Why my kids don't get to go to summer camp.

In six days school will be out and I'll have my girls home all day, every day, for 84 days.
YAAaaaaaaayyyyyyyy??
Seriously, other than not being able to lie about how many naps I really take or how much time I spend daily on Facebook and Twitter and HuffPostCelebrity and E!Online and People.com and Mamapop, I am super excited.
Really.
I mean it.
I'm not lying.
Super Excited for all that togetherness she says as she uncorks the first of many, many bottles of wine. 

Because when I say 84 days, I mean eighty-four days.
No camps, no lessons, no trips to far away places.

That's a lot of togetherness — and that's a typical summer for us.

I know.
I should be committed.

But before you call the insane asylum and reserve a spot for me, let me present my case for the defense.

I spend every day from the end of August to the first week of June as a slave to the Things' schedules: Lessons, rehearsals, concerts, plays, retreats, conferences and other school programs, not to mention all the things they do with their friends that I have to drive them to/pick them up from...or host.

Um, but isn't that all just part of being a parent? you ask. 

Certainly, but when June rolls around, I'm ready to be a little bit selfish.

It's my summer too, dammit.

And guess what? I want to sleep in! I want to have nothing on my schedule and nowhere I have to drive someone! I want to go to my little cabin for a long weekend, and if the weather forecast looks great, be able to stay through the following week! So yeah, it may sound selfish, but I deserve to have a say in how I spend my summer — and I say I want a break, and I want my kids to have one too.

A real summer break.

Remember those?

Not many kids these days will ever know the types of summer vacations we spent as kids. And by "we", I mean those of us who were kids back in the day where summer meant hours of roaming the neighborhood barefoot with a friend or two, maybe walking down to the corner gas station for a pack of Bubble Yum or the 7-11 for a slurpee. It meant long car trips with your family when the only thing you had to do to pass the time was sleep, read a real book, or play car bingo or 'slug-bug'. It meant sleepovers with board games and mad libs and crank-calling the neighbors, and maybe some good videos on MTV if you were lucky.

And just because my kids aren't enrolled in camp doesn't mean they'll be roaming the streets barefoot (much) or playing "Mousetrap"with their friends (although now that I think about it, I'm totally digging around and finding that game); they'll spend an unreasonable amount of time staring at a screen of some size every day, I'm quite certain. (There's also some super fun things on Thing 1's calendar like writing college application essays and more college visits and continued volunteer work and senior pictures and getting her wisdom teeth out.) And there'll certainly be days where they'll be bored and have to figure out something to do to kill the time when I tell them "screens off". And after grumbling at me for a bit, they will.
They'll read tons of books, write stories, make movies, ride their bikes, swim and go tubing and hang out with friends.
They'll stay up too late watching movies and sleep until 10 if they want.
They'll have other campless friends who'll come over in the morning and not leave for a day or two.

They'll have three months to relax.
To recharge.

And so will I.

And in all honesty, I really am super excited about almost every one of those 84 days.

It helps, of course, that my girls are great friends and truly enjoy hanging out with each other, and also (thankfully) with me. We genuinely have fun doing stuff together, unless it includes me gritching at them to clean up their piles of crap (then they're not my favorites, and I'm certainly not theirs). And sure, there will be days where one of us will be in a foul mood and be a real bitch to the other two (take your pick) and days where we have cabin fever (literally) and need to escape.
But I think there's value in that.

Teaching them to slow down, to figure out how to make their own fun, to coexist - peacefully - with each other and others, and how to escape when necessary is just as important -- maybe even more so -- than keeping them so busy they don't have time to just be.

Listen, I get that there's kids who need more structure and spending three months without it would lead to all kinds of trouble (I used to teach quite a few of them). I understand there's kids whose soccer or football career depends on the two week camp in the middle of August, or ones who truly love escaping to sleep-away camp for a month. And I know that many parents work and don't get a summer vacation. I get it. I do.

But this isn't about their 84 days.

It's about mine.
It's about my girls'.

And we're ready.