Vendredi V - School's Out! Edition

Among the things that America does better than Canada (Netflix! Chipotle! Target!) is its designation of school levels. In Canada, you've got the oh-so-cumbersome I'm in grade one. Which works fine, until you are talking about said child and you have to call him a kid in grade one or grade one-er.

In America, it's all about the first grade and third grade; I'm in first grade isn't particularly easier than I'm in grade one, but when it comes to parental bragging, I've got a first grader and a third grader trip off the tongue much more easily.

Unless, of course, these things are true. In which case, there are no words, but merely an astonished gasp.

And they are true. School ended today and, as confirmed by their report cards, my munchkins are officially in first and third grades respectively. This is, of course, clear evidence of a rift in the time/space continuum as this actually happened only yesterday, and I heard the doctor exclaim, "It's a boy!" a mere two days ago and "It's a girl!" the day right before that.

Not surprising, then, that it feels like it was last week that I came running down Third Street, breathless with excitement that my own elementary school was out for the summer. The holidays beckoned, eight whole weeks ready to be filled with:

Top 5 Best Parts of Summer Holidays

1. Homemade popsicles. Did your mom make these? Mine did. It can't have been a cost-savings, since popsicles cost something like four cents. These contained some magical elixir made of carefully measured proportions of Kool-Aid and Jello and were molded in Dixie cups, with popsicle sticks stuck in at exactly the right moment of viscosity. They tasted amazing and, best of all, she would make them with different layers. Lime and cherry, ohhhhhh yeah.

2. Going to the library. Finally, no school to interfere with the best part of life. I'd put a cardboard box on my wagon, trundle it down to the library two blocks away, and fill the box with books. One year I got in trouble with the librarians because I read and returned most of the books on the same day I took them out, and they were none to pleased to have to re-shelve books whose spots were only recently-vacated.

3. Red Rock Bible Camp. Despite an only partially-successful first year in which I spent a good part of it crying for my mummy, I grew to love my annual week at camp. And what wasn't to love? I took Arts & Crafts and Music (hello! geek skills!) except for the years I broke it up with Fishing (which was fine, since we always went out in the heat of the afternoon and didn't have to catch anything). I retched a couple of times on the first day in order to successfully escape plate scraping duty (those coffee cans and spatulas clunked unceremoniously at the end of the table after a meal? Grossest thing ever). There was always a cute counselor to have a crush on. But my real crush was on Jesus. As much as adult Christianity is rewarding, it's hard; some days, I'd give anything to be be back in in that black and white world, where I was in looooooooove with Jesus, singing love songs to him around the campfire.

4. Painting the garage. Our garage doors were made out of red metal, and, when they (and my mom) got super-hot, she'd send us out with pails of water and paint brushes to make water-darkened pictures on the scalding metal. The pictures dried in minutes, so we had a blank canvas all afternoon long. She was smart, and we were losers, and everyone was happy.

5. Leathery feet. It was always a shock to run barefoot around the block for the first time after school was out; the feet in my memory were those from the end of the past summer, toughened by eight weeks of tearing around after friends, bikes, and dogs. Didn't take long, though - by mid-July my jelly shoes were somewhere in the back of the closet and my nightly ablutions consisted mostly of scraping the dirt off my feet.