I started to act like a bitch around dinnertime tonight. My excuse: I was hungry and tired, but really I’m worried about the first day of school, even though I know I don’t have to be. I know they will be fine. Really. I know. Fine.

The thing that was/is making me anxious is that we had such a great summer. The boys got taller and skinnier and learned to jump off the diving board and skimboard and started to do things all on their own like go crabbing with a bunch of other kids in a small inlet off the beach while David and I sat and read books and taught each other how to skimboard without looking or feeling too old when we totally wiped out—which we did and often.  I gained at least seven pounds drinking rose wine and eating ice cream and we all got too tan. David looks like George Hamilton with a beard.

I love that Staple’s commercial with the Christmas carol as much as any mother and I’m relieved the weather is cooler and ready to splurge on something cozy at Anthroplogie, and there are no more ice cream flavors for me to try. But now that summer is over, I’m afraid that the fun we had and the way we learned to get along and relax as a family is going to be packed away with our bathing suits and Crocs. I started to get out their lunch boxes and it hit me, I feel like I had a summer romance with my family, and you know summer romances are never meant to last.

Conrad spent his summer at the Montclair Learning Center, a geeky-in-the- best-way camp where you can make Lego robots and learn how to build a video game and feed a tarantula and play dodge ball if you want too. His pouty side barely made a cameo. He was happy everyday. Happy when the scorpion robot he made wouldn’t start during a presentation in front of the whole camp and happy when he came home starving at 5:00 pm after being at MLC since 9am.

Dashiell was also relieved to have his days while by. He and Conrad played for hours just the two of them without much bruising emotionally or physically. Even when he insisted that he was incredibly bored to get me to let him play a video game, I knew he wasn’t. He filled his time with imaginary games I couldn’t keep track of and breakthrough of all breakthroughs, he stopped flipping board games over if he lost.

There was a lot of summer in our summer and I’m not exactly sure why it all worked out so well and now I don’t know how to make those feelings last. I know a large part was taking a break from our routine of school-activity-homework-dinner-bath-bed. I’m sure it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t working that much.  Their summer was like one big long hour of choice time and now their days are going to be filled with a lot more ‘have-tos’ than ‘why don’t we…’.  Our old routine is coming in less than 12 hours, I’m dreading that our lives will revert to firedrill mornings rushing out the door and Conrad will suffer his quiet anxiety over reading levels and math assessments and every morning he’ll wake up listing all the reasons he doesn’t want to go.

I’ll know soon enough. And I know I need to relax and take it one day at a time and all that. Since, I’m not relaxed at the moment, for the first day back I’m going old school and bribe them. I set the table for breakfast and gave them each a Go-Go pack. There’s a very good chance I’m setting myself up for failure here because I gave them a similar pack on the last day of school and they told me that it wasn’t as cool as they expected.  So like with this year, I’m hoping for the best and quietly preparing for disappointment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 12th, 2010 at 9:42 am and is filed under Random acts of mothering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.