WAAAAAHHHH

As my best friend just posted on her FB page, let's just call today August 32nd live in denial. Honestly, I much prefer the crisp cool air and the fiery hued leaves of autumn, but there is just something about summer that I don't want to let go of and it isn't just because I have to go back to work in two days.

Summer is the delicious time when we get to spend way too much time together as a family and I can pretend the boys are going to be young and innocent forever.  It is a time for spending eight hours at the lake on a ridiculously hot day or playing Stratego on a rainy afternoon. It is the time for learning how to ride a bike. (Yes, Scrappy is riding!) It is a time for finding crazy looking bugs and caterpillars and toads at the back door. It is a time when the kids know to get themselves a snack around 6pm because Mommy is still in the garden picking vegetables for a dinner that won't be ready until 9 or my personal record: 11pm.  It is also the time when we all get to pile into the king sized bed and watch a movie after the 9:00 dinner.

Every summer is a reminder of how one September in the not so distant future, those (mostly) adorable kids will head off to college and work and lives of their own and their childhood summers will just be Popcorn Bowl memories.  I am pretty sure those memories will be of searching for crabs at low tide on Plum Island or swimming in their friends' pond or making a movie or playing tag in the dark or geocaching or maybe even of butchering chickens.  The Popcorn Bowl will probably not be full of memories of  doing homework packets, math drills or even tennis lessons, so round about week three of vacation, I pretty much gave up on the notion that the kids were going to have any sort of schedule.  The summer bucket list went right out the window and we slid down the summer slide.  I'll admit, there was more Xbox than I would have liked and I am feeling a slight twinge of bad mommyitis that James Dean only read four books and that we are not all going on tour as the newest classical guitar playing family sensation, but all in all, it was a great summer.

So as their backpacks hang full (that's right, I actually managed to finish back to school shopping BEFORE school started and now that I am onto the teachers' little game of putting unattainable items on their school supply lists; next year I am ordering all of the white and orange folders I can find online in May and selling them in front of Office Max for $2 each over Labor Day weekend.) I bid another summer adieu and get ready for homework, swim lessons, soccer games, instrument practice, bed time schedules and a lot less time hanging with my kids.

Thanks summer 2013.  I am looking forward to your return as summer 2014.