy: This summer, we’ve also created some new frameworks that I hope will carry into the school year, like a reward program to encourage better behavior (i.e. less fistfighting) among the kids and better adherence to Jackson’s chore chart.
Summer, I’ve found, shouldn’t be a time for rigidity. There’s plenty of that to come in the school year; break those rules and create new ones.
Constant vigilance
My kids never fail to surprise me, and with more time together in the summer, those surprises come even quicker.
During one of Jackson’s camp weeks, I started to settle into a pace of working at home with the twins. Like the day previously, I switched on “Bluey” and ran upstairs to throw makeup on for my morning meeting. After no more than 90 seconds, I returned to Avery standing in the middle of the living room entranced by the Heeler family. I called for her brother and she replied, without taking her eyes off the TV, “Auggie outside.” Excuse me, what? Hearing no sounds from the kitchen, I dashed out front and my heart started exploding out of my chest as I called August’s name in the front yard and into the street. I spun around to grab my phone from inside and dial 911 and found the little angel sitting in our front garden, his hands folded in his lap, just smiling at me as I ran like a maniac. “Just watching the birds, Mamma,” he replied when I asked what the hell he was doing.
From then on, we started locking the screen door whenever Ashlee or I were out of the room. Just days later, when I was working at a cafe, Ashlee sent me a picture of the twins ambling back up our deck steps in just their diapers. Around 7:30 a.m., August the Adventurer appeared to have led his twin out into the backyard after finding the front door locked when Ashlee stole a few seconds to get dressed for the day.
Constant vigilance.
Enjoy the judgment-free zone
Jackson’s about to start first grade, and while this age isn’t exactly clique central, most kids likely already feel a bit more at ease being their full selves at home, rather than at school. I’ve been trying to lean into that as much as I can—both for his sake and ours.
For instance, often when we pull Avery’s hair up into a ponytail, Jackson (and August, because he copies everything his big brother does) wants his own “unicorn”-type ponytail at the front of his head. Recently, he was sporting this ‘do, alongside the outfit he proudly selected by himself: a too-short red shirt with George Washington’s face on it from Colonial Williamsburg and too-long red, white and blue American flag shorts. To cap off the look as we headed out on our walk, he wore Avery’s black velvet play purse like today’s in-fad crossbody fanny packs to help collect the rocks, leaves and other treasures he would find.
Even though we’re years from the peer pressure of high school, I doubt that even now Jackson would opt for those fashion choices on a school day. At home in the summer with his moms and little siblings, he can be who he wants and make whatever choices he wants, with no judgment. And we’re trying to soak in this time before the pressure to be “cool,” even with his family, steals away these silly moments.
Make the mess
With three youngsters, one of my deepest desires is to have a clean house—and it’s one that I know won’t be fulfilled for at least a decade. We’ve grown accustomed to dust bunnies laying in wait, crunchiness in our living room rug and apple sauce smears in random surprise spots. But summer has taken mess to a whole new level. By the time we get the toys cleaned up from morning playtime, the toddler tornadoes are up from their nap and ready for the next round.
However, mess doesn’t have to be all stress. On the last day of school for Jackson, we invited the neighborhood kids and their parents over for a pizza party and inflated a few kiddie pools and a slip and slide in our backyard. Within an hour, our yard was a mud pit, and the kids had started a full-on mud fight. We talked about trying to stop it but the sheer joy on all of their faces was too much to interrupt. The day ended in a line of youngsters being hosed off against the side of my house and muddy handprints on my fence that are still there—but they had the absolute time of their lives.
Riding the emotional rollercoaster
When Ashlee was pregnant with Jackson, I kept a list of ridiculous things that made her cry as her hormones waged war on our house. This summer, it’s been the kids’ turn. Youngsters, of course, have big emotions and we’ve been immersed in each and every one of them as they change by the hour among the three kids.
Within just a few minutes, we’ve had August physically melt into the floor in hysterics because his Pop-Tart broke, Avery scream like she was being tortured because the blanket she was cuddling with on the floor wasn’t fully covering her feet and Jackson unleash the “You’re the worst Mommy!” for giving him one Oreo and not two.
Such an influx of togetherness time has meant all of our emotions are intertwined, and we’re riding the rollercoaster together.
Simplicity and flexibility rule
I’m writing this column from Wildwood, N.J., where we’re midway through a week at the beach. Earlier this summer, we took the kids to Kalahari Resort for an overnight waterpark adventure. Such trips are probably what Jackson will choose to write about when his first grade teacher asks for an accounting of his summer highlights; however, it’s also been the simpler moments that I think will have an even longer imprint, for both the kids and us.
One rainy week this summer, we were grasping at straws for cheap entertainment—and we found it at the library. We’re big fans of our local library but in this particular week, we branched out and visited three others in the area: new toys, new activities, new scenery! On sunnier days, I played hooky from work and splashed in the inflatable pool with the kids, only half-heartedly telling them to stop drinking from the hose. We even created a “bucket list” of fun summer activities Jackson wanted to do—from scavenger hunts to visiting an aviation museum to craft projects—and knocked them off one by one.
Hand in hand with simplicity has been agility; being willing to go with the flow has been a summer saver. For instance, one morning we came out to drive the twins to daycare and found a baby mouse on our garden wall, clearly dead to an adult but “maybe just sleeping” to a then-5-year-old. All day, as we came in and out for walks and errands and appointments, Jackson checked on Bob the Mouse (Ashlee and I have a 17-year agreement that I handle bugs and she handles vermin, so Bob was waiting to be disposed of for when she got home from work). When flies started surrounding Bob, Jackson even partially covered him with a Tupperware container, leaving a space for him to escape “in case he wakes up and walks away.”
After about eight hours, I couldn’t take it and sat Jackson down for a tough talk about mouse heaven. “Why do I care so much when I didn’t even know Bob?” he asked, setting off conversations about empathy, loss and compassion. It was truly a core memory type of day for both of us. Capped off by Jackson finding the biggest rock he could and painting “Bob RIP” (after I shot down “Bob is Dead”) and placing it and a rose in our garden where Bob spent his final hours (and from which a visiting neighbor removed the little guy surreptitiously for me).
In some ways, summer as a parent feels wholly different than how I experienced it as a child: stress instead of fun, exhaustion instead of laziness, limits instead of freedom. But on those days, or even in those moments, where I can step out of the confines of adulthood and walk next to my kids through their summer—laughing instead of cringing as they dump a bucket of water on my head in the backyard, racing next to Jackson’s speeding bike without yelling “Slow down!”, shedding a genuine tear at a mouse memorial—that’s where the real magic of summer is found. And those are the times we don’t want to end.
