This is it. The last Monday of summer. By next week I’ll be up at the crack of dawn cooking a Back to School breakfast that no one will actually eat and packing a lunch that will be the best lunch I’ll pack all year because I will be enthusiastic! And organized! And will have made a trip to the grocery store to stock up on lunchtime essentials!
In fact, I’ve spent the last forty-five minutes perusing Pinterest and pinning all manner of delicious CrockPot recipes that I plan to cook in the CrockPot that I bought last fall. Although in the interest of full disclosure I feel that you should know I have yet to actually take the CrockPot out of the box it came in, but this year is going to be different. I have the CrockPot Recipe Board full of pinned recipes on Pinterest to prove it. It’s just a matter of time before I stick a roast in that bad boy.
Because that’s what the first few weeks of school are all about. It’s the mom version of a new year. I’m going to start working out again. I’m going to eat better. I’m going to take better care of my skin. I’m going to send Caroline to school in clean clothes that actually match with her hair neatly combed, maybe even curled if she’ll let me. I’ll put notes in her lunch box and make tortilla roll ups that look like pieces of sushi. And in the evening we’ll do homework before we sit around the dinner table as a family discussing our day.
I’ll talk about how it’s good to be back on a schedule. It’s better for us. When you reach the point in the summer where you have to set an alarm to be somewhere by noon, it’s probably time to get back in a routine. And I will rock the heck out of our new productive schedule for at least two weeks before I begin to count down the days until Thanksgiving vacation.
Because just like Cinderella sang in their 80’s power ballad, you don’t what you got until it’s gone.
Anyway, Friday was our wedding anniversary and now the celebration portion of our summer is officially over. P and I celebrated in the traditional manner. By which I mean that he kept Caroline while I left for a girls’ weekend at the beach with some friends. When you look at the list of traditional anniversary gifts, sixteen years isn’t even assigned anything. Fifteen years is crystal and then it just skips to twenty years which is china. In my mind that equates to giving your wife the gift of a responsibility-free weekend at the beach is the logical conclusion. Frankly, that’s better than china or crystal.
My friends and I left San Antonio around noon on Friday, made a quick stop for a fried shrimp basket once we hit Port Aransas and then made our way to the beach where we sat in chairs with our toes in the sand and experienced the bliss that comes when you don’t have to count heads in the surf or dig an enormous hole with a plastic shovel you bought for twenty-five cents at Big Lots.
On Saturday morning we were back out on the beach by 11:00 and stayed there until we finally checked the time when we saw the moon starting to come up over the surf and realized it was almost 8:00. We spent the majority of those hours solving all manner of problems, discussing all the ways we were going to be better this school year, and never once felt bad that we ate our weight in Salted Caramel Rice Krispie treats while wearing our bathing suits. It was a heck of a way to spend the last carefree weekend of summer.
And now one more week. We plan to spend tomorrow waiting by the mailbox to find out who Caroline’s fifth grade teacher will be. I’m sure there will be a few more trips to the pool, a couple of lazy mornings where we stay in our pajamas way passed what most people consider to be a decent time, and making a trip to HEB for a few last minute school supplies. It will be pretty low-key in the whole scheme of things because here’s what I know for sure, we have milked every ounce of fun from this summer. We have squeezed the marrow out of it.
It’s time to pack up our notebooks, write our names on new folders, sharpen our pencils and pray for the first cold front.
But I don’t plan to set the alarm clock until we absolutely have to. Somethings are better left until you absolutely have no other option.
Which may explain why my CrockPot is still in the box it came in.