The Dreaded End of Summer (for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop)

Ah, summer.  It’s always been my favourite season, for many reasons.  Unfortunately it doesn’t last long enough, and, in fact, this one’s coming to an end quickly.  I’ll definitely miss it, even though this has been one of the busiest summers I’ve had.  This blog post is in response to Mama Kat’s latest Writing Prompts.

Writing Prompt:  List 6 things you are going to miss about summer.

1)  Having no fixed time to get up and out the door.  My husband and I are secondary school teachers, so summer is one long break from work for us.  Actually, since I’ve been on a leave of absence since having our daughter, who is now 3, I’ve been working at the radio station in town.  So I don’t actually have a break from work.  That said, I don’t work full time, so on many days I don’t have a fixed time to get up.  Most importantly, there’s no fixed time for my 7 year old son, in school full time during the school year, to get up, get ready, and get out the door.  That is often a source of stress for me, because there’s the “Do I have to go to school today?”, “I think I’m sick”, “I’m too tired”, and “I’ll get dressed later” that I hear daily.  I don’t hear it in the summer.  I’m going to miss the absence of those excuses when summer ends…

2)  Having my husband home all day long.  It’s so nice having him home to help with the kids and to help with everything else that needs done in the day.  He also gets up every morning with the kids, so I can try to sleep in a bit, which I will miss greatly when summer ends.  Back to getting up at the crack of dawn.  Yuck!  (You can read about how great my hubby is here.)

3)  Being able to go to work when I’m needed.  Because I am the “swing shift announcer”, I’m called upon when someone is sick for an on air shift, or can’t make it in for any other reason.  In the summer it’s easy to go in at the last minute because my husband is home with the kids, and so I don’t need to scramble to find a babysitter for my daughter and someone to either get my son to school or pick him up at a certain time.  Once summer ends my availability is limited, and I feel like a jerk saying no when I’m needed.

4)  The weather.  Living in Midwestern Ontario, Canada – otherwise known as the “snowbelt” – means there are only really a few months of lovely weather to enjoy.  Those are the summer months.  It’s nice having the windows open daily, going outside in shorts, and feeling the sun beating down on me.  And it’s so much more convenient when getting the kids ready to go anywhere!  When the summer ends, the cool fall weather begins, and it just gets nasty after that.  (You can read about the damage our winters can do here.)

5)  The kids being able to stay up late.  It’s nice to be able to stay up with the kids and play, or watch movies, or do whatever we please, and we stay up later in the summer.  No school or work in the morning means Harry Potter marathons for Zander, and Mommy can lie in bed with Zoey for a long time without worrying about how long it actually is and how late it actually is.  The kids and I even went for a walk tonight – way past bedtime – to get a good look at the brightest and biggest moon of the year.  Beautiful.  The end of summer means the beginning of more stringent bedtimes.

6)  The many hours of daylight.  I love that it is light out until late right now.  There’s something WRONG about being somewhere at 5:00pm and it being PITCH BLACK.  Freaky.  But when fall is upon us so are the shortened days, unfortunately.

I need to squeeze the last bit of summer out of these next few weeks…and I’ll definitely miss it when it’s gone.