and I don’t care, because I love summer.

I first wrote this post in longhand, sitting at a friend’s swimming pool drinking beer and watching the kids play at six o’clock on a Sunday night. I could never do that on a school night – there’d be lunch to pack, last minute school work to get done, Diva would have to take a shower and get to bed…dude, I love summer.

If you’re a stay at home mom, maybe you dread it; most of the SAHMs I know do (full disclosure: I’m jealous as hell of SAHMs.)  SAHMs suddenly have kids in the house and under foot unless they schedule activities, and then they spend all day ferrying the kids from one place to another.  My hyper-organized sister does not enjoy summer break.

Ah, but summer is as much a vacation for us working mommies as it is for the kids, even if we do still have to get up and go to work every day. No homework! (In what grade will Diva start doing her homework unprompted and unassisted? Can anyone give me a rough estimate?) No schedules! Late bedtimes!

I don’t have it that bad; I only work part time. But even just working six hours a day, I have to maintain a tight schedule.  Diva has about an hour’s work of homework every night, which takes her between three and four hours to complete, because The World’s Slowest Toddler has grown into The World’s Slowest Second Grader. Plus there’s martial arts twice a week, and I need to work out a few times a week, and I try to cook dinner once in a while, and Diva needs to be in bed by 8:30, and I need to write, and somehow we seem to go from 3:00 to 8:30 in about two hours.

But in the summer, I blow off the bedtime. Diva’s signed up for eight weeks of different day camps, and some grandma time, and a week at my sister’s, and if she goes sleepy a few days a week, what’s the harm? The hours I normally spend haranguing about homework can be spent writing. We eat supper later, we swim at the Y till 9:30, and I don’t yell quite so much. It’s a beautiful thing.

I’ll be singing a different tune come Labor Day, which in other parts of the country signals the approach of fall but here in Houston means we still have two months of soul-sucking sauna-like conditions ahead of us. But for now…

Happy summer!