School is out. Thank god. I can’t take any more crazy school-mom mania.  The overachieving moms get me all worked up with their uber involvement and super fabulousness.  The closer we get to the last day, the harder they organize, schedule, and plan.  I am so not made that way, and I get really grumpy and rebellious when I’m around them. Cut it out, crazy moms. Go home, eat something and stop with your highly organized efforts.

I can’t handle the super summer scheduling of kids either.  I’m a firm believer in free play.  Unleash the imagination! I refuse to sign them up for a bunch of crappy camps that cost a fortune and require me to drive them all over town. I brag about this to the uber moms, hoping to induce a new competition for just letting kids play. They don’t buy it.

I relish the idea of summer: no alarm clocks, no lunches to make, no barking about homework.  Ahhhhhh just sleep, reading and the unfolding of a new day.  Who knows what today will bring.

Apparently, today (the first day!) it brings: fighting, whining, crying, pinching, pulling, demanding, eating, spilling, and trashing. Shit. I need a crappy camp to get them out of the house.  I panic. What was I thinking?  I start flipping through the catalog of expensive day camps.

Quickly, I rough out a schematic for this week: fairy camp, safety town, hip hop dancing, tennis and lacrosse. I make plans to dip into their college savings to cover next week. Everything’s going to be okay, I tell myself.

Then Elizabeth hands me the list she’s made of “100 Things to do this summer”. She’s done it on her own, inspired by a summer of possibilities. She’s decorated the cover with a crayon drawing of a beach umbrella stuck crookedly into a yellow hump of scrawled beach.  The list is written in purple marker.  It’s four pages long and stapled together in the corner. I read it and relax. Here are just a few of her summer aspirations:

#5 Watch a scary movie
#11 Ride bikes to the library
#18 Visit a relative
#22  Read a book
#35 Make up a dance
#46  Sun bathe
#50  Make friendship bracelets
#66  Go to the beach
#72  Take a nap
#85  Make a sand castle
#97  Catch bugs

I toss the camp catalog in the garbage. Clearly, she has better ideas. I start making lemonade. Welcome to summer.