How’s summer going? At our house, we’re having trouble finding the right balance between fun and exhaustion. Or rather, we’re constantly swinging from one extreme to the other.
After a late night camping and partying on Saturday, we spent most of Sunday acting like utter slobs. There was napping and waaaay to much tv watching.
Then yesterday, J had a long stretch of nothing to do between the end of playground camp at noon and gymnastics at 5 pm. She wanted to lie around a bit, and she did for a while, but once M arrived home I basically dragged J to the pool. M wanted to go and I thought that if J stayed home much longer, she’d just want to watch tv, anyway. I coaxed her with promises that if she was too tired to play, I could read her book to her. Once at the pool, though, she enlisted me to play with her (that hasn’t happened in a while), and she spent hours working as hard at playing as a kid can do at the pool. I ended up basically dragging her out to head to gymnastics, and then of course by the time she’s sat a little while in the car to get to Cartwheels, she was half-asleep and I felt like Bad Mama for overdoing it, even in the summer.
Today the girls had camp in the morning, and then we went straight from M’s farm camp to Great Escape, because I’m writing some reviews of Great Escape for KidsOutAndAbout.com. I know, right? My life is so hard. It’s tough work, but somebody‘s got to help everyone else locate fun around here. If you can believe this, that was my first visit to the park ever (although I had been to the Great Escape Lodge & Waterpark–see my review here). We stayed straight through to closing and I fully expected both girls to be snoring before we’d passed Saratoga on our way back south. Instead they were bopping along to Kelly Clarkson and having a grand old time. If I hadn’t been driving I’d be cuddled up with my beach towel, dead to the world. J explained to me today that she would absolutely like to drive for me, but she’s not 16 yet, so it just wouldn’t be appropriate.
Today, before we managed to get ourselves out the door and on to our latest adventure, I was managing to stress out a little. I don’t like to arrive late to pick-up at camp, and I knew that I’d be torn all afternoon between ensuring that the girls had fun and getting the actual research done that I like to complete in order to write a review. And then I thought, “Wait, am I actually feeling stressed about taking my kids to an amusement park all afternoon?” At which point I slapped myself and reminded myself that this wasn’t merely a First World Problem, but a Kids Are Healthy/Life is Terrific/Suffering From Too Much Fun Again Problem. Okay, I didn’t actually slap myself. I emotionally slapped myself. Or, no, it was more like that thing where you snap an elastic band on your wrist to quit your destructive habit? So it was more like a spiritual elastic-band-snapping. Which I completely deserved. Because that, my friends, is a good life.
