The Impossible Schedule

I was recently shocked to discover the end of the school year is almost here. I hate it when the calendar surprises me by progressing one day at a time in a completely linear fashion. Soon, my kids will be home for the entire summer with nothing to occupy their time. If idle hands are the devil’s playground, I’m raising his slide, teeter-totter, merry-go-round, and jungle gym. Extracurricular activities abhor a vacuum. Recognizing that my kids will soon be free to run amok across the countryside, every group, club, and sport they’re in decided to blast them with one last wave of overscheduling. For the final few days of the academic year, I’m supposed to have each of my kids in three places at once. Even Jedi can’t tri-locate, no matter what the showrunners at Disney try to tell you. Faced with this impossible task, I’ve been doing my best to get my girls to the right place at the right time one-third of the time. To everyone at the activities we missed because we were triple-booked or because I forgot or because I simply didn’t want to go, I offer this blanket apology: Sorry you made the mistake of letting someone from my family into your group. I trust it won’t happen again.

My seven-year-old, Waffle, is also packing in as many activities as she can before the end of school. While she’s too young to join most extracurricular groups, she’s an event all by herself. She looks like a first grader, but really she’s a volcanic eruption in human form. In the past few weeks, I’ve received not one but two calls from the school nurse on her behalf. Just when I thought she’d done everything possible to hurt herself and others, she genuinely surprised me. The first incident happened in the lunchroom.