time wasting

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Summertime Schedules

For the most part, summer has been great. Carla, I think, has had a good mix of being in camp and not being in camp. It’s been a good mix for me, too, because I’ve had some nice chunks of Not Driving. We could be doing more friend get-togethers, but those have proven surprisingly difficult to arrange; I’m assuming everyone else is in the same boat of trying to work vacation and camp and downtime into the remaining days before school starts.

The hardest part of summer for me is the lack of a set schedule. Sure, it seems nice, to have loose lazy days where we do not much of anything at all… but in practice, I end up feeling kind of yucky about it. I think if we had a more rigid schedule on most days, an occasional lazy day would feel more like a break than a waste of time.

Well, it feels quite late in the game to be thinking about re-jigging our schedule. Especially as we have both a two-week vacation AND another full week of sleepaway camp coming up which will throw everything into disarray.

It feels kind of stupid to be stressing about schedules in the summer. And yet, I persist. The stress is the result of two pressures. No, three pressures:

  • Academic Pressure: I want to make sure that Carla stays engaged in things that challenge her brain and encourage critical thinking. Plus, she has a robust array of summer assignments she’s supposed to complete.
  • Sports Pressure: Carla is an active, athletic kid who likes to participate in sports. We’ve never gotten into the whole travel/club sports scene, about which, frankly, I feel quite relieved. (My god, talk about stress and scheduling complexity.) She’s only participated in sports through school. For my particular child, who is unlikely to play sports in college let alone professionally, sports offer an array of benefits that go beyond Being A Star X Player. I want her to continue to play the sports she likes and continue to feel good about her contribution to her teams. As she gets older, and as her peers advance their own skills, it feels more and more important to encourage her to practice and build up her strength and endurance. I would also love for her to get into the habit of regular exercise, because it’s good and necessary for her. She got this for her birthday, which seems like a way to combine fun and exercise. If the weather would cooperate, maybe we can try it out.
  • Break Pressure: The counterweight to the above two pressures is the pressure to give Carla a freaking break, and let her experience the pleasure and freedom and, yes, boredom of long, lazy summer days with no commitments and no expectations. When I was her age, I had ZERO summer expectations. I’m pretty sure I either stayed at home with my brother and his nanny all day, or my mom dropped me off at various friends’ houses on her way to work in the morning and the friend and I roamed around town all day until my mom picked me up on her way home from work. I had no summer homework, no summer sports practice, no summer camps, no supervision. It was glorious. Clearly, it was a different time. For many, many reasons, I don’t think trying to recreate that experience for my kid would fly. But I do want her to have SOME of that summer freedom. It’s so fleeting.

My reaction to all these pressures has been to create a daily schedule.

I did a lot of research into schedules, and compromised my morals by asking ChatGPT for help fitting everything we wanted to do into each day. Then I designed the schedule in Canva and had Office Max print it out and laminate it for me, so we can add specifics to each day. It’s taped to the kitchen wall, directly across from Carla’s spot at the table.

I like this schedule because it incorporates all the things I want Carla to experience in a week: dedicated time for schoolwork, exercise, and music alongside plenty of time to do Summer Things. The key for me is that we get all the work done before noon, and then our afternoons are wide open. That feels both doable and like I’m not weighing her down with a grueling workload. I feel like having a half-hour dedicated to music practice, for instance, is a lot less onerous than telling her, “You need to practice your music today.” I want all her to-dos to be finite.

The schedule worked beautifully. For about a week and a half. Then, as is ALWAYS my problem, one little hiccup brought down the whole system. If I had to identify one culprit, it would be going to bed late. Carla still, at thirteen, does best if she gets ten to twelve hours of sleep a night, and sleep has always, always been one of my top priorities for her. Which means I am reluctant to wake her up at seven when she’s gone to bed at eleven the night before.

Nights are SO HARD though! My husband is not on a summer schedule. He is on his regular, everyday work schedule. He gets home at six or seven most nights, works out, and then we eat dinner at eight or so. We like to watch Taskmaster as a family, and it’s very difficult to keep ourselves to one episode a night (although we succeed, most nights). This means that Carla’s 8:30 bedtime creeps up to 9:30 or 10:00 and sometimes later.

Could I be more strict? Certainly. But it’s not easy, and I grow weary of being the Bedtime Bitch who is pushing and nagging and trying to keep everyone on track. (I would also prefer to go to bed at 9:30 or 10:00; but I still read to Carla every night, so when her bedtime gets pushed back, so does mine, and I end up in bed around midnight. I still wake up at 5:30, so I am VERY TIRED a lot of the time. Which also makes it harder for me to keep on top of things.)

Last night was one of the late nights – and I think Carla was up until midnight working on her summer reading, which is both commendable (and relatable) and also go to sleep. This morning, I feel groggy and unmotivated. How am I supposed to motivate my child into action when I struggle with motivating myself??? If I allow her to sleep in, she’ll have more energy for getting things done… but then our schedule will creep into the afternoon, and we won’t have time for the fun stuff… and then I’ll feel like a Mean Mom, or we’ll allow fun stuff to bleed into the evening, and then we’re in bed at midnight and the whole misshapen cycle continues.

Well, there’s not a lot to be done except try to get back on track.

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Weigh In Wednesday (Post Not in Any Way Related to Weight)

My hands are still shaking from a horrendously embarrassing experience, so I am trying to distract myself with some fun and fluff. 

Oh, you want to share in my humiliation first? Okay. 

