Can I get an AMEN!?
By BECKY ANDREWS, Wilson Living Magazine
This summer our home has been a revolving door of activity. I do believe there’s not been a single week where my boys have not had at least one sleepover (at our house). You may or may not know how hard it is to work from home during your children’s summer break. It’s not all together impossible, just challenging. And unless you’ve sat at your makeshift desk at the kitchen table talking on the phone, trying to work on your computer while your children decide to fight a blood match 12 inches away-you may not understand.
I prefer kids to stay over at our house. It actually helps me… most of the time. For the duration of the sleepover, my children forego fighting each other and instead have a wrestling match with their guest(s). If I go into my closet and shut the door, I can take business calls without interruption. The only problem is the amount of damage four boys can do to a perfectly tidy bonus room left unsupervised for 10 minutes.
Last weekend my oldest son’s best friend and his cousin stayed a couple of days with us. The boys had a blast. Playing, running, jumping, yelling, screaming, wrestling. Since the heat index was well over 100 degrees, this flurry of activity was happening inside our house.
I love that children are comfortable at our home. So comfortable in fact that they cool themselves by opening the refrigerator and staring at its contents for 10 minutes or until my husband shouts, “It’s cheaper to stand over the air conditioning vent!”
So this summer we’ve had about 30 sleepovers-give or take-, gone through 2 tubes of triple antibiotic ointment, 3 cans of sunscreen, 2 bottles of bug spray, a gross of marshmallows, 1 large box of band aids, 1,000 yards of fishing line and 4 containers of worms. We watched 5 movies at the theater, set off 8000 bottle rockets and spent enough on groceries to feed a small country. All this with ZERO trips to the emergency room, pretty good for boys I think.
We did manage to squeeze in a trip to The Frist. The boys didn’t care for the Andy Warhol exhibit. When we left they were both complaining about how they never get to do anything fun. To distract them, my sister asked if they had a good time.
Now I had just about all I could take from these little ingrates so before they could answer I said, “If you say you didn’t like it, you guys aren’t doing anything the rest of the summer!” Not my finest moment. But if I have to live through my upstairs smelling like gym socks all summer, they will go to The Frist with me and like it; NO, they will LOVE it!
I’ve learned a few things on this break. One, summer break was created to make parents appreciate the school year. Two, kids today have no idea what it means to be bored. And three, because I think we should go back to the good ole days when children would spend at least two weeks in the summer visiting an out of town close family member, my children will be making a surprise visit to my sister’s house in Oregon next summer.
Email Becky any comments to becky@wilsonlivingmagazine.com