Summer doesn’t officially begin until Monday and I am already fried. Deep-fried, and I’m not referring to my skin.
My daughter has been moving at warp speed since the Monday following her kindergarten graduation. For some insane reason (call it disorganization) I signed her up for an inordinate number of summer classes and camps, and now I am the one paying for it… in more ways than one.
So much for the lazy days of summer.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. All I remember is that a few months ago a bunch of moms asked if my daughter would like to sign up for the same classes their kids were in.
“So and so is in taking such and such this summer, does T wanted to join her?”
“M had so much fun taking yada yada last summer, you should really sign T up this summer… she and M can be in it together.”
That’s all I heard from various moms during March and April. By the end of May my daughter was enrolled in tennis, t-ball, soccer, pottery, cooking and basketball.
I was careful to ask my daughter if she wanted to participate in each class prior to committing her, but she’s a high-energy, outgoing, fearless 6-year-old. There’s no way she was going to say “no.” She didn’t, so enroll I did.
It didn’t seem so bad at the time, but once June rolled around and I started to plot out my daughter’s summer activities on our wall calendar, I realized that we (meaning me) might have (meaning definitely) gone overboard with the organized summer fun.
Overscheduled doesn’t begin to describe the chaos that is my current life.
Fortunately, my daughter is blissfully unaware of what it takes to get her from tennis to t-ball in less than 10 minutes. Never mind that the two classes are nearly 15 miles apart from one another and traffic is horrendous thanks to summer construction.
It’s not her fault that her mother sucks at math and didn’t properly calculate time and distance when signing her up for summer class marathon 2010. I take 100 percent of the blame.
For what it’s worth my daughter loves every single one of her classes. She’s having a ball, and for that I am very grateful. Further consoling me is that fact that childhood experts say unrelenting organized activities are a good thing for some kids. According to a 2006 Yale study, kids who take hours and hours of adult-instructed fun are better students. They’re healthier, they have higher self-esteem, and they’re not socially stunted.
Still, I can’t help but long for the summer days we spent lounging by the pool, dancing naked (she, not me), biking to Dairy Queen and playing hopscotch in the driveway without ever worrying about what time it was.
Yesterday I saw a boy riding his bike up the hill near our home as I was dashing to yet another of my daughter’s classes. The wind was blowing his sun kissed hair straight up into the air. He had a basketball tucked under one arm and a smile the size of Texas on his face. Noticeably absent… a watch.
To me he personified all that summer should be.
Is your kid overscheduled this summer?