I texted the owner of The Kitten to see if Carla could come visit him (“him” meaning the kitten; the owner is a woman). I had recently put her number in my phone, at Carla’s request. She’d (the kitten owner, not Carla) texted me so I would have her number, and I’d added her to my contacts. I tend to add people to my phone as “FirstName LastName,” and then never include any other identifying details… and you are well aware that I have a terrible memory… so there are multiple people in my phone who are now complete mysteries to me. One of these days I should really go through my phone and delete those people. 

I clicked on the kitten owner’s name – noting briefly that there was no prior text from her; I must have deleted it – and texted her: Hi, this is Carla’s mom. Is there a good time for Carla to come visit The Kitten?

A few minutes later I got back a series of question marks. 

As you may have intuited from my expert foreshadowing, I texted THE WRONG PERSON. Apparently, I have two people with the same first name in my phone. A fact which I have long since forgotten. The one whose name popped up when I started the text was the wrong one. 

And I have NO IDEA WHO SHE IS. 

Is this an old work contact? Is this someone for whom I’ve done freelance work? Is she a fellow parent from Carla’s school? Is she a board member I’ve interviewed for a writing project? Is she someone I went to grad school with? Is she a friend of a friend I’d connected with at some point? Is she some sort of service provider I have employed at some point? ZERO IDEA. 

I typed back, So sorry! I must have the wrong number!

But what I REALLY should have typed back was, So sorry! I must have typed the wrong FirstName!

Because if she is in my phone, there is a real likelihood that we know each other, and have interacted via phone before. Which means that there is a real possibility that she is sitting there wondering a) why I am contacting her about a kitten she doesn’t know and b) why I am pretending it was a wrong number and c) why I haven’t asked her how her work/family/life is. 

But I have no idea who this person is, or why she is a contact in my phone. I even googled her and I swear I have never seen her before in my life. But she was in my phone. So we must have known each other at some point! 

All I can do is hope that this person has as terrible a memory as I do, and has long since removed me from her phone, and isn’t feeling hurt/miffed/weirded out by my faux pas. 

LET’S MOVE ON TO LESS HORRIFYING TOPICS.

I have some questions for you. 

Weigh In #1: What food do you hate, but wish you didn’t? While I am a very choosy eater, I don’t feel particularly bad about it most of the time. I eat enough of a variety of foods that I’m pretty confident I can go to any restaurant or any friend’s house and find something to eat. I’ve never once thought, “I wish I enjoyed lamb. Or beets.” But there are a few foods I hate that I really wish I didn’t. 

Tomatoes. I hate tomatoes so very, very much. But they are one of those wildly ubiquitous foods that show up all the time, in places expected and not. (I cannot tell you how frequently I have encountered tomatoes on a Caesar salad, when they have no place in a Caesar salad.) Life would be so much easier and more pleasant if I just liked tomatoes! Or could at least tolerate them! Even friends who kindly ask about food preferences before they invite us over sometimes have tomatoes in their offerings, and I am just so very weary of being that picky person who doesn’t like tomatoes. 

Oatmeal. I cannot bring myself to enjoy oatmeal. Outside of oatmeal cookies, which are the sole exception. But lots of people genuinely enjoy oatmeal, and it seems like such a hearty, healthful food. I really wish I liked it. 

Eggs. Outside of scrambled eggs – which, even then, I only like a specific way – I avidly dislike eggs in ALL FORMS. But they are versatile and easy and full of protein. I want to like them. 

Weigh In #2: What is the best seat on an airplane? I prefer the window, myself. I like being tucked in next to the wall, I like being able to look out during turbulence to reassure myself that we are not in fact falling out of the sky, I like being able to lean my head against a solid surface. But when I fly with my family, my husband is the one who gets the window (although sometimes he swaps with Carla) and I get the aisle. I do not care for the aisle, because it puts me in close proximity to people, and those people tend to be very oblivious to the boundary between their space in the aisle and my space in my actual seat. The only benefit to the aisle seat is easy access to bathroom breaks. But then again, you have to be the one to pop up and down while the middle- or window-seater squeezes past you to the bathroom. I still remember the time I flew and a woman in front of me refused to swap seats with her row-mate’s spouse, because the spouse was in a window seat. “I have a bum leg, and I prefer the aisle so I can stretch out my leg,” she said. But… you aren’t supposed to stretch your leg into the aisle, right??!?! Isn’t that a tripping hazard? Isn’t that begging for a new leg injury when the drinks cart slams into your shin? 

Weigh In #3: What is your worst time-wasting habit? I am already terrible about spending too much time on social media. But more recently, I have found new depths to my time wasting online, which is that I have gotten sucked into watching gender reveals on Instagram. There is literally nothing beneficial about this habit – except that I derive occasional joy from the rare parent that shows true, unbridled joy at the result. Okay, and usually only if that unbridled joy is coming from the male parent, and in response to a pink result. These videos are fascinating, though. There are a bunch that feature the same bearded guy, who must run some sort of company that offers and records these sorts of reveals. There are a bunch where the timing is off. There are a bunch where the couple have other children, some of whom seem very disaffected by the whole event. 

The worst – and most fascinating – ones are the ones where one parent is CLEARLY disappointed by the result. I am not faulting someone for being disappointed: when I was pregnant, I was SURE I was having a boy, and I pictured a tiny blond copy of my husband. I got very attached to this fantasy. When we found out that Carla was a girl, I was disappointed. I hope you know that not a single cell of my body is disappointed NOW, now that Carla is a real wonderful human and it has become clear to me that everything I love about her is completely unrelated to her sex. But I get the disappointment. What I find perplexing is recording that disappointment and then posting it for the world to see. Perplexing and fascinating.  

Anyway. That is how I have been wasting far too many minutes of my one wild and precious life lately. I blame spring break. 

Now it’s your turn. Please weigh in.