Pass the "Kool-Aid-Summertime With Kiddos.

I seem to remember summer as a time of endless bliss. The moment that last school bell rang the weight of the world was suddenly lifted from my tiny shoulders. SWEET FREEDOM! I would lug home my backpack full of dirty gym clothes and scraps of paper salvaged from my locker, dump it in the front closet and not look at until late August.

Summer seemed to last forever. So many weeks without responsibility, to do whatever I wanted to (which consequently turned out to be watching copious amounts of daytime television and eating a fuck ton of Kool-Aid
mix without water (sugar high!) I still remember the daytime line up. 10:00 Price Is Right, 11:00 Young & The Restless, 12:00 Days of Our Lives, 1:00 Another World, 2:00 Santa Barbara, and at 3:00 to balance out the Soap Opera smut, it was Little House On The Prairie. Ahhh good times.

When we weren't vegging out in front of the tube, we would walk to the neighborhood grocery store and stock up on candy. Nerds were a personal favorite, clearly I had an affinity for sugar. And in the evenings the neighborhood kids would gather outside to play tag or kick-the-can until the mosquitoes became unbearable or our parents called us in.

What I don't remember was being bored.

Hiking. It looks like fun. right? 

Am I just blocking it out? Because this seems to an epidemic with today's young whipper-snappers. Doesn't matter what we do. After a weekend spent at a mountain cabin the first words uttered upon return were "what are we going to do now?" After a day spent at the pool we come home and hear "Mom, I'm BORED."  While hiking the Rockies, one child will inevitably whine, "This is boring, can we go home now?"

Seriously? Seriously? For the love of God, when I was a kid we weren't entertained every damn second of every summer day. We did our own thing. We used our imaginations (if that includes borrowing from the imaginations of soap opera writers.)

This summer has been a bit of a challenge. We ran into some childcare snafus and scrambled to find fun and entertaining camps for the older boys. This week the boys went to some crazy expensive sports camp across town, adding nearly two hours of driving to my day. While at camp the boys have played dodge ball, tag, home run derby, baseball, soccer, and even (to my utter shock) enjoyed a zumba class. And every day they have returned overtired and crabby, complaining about the quality of the food (and here I thought it was only my cooking they hated.)

Yay for the camp commute! 

And we are only two weeks in. Two weeks. We have like what eight more to go???

I'm starting to think about sleep-away camp next summer....for me.

Good luck to all the moms and dads out there trying to survive June, July & August. Stock up on sangria and cold beer, because Kool-Aid just does not do the trick anymore!