The Perfect Summer

Newsletter 2023-07-16

School starts in two and a half weeks. That sound you just heard was my kids screaming in the distance. I don’t even have to say the words. Even typing them silently in another room is enough to send them into a panic. Truthfully, most of my kids like school, or at least grudgingly tolerate it. It’s a chance for them to reconnect with their friends, learn, and, most importantly, get away from me. Still, if given a choice, they’d rather make summer last forever. They’ve utilized this break more than any other to take advantage of their favorite hobbies, gluttony and sloth. That’s a compliment, not a criticism. They’re doing summer break much better than I ever did and pulling off a lifestyle I won’t be able to attain until I’m retired—and maybe not even then. They’ve found true happiness by moving and doing as little as possible. We all have so much to learn from them.

I work a hybrid schedule with some days each week at home and some in the office. At the start of the summer, I assumed the days at home would be a disaster. When you’re a pessimist, it’s always safe to expect the expected. Contrary to my well-founded fears, my days in the house have been peaceful and productive, mainly because I seldom see my kids before noon. My children bucked the trend of sleeping in on school mornings and waking up at the crack of dawn on breaks and weekends—or so I thought. Then I discovered what was really going on. When I took away my seven-year-old’s phone one night because of some random act of evil (seriously, you can’t expect me to remember them all), she complained that she needed her phone as an alarm. She set it for 6:30 every morning. Keep in mind that there was nothing on her schedule for the next two weeks. She could have hibernated for the rest of the summer without missing a single engagement. It turns out that she wakes up early, then stays in bed watching YouTube and playing games on her phone. That’s why I don’t see any of the kids before lunch. They’re awake but quietly entertaining themselves. It’s the ideal scenario. The fighting doesn’t start until they leave their beds and have to interact with each other in any way, no matter how minor. They have yet to figure out how to brush their teeth without it escalating to a screaming match. I realize there are parents who view screen time as the greatest threat to society, but I have the opposite opinion. Screen time is a peacekeeping force more powerful than the UN and should be mandated before resorting to alternative approaches like family therapy. Screens have brought more tranquility to my house than philosophy, sociology, and religion combined. I don’t think YouTube is ruining civilization; I think it deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

Not all my kids wake up bright and early. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, is legitimately asleep until almost noon. I can’t blame her. She’s going through her biggest growth spurt since she was a newborn. I recently saw side-by-side pictures of her from cross country last fall and track this spring. In the span of six months, she went from a miniature version of my wife Lola to her full-size doppelganger. If Betsy stole her mom’s ID, she could probably buy beer. I can’t imagine achieving adulthood in half a year. I’m thirty-eight and I’m still not there. That level of transformation sounds exhausting. I’ll let Betsy sleep as long as she wants on any non-school day. As an added bonus, when she’s in bed, she can’t rile up her sisters. Whenever I’m not home, she’s in charge. With great power comes great antagonism. I’ve tried to get her to stop picking at her siblings, but, as the oldest of seven children, I did exactly the same thing when I was in her position. Most of adulthood is just karma punishing me for all the stuff I did as a kid. I hate living in a just and fair universe.

When the girls finally venture downstairs halfway through the day, their first act is usually to grab a bowl of cereal. That’s a problem if it’s time for lunch. I’m a strong advocate that cereal is an all-day food, but I also believe it can’t be your entire diet. That’s probably been disproven by some NASA experiment where a volunteer was locked in a pressure chamber with nothing but Cocoa Puffs for six months. If any other researchers are looking for subjects for extended cereal isolation tests, I can clear my schedule. Regardless of what the science says, in this house, we also eat from other food groups. Not that the other stuff I feed the kids is much healthier. Their favorite entrees are pizza rolls, taquitos, and ramen. Their perfect meal is basically how I ate as an impoverished newspaper reporter straight out of college. They’re well prepared for the real world.

By early afternoon, the kids are sometimes ready to leave the house. It takes a lot to get them out the door. They can’t be tempted by anything less than an inground pool. When Lola and I took the kids on a grand tour of all the museums in Minneapolis, the girls asked again and again to simply hang out at my aunt’s house and play in her pool. The wonders of the natural universe can’t compare with having your thirty-fifth splash battle of the day. Swimming outdoors also gives them a chance to cover themselves in all sorts of fun chemicals. They’ve been constantly doused in a protective layer of bug spray and sunscreen all summer. Simple aerosol cans can defend them against malaria and the sun itself. What’s not to like? Perhaps the vague chemical odor they’re covered with in between baths. The most dangerous question to ask in this house is, “When did you last take a shower?” At least the lingering scent of chlorine keeps them from growing algae.

Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi on Unsplash

My kids go from total sedentariness to extreme activity with nothing in between. Those wild swings cause wild hunger. Sometimes, cereal and starvation college foods won’t cut it. That’s when my children turn to their other summer specialty: candy. We have quite a stockpile left after our week-long trip to the upper Midwest. We basically bought out the grocery store’s entire junk food aisle since everyone knows road trip calories don’t count. At home or at work, I can easily wait hours before eating, but when traveling, if I go more than five minutes without a bag of M&Ms, I’ll die like a hummingbird who can’t find nectar. My kids are the same way. They asked for the first snacks of the trip before we left our parking spot in front of our house. We stocked up so thoroughly for that expedition that even our ravenous horde couldn’t eat through all the goodies in a single week. Now all that gloriously awful food is sitting at home. On our way north, we stopped at a store attached to a gummy worm factory and bought twenty pounds of goof-ups. They’re the same gummy worms as in the full-price packages, but stuck together in clusters, which is just a bonus. I was going to eat them by the handful anyway. If I let them, my kids would live on those gummies until they ran out. In terms of sugar content, it’s probably no worse than Lucky Charms. Toss in a glass of milk and they’re a balanced breakfast.

My children’s lives aren’t totally carefree over the summer. Each day, they have approximately one chore to complete between the four of them. This single, simple task causes them more consternation than you can possibly imagine. Actually, if you have a kid, have met a kid, or have seen one from a great distance, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Each morning before she leaves for work, Lola writes down what she wants the kids to do. That way there’s an indisputable record of what she requested. The kids read this list and promptly ignore it until about twenty minutes before the end of the work day. That’s when panic sets in. If they teamed up, it would take practically no time at all to vacuum three rooms. Instead, they work in exact opposition to each other. Anything worth doing is worth doing while in active combat. They spend exponentially more time arguing about who has to do what than it would take for any one of them to just do it all themselves. When I get home, the chore still isn’t done. That’s when I put on my motivational speaker hat and inspire them all to finish the job, by which I mean I threaten them and unite them all against me, their common enemy. Then I leave for the gym. By the time I get back, the job that should have originally taken five minutes but is now on hour number three is finally complete. I’d say I was just as bad as my kids at their age, but my mom didn’t even assign my siblings and I to do chores. She got far fewer migraines by doing them all herself. Once again, the behavior of my children today is a divine punishment for all of my past wrongs. This whole cosmic vengeance thing is getting old.

Now, in the closing days of summer, the chores are taking on a more sinister tone. The jobs Lola writes down for the kids in the morning include gathering school supplies from our unending stockpile in the attic. We have enough pens, pencils, and loose leaf notebook paper to equip an entire school district. That’s what happens when you hit the clearance rack out of season. The girls grab what they need, but they don’t have to take as much as kids used to. The majority of their homework is done electronically these days on school-supplied tablets and laptops. Back in my day, computers were confined to a single room in the school, which also happened to be the only one with air conditioning. I didn’t care how many times I died on the Oregon Trail as long as I wasn’t sweating to death in real life. Now, computers are as ubiquitous as trapper keepers and pink erasers. I wish I could have typed out my answers on a computer rather than doing them in pen. No one could read my handwriting. Then again, maybe my illegible answers were the only thing that saved me. If my teachers knew what I was actually trying to say, I never would have passed kindergarten.

The kids would make this summer last forever if they could, but they’re also looking forward to reconnecting with their classmates. The reunions won’t be as dramatic as in the old, pre-cell phone days. My children use their devices to stay in touch with all the friends they actually care about. I do the same thing with my old classmates. My twentieth high school reunion is coming up, and I expect it to hold exactly zero surprises. The two types of people I keep up with on Facebook are the ones I care about and the ones I want to see fail from a distance. I may or may not have toasted to someone’s third divorce. My kids are much less motivated by schadenfreude. Each of them has nine best friends, and they’ve been texting and video calling daily with all of them. The start of the school year will give them a chance to finally hang out in person. Yes, they’ll have to give up their perfect lifestyle