It's That Time of Year Again!

Dunh dunh dunhhhhhh.....

It's summer program time!

I didn't know this existed until I became a mom. When I was growing up, summer vacation = sleeping in and then running amok in the neighbourhood, coming in only for lunch and homemade popsicles.

(Made with jello - two kinds - and dixie cups/popsicle sticks. My mom was The Awesome.)

None of my friends had dual income families either, so summer looked the same for all of us. The only alterations to that schedule were my annual trek to summer camp (ohhh yeah - I was Arts & Crafts and Music & Drama girl at Red Rock - totally one of the cool kids) and our yearly family vacation, usually to Falcon Lake, but sometimes all the way out to the Left Coast to visit family.

When my own munchkins were younger, summer didn't look all that different from their usual days - they were in daycare. I'd already made the mental shift from "all kids need to have a stay-at-home mom because I did" to "a family does what makes sense for that family, and in my family, it makes sense for mom to work," so it wasn't a big deal.

Then they hit school (its own mental shift), and we hit our first summer. Suddenly, used to year-round, all-day programming for our kids, we were left staring at the vast expanse of 11 weeks on the calendar with nothing.

It was a total double whammy, too, since we were in America, where they let their kids out of school in the first week of June (and then wonder why their kids are falling behind, but whatever), leaving almost three months to cover instead of a much more manageable eight weeks.

So we discovered the Summer Program. And every year, come early March, we have to discover it all over again.

What are the kids going to do this summer????

I work because I want to, so quitting my job isn't an option. We don't have enough holidays between the two of us to cobble together an entire summer's worth of care. And, more's the pity, the county says we can't leave them alone all day for 11 weeks.

So, it's various clubs and programs and camps. For the past few years, we've done the same summer program that runs their inservice/spring break/winter break care, and it's been fine. This year we're trying something different - an a la carte version where you mix and match various options.

But I don't WANT to do fishing - I don't want to touch a gross fish!!

No. Dad. I do NOT want to do football. For the eighth time.

I want to do archery.

How come I can't do swimming? Why are we ALWAYS gone when I get to do good stuff?

Sigh. We're also trying to mix in a quilting camp (a saint from church has offered to teach The Girl's Sunday School class how to make doll quilts), The Girl's first-ever overnight Bible camp experience, our own family vacation (if only a week for us to find some local biking trails and hang out at the lake), and a couple of weeks for the kids at "Grandma's Farm."

Makes me tear my hair out a bit every year, I'll admit. But since the alternative is handing in my resignation and stocking up on jello and dixie cups, I grab my enrollment forms and a pen and grumble as I go looking for immunization records.