June 19th, 2014

Summer, Summer, Summer!

by Terri Libenson

I don’t know about you, but my family has been “checked out” since Memorial Day. By checked out, I mean our brains basically shut down and went into summer hibernation (two weeks before school actually ended).

Like a cosmic joke, I don’t think we were ever so busy or overwhelmed as we were the last few weeks of school. And this includes planning last year’s Bat Mitzvah, the simultaneous launch of PD and moving to a new home, and rearing newborns. I may be exaggerating, but only slightly.

I knew I was in trouble when we started receiving emails about my older kid’s 8th grade graduation and younger kid’s 5th grade graduation (did we have such milestones back in the day? Not that I recall.). Anyway, it wasn’t just the prospect of trying to be in two places at the same time on the same day…but there were also weeks of activities leading up to the main events.

Meanwhile, we were dealing with all the other “ends of”: Soccer championship games, dance recitals, final tests, etc. And, of course, “beginnings of.” Beginning of sleepaway camp for the younger kid (lots of packing), high school band meetings, high school cheerleading meetings, student council election, etc. I also had a presentation the night before school let out. This is what my [old-school] agenda looked like last week:

And, yes, I had to color code stuff.

You can already see the relative sparseness of June 13, the day after school ended and I got some semblance of my life back. Yep, Friday the 13th was one lucky day.

Why am I writing this in my comic blog? I guess I needed to vent. BUT this is also a celebration. A celebration of summer, that time of year when we can turn our brain cells off (ignore those TV commercials for Sylvan supplemental summer learning) and enjoy the simpler things in life: a warm day, a cool drink, and more leisure time to enjoy fitting comics like these:

Enjoy your summer. And try not to use any brain cells until fall.