On the first Monday of summer break, Lila woke up at 6:10, came into our room, and asked in a whisper what we were doing today. Ben had already left for a survey job out past Bowman. I looked at the ceiling fan turning above the bed and realized I didn't have an answer. I had been home full time since January, but this was the first summer of it, and somehow I hadn't planned a thing.
She's six and just finished kindergarten. She has energy in a quantity I can only describe as municipal. And I've got bookkeeping for two small businesses that needs a few hours of my attention most weekdays. That first week taught me a lot about how summer at our house needs to work. Not a schedule, exactly. Something looser.
Why I didn't make a schedule
I tried. On Sunday night I'd sketched out a summer calendar with color-coded blocks: reading, outdoor time, crafts, "quiet hour." By Tuesday afternoon, it was in the recycling. Summer days in Orangeburg don't respect color-coding. A morning thunderstorm changes everything. A friend calls about the splash pad. It's 94 degrees by eleven, and the outdoor block has to move.
What worked better was an order instead of a timetable. The same things, roughly in the same sequence, but with no clock telling us when to switch.
Our loose shape for a weekday
- Outside first. Right after breakfast, while it's still in the low eighties, we go outside. The backyard, the porch, a walk with Pepper around the block, the park if we're feeling ambitious. The pecan trees give us real shade until about ten-thirty.
- Something with hands. When it gets hot, we come in and do something at the kitchen table: playdough, drawing, a puzzle, cutting up old magazines. This is when I sit nearby and do the morning's bookkeeping.
- Lunch on the porch. Usually sandwiches and fruit. The ceiling fan out there makes it bearable even in June.
- Quiet time. One hour after lunch, in her room with books and the fan on. She doesn't have to sleep, but she has to stay in there. I was nervous about whether this would hold. It does, mostly, because I'm consistent and because I let her take Pepper.
- An outing or a project. Late afternoon is when we do the one thing of the day: the library, the pool, a Food Lion trip where she gets to hold the list, or a small job around the house.
- Back outside after supper. Once the sun drops behind the trees, the yard cools enough to be pleasant again. Bubbles, sprinkler, fireflies. Ben is usually home by then and takes over.
A few anchor points
Within that loose order, I've kept a couple of fixed points in the week. Kids seem to like having something to look forward to, and frankly, so do I.
- Tuesday is library day. I worked at a library for eight years, so this is non-negotiable. She picks out a stack and signs up for the summer reading program.
- Thursday is "Lila cooks." She plans one simple dish with me, writes the list, and helps make it. This week it was ants on a log and a very lumpy pancake supper.
- Saturday is the farmers market, all three of us.
What I learned in week one
Boredom is fine. On Wednesday she lay on the living room floor and told me she was "the most bored a person has ever been." I said I was sorry to hear it and went back to my spreadsheet. Twenty minutes later she had built an elaborate hotel for her stuffed animals out of shoeboxes. I'm trying not to rescue her from boredom so fast.
Screens need a time, not a total. Arguing about minutes wore me out. We switched to "a show while I make supper," and that's it. It ended the negotiations.
The heat sets the rules. I stopped fighting it. We do outdoor things early and late, and the middle of the day belongs to the house. We had a home energy audit from our utility last month, and one of the things that came up was how hard our heat pump works through the afternoon. Keeping the doors shut and the blinds down in the hottest hours, while we're inside with puzzles, just makes sense.
My work fits in the cracks. I was worried that summer meant I couldn't get anything done. In practice, I get an hour in the morning while she's busy at the table, quiet time after lunch, and sometimes an hour after she goes to bed. It's enough, if I don't fill those cracks with other things.
It's Sunday evening now, a week in. Lila's asleep with the fan on and three library books on her pillow. The summer calendar I made last week is gone, but there's a short list taped inside a kitchen cabinet that says, in her handwriting, OUTSIDE, TABLE, LUNCH, QUIET, GO SOMEWHERE, OUTSIDE. She wrote it herself on Friday, after I explained the plan out loud for maybe the tenth time.
Eleven weeks left. I'm not counting them down. Not yet, anyway.
