As I type this it has been almost exactly seven weeks since the end of school, but I feel like it’s the first week of summer. The first month and a half of summer was swallowed whole by morning swim practice, sleep away camps, vacation, and swim champs. Now all of those things are over and before travel resumes, we have a few empty days. Long lazy days are exactly what I imagine summer to be, even as I sign over another summer over to swim team, even though in all my life have I ever had a summer that was long or lazy.
These past few days were the first we didn’t start with bathing suits and goggles and rushing the kids to the pool by 9 a.m. We are sleeping in, and yesterday I let the kids stay in pajamas all day because when I was a kid (and now), this was the height of luxury.
I’ve been doing load after load of vacation laundry, organizing things I haven’t gotten to since our renovation wrapped up, and my kids? If I gave you 100 guesses as to what my kids have been doing you’d never get it.
They’ve been playing.
Even more incredibly, they’ve been playing nicely.
This is a monumental development that deserves a blog post at the very least and maybe even a historical roadside marker.
For years I begged my children for five minutes, please. Fine, two. I’ll take two. Two minutes of no fighting, crashing, or bringing the hose inside (that did happen once). For years I would listen to collisions and shrieking, or worse — silence — as I rushed upstairs to put the baby down for a nap or use the bathroom.
And now, here we are.
To be clear, my entire house is a mess, given over entirely to this game. I do not care.
A fort in the living room, a laundry room overflowing, a kitchen strewn with crumbs and empty cups, and my kids in the backyard doing who-knows-what.
I say this without even a touch of exaggeration or sarcasm: when I signed up to have kids, this is what I always imagined it would be like.
