Thursday
School. Sigh.
I would be hard pressed indeed, as would most anyone I presume, to think of any time of year that is as bittersweet as are the closing days of summer. The days are getting shorter, the sun is setting noticeably farther south, and the night air brings a chill not felt since spring. The heady days of rough and tumble fun at the beach are now behind us just as surely as a last campfire somewhere slowly burning down.
Good Lord, what a load of sappy nonsense. Campfires indeed. Anyway, bottom line is that the lads are back in school, and despite my mildly conflicted feelings about losing the freedom that summer brings, I know it's best for everybody to be done with it. Sure, it's tough to get back into the grind of our over-scheduled lives, but at this point the lads and I have had about as much fun as we can stand.
The boys have played through every video game we have, and I've gotten tired of being beaten at Call of Duty 2. We've read books, done puzzles and watched every Marx Brothers movie I managed capture and burn from TCM. There have been trips to kid museums, science museums and aquariums. We've done day trips here and weekend trips there and we've been pruned up in the town pool more times than I care to remember. We've played tennis. We've played kickball/football/Frisbee in the back yard. We've played basketball in the driveway. We've fished, bowled, and been to the local skate park. We even fit in some minor league ball (Go Jackals!), a trip to the U.S. Open and went whitewater rafting. In the end I was, simply put, pooped.
So it was with a renewed spring in my step that I took the lads to Target last week and collected a shopping cart full of pencils, markers, notebooks and all the related educational tools that will, apparently, make them smarter. I was actually a little surprised by how well the boys adjusted to the news that summer was over and that the fourth and sixth grades, respectively, were upon them. After all, I guess there's only so many times that they can whip me at Halo2 before they're ready for a new challenge, even if it is (sigh) ...school.
