Recognizing Summer

Well.
Good thing I never set up unnaturally high expectations for things. That way I’m never disappointed.
Oh wait. I do and I am.
But it’s all good because it’s summer. A summer without schedules. With swimming. With laughing and frolicking and playing.

That’s what I thought. But then I called about football tryouts for my oldest boy’s high school. I thought I was actually being proactive and calling a tad ridiculously early. That’s when I was informed they’d already been practicing for 3 days and I needed to get off my summer-lazy hiney, get the boy’s physical, get his medical pack notarized, and get him to conditioning by Monday at 4. Oh good. Today is Monday. And you know when 4 o’clock is.

So Summer ended before it began.

But that’s a glass half empty approach.

I’ll try for glass half full.

YAY. I get to take a kid to football practice from 4-6:30 and then somehow get him showered and fed before skating begins at 7! Still glass half empty, isn’t it?

My glass is half empty. Whatever.

So, the Informinator heard I had taken a day off blogging last Friday and said, “Oh, there we go…see you in 6 months.” Her glass is all the WAY empty. Sheesh. I took a day off because everyone was as sick of reading the blog as I was of writing it. Sometimes we all just need to walk away.

My youngest, snuggilest daughter came to me in the dead of night Saturday. It was 2:15 a.m. Sunday morning. I always hear my door open and see the stream of light attacking my eyeballs from the hall bathroom. The stories are always similar. I can’t sleep. I had a nightmare. There are 100 spiders in my room. Blah blah.

“I had a bad dream,” she said.

Wanting the wakefulness to end as quickly as possible, I invited her up to my bed for a quick snuggle. I didn’t ask questions because I didn’t want either one of us to become more awake than we already were. Then I sent her back to bed.

Two and a half frustrating hours later, I think I fell back asleep. It was a restless, exhausting night. I go to sleep fine. But if you wake me in the middle, I don’t resume sleep very easily. Having lost so much sleep over her bad dream, I needed to ask what it was about. Over breakfast on Sunday, I asked her. Was it a scary clown? A storm? A bogeyman? Serial kidnapper? 

“No, it was about Flash,” she answered. Flash is Brady’s neglected hamster. “I took him down to the deck by the river. It started to rain so I ran in the house and left him out there. I guess he fell in, because I never saw him again.” So you don’t even know that he fell in the river? It’s just a hamster wandering off? That was the bad dream?

It’s time to have a talk about what the mother can be awakened for. It isn’t for hamster dreams. I will schedule this talk today between the notarization and the football practice.

Bam.