The Long Hot Summer

This was printed in the Orlando Sentinel June 12, 2018.

Summer break is upon us and I have a house full of kids.  Home from school.

Griffin and Miles

Well, not a house full but I have twins and they can make it seem like there are many, many, more of them.

I think I speak for most parents when I say summer break seemed long as a kid and seems even longer as a parent.

What to do?

Swim team was fun for them when they were younger.  For about an hour. We live next door to a country club that has a pool and my wife was determined that they would have something to do for the summer. So swim raised its head for them. They had two swim practices every day. One in the morning and one in the early evening.

First, morning practice. At 8. Ayem. Can you say, "Yeesh?" I think you can. Getting your sons up that early when they've been up half the night playing video games was no easy task. It's like waking a bear up in the middle of hibernation.

Second, there were evening practices which began at 5. Every day at 4:30 one of my twins would say, "Looks like rain."

Every day.

The meets were fun.

Griffin

Watching them in races was fun. Watching them get better and better was fun and then... they got older and the first thing that went bye bye was swimming.

One of the fun things about being a parent and getting older in general is your memory gets a bit fuzzy. I couldn’t tell you what they did in summers after that if my life depended on it.

Okay, they're 14 now and money has become extremely popular with them. This I know. They figured out you can buy 'things' with it and go 'places' with it as well. Things tend to be more video games and places tend towards movies like The Avengers and The Black Panther.  So off we went to Publix to fill out applications to work there bagging groceries.

One was like, “I have a very busy schedule and I’m only available to work on Saturday afternoons.” Sounds like he has a lot to do, right? Actually most of it is bupkis, nada, whatever you want to call it.

The other one was like, “If I work every day I’ll bring home $150 a week! Cool!”

Turns out the kids working there are in high school and since mine go to ninth grade next semester it was a no go.

Close but no cigar.

We did go to the Y together today. That’s something, right?

Miles and Griffin
In younger days

It’s barely June.

Like I said, “Looong.”




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