I don’t know when I’ve ever been so ready for Spring Break. Second grade is about to kill me. And this is where many of you will leave comments like “Wait until third grade!” or “You think this is bad? Junior high is brutal!” or “Cherish this moment because pretty soon she will be going off to college and getting married and you’ll be a grandmother!”
Then I’ll get all sentimental, especially because I held my friend Natalie’s newborn baby yesterday and it was a reminder that little babies are so soft and cuddly and don’t ever look at you and say, “NO WAY AM I WEARING THAT.” And then I’ll sing a few bars of Time in A Bottle by Jim Croce because if there’s a tender moment that can’t be summed up with the musical stylings of Jim Croce then I don’t know it.
(On a parenting side note, a few weeks ago my friend and I were in the school gym waiting for our girls to be finished with basketball practice. She had her two-year-old with her and he was having a particularly bad night. You know? The kind of night that toddlers have because their life is so hard with all the being waited on hand and foot and having their diaper changed. A nice dad from the team was trying to help her out and she said, “Thank you. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with this.” And he responded, “Oh this? This is nothing. I have a daughter in junior high.” I looked at her two-year-old throwing a big screaming fit and have never felt more frightened for my future. On the upside, it has helped my prayer life considerably.)
If I didn’t know before, I knew for sure it was time for a little break from our routine on Tuesday morning when P told me he could drop Caroline off at school if I’d just get her ready. I packed her lunch, grabbed her school bag, put it around her shoulders, HANDED HER THE KEYS TO MY CAR, and kissed her goodbye. She walked back in the door about five seconds later, handed me back my keys and asked, “HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?”
Yes. I have. Somewhere between the Rocket Math and the word problems and trying to remember how many pints are in a quart, I have lost my mind.
Anyway, Gulley and I are leaving town with the kids for a little trip over the break and I can’t wait to get on the road. Spring Break brings out the wanderlust in me, maybe because P and I spent about ten years worth of Spring Breaks taking a busload full of high school kids skiing in Colorado when he worked for Youth for Christ. Obviously this was back when we were younger, stronger people who didn’t mind being woken up in the middle of the night to hear tales of drama and woe such as, “Umm, I told her I liked him but then she said she liked him first and I was like WHATEVER and she knew we were supposed to ski together yesterday and then they went off together and (insert big sobs and nose-blowing here) and she wore her pink ski jacket when SHE KNEW that I was going to wear my pink ski jacket tomorrow.”
I don’t know why we quit chaperoning those trips.
Oh, I kid. I loved chaperoning those trips. The actual skiing and the seventeen hour bus ride? Not so much. But the kids? LOVED THEM. And I can’t really think too long about how the majority of those kids are all grown-up and married and have kids of their own now. Cue the Jim Croce.
So what about y’all? Going anywhere fun or doing anything interesting for Spring Break?
(Disclaimer: If you are part of a roving band of thieves who is now planning on breaking into our home because I’ve just announced we’ll be out of town, I must warn you that P will still be at home because he is a busy worker bee. He is armed. And semi-dangerous.)