By: Paul Morrone
The last month of the school year is a blitzkrieg of activity and rivals the holiday season. It’s even earned its own name – Maycember – in pop culture because it is there is too much to do and too little time, much like the frenzied time between Thanksgiving and Christmas that takes a toll on all of us both physically and mentally (here’s a fun article from Today that sums it up better than I can: Click Here to Read). It is a shell game of time, and in our house our digital calendar looks like a bag of skittles threw up on it. It’s painted with colors representing different things: baseball games, class projects, end of the year parties, field day, birthdays, memorial day cookouts, you name it. We have to take it all head-on. There’s been an end in sight, however, and we finally reached it this past weekend.
We stayed busy, but on our terms. Sports are over, school ends on the 17th, and we’ll quickly transition into summer-normal, which is its own dimension of chaos, just not to the scale of ‘may-mageddon’ (another name I’ve come to love). Mother nature blessed us with a perfect summer weekend, complete with long sunny days and comfortable nights. We spent a lot of time in and around the water and with friends and family. It was an oasis of a weekend after running at a breakneck pace from early April.
The kids got to do kid things. It was refreshing to watch them play in the sand, throw a football on the beach, wrestle in the pool, and just be kids with other kids. We even squeezed in a driving range session with the boys. Don’t get me wrong, I see the value (and enjoy) that our kids participate in organized activities, but there is something to be said to watch them with a genuine smile on their face being goofy and making up their own rules to a game they just created.
Jill and I enjoyed it as much as the kids did. It’s therapeutic not having to rush out the door on a Saturday morning and not bouncing between three different events on what was supposed to be a quiet Sunday (what happened to Sunday being a day of rest!?). We got some things done that have been deferred around the house, I even went on a run for the first time in way too long.
After the first taste of summer, I have high hopes for what the next few weeks will bring. Lobster rolls, fireworks, late night fires, cold drinks on the beach and quality time with friends are all on my to-do list in the coming months. I’ll take it all and enjoy every minute of it, because before we know it we’ll be complaining that the days are too short and it’s too cold outside.
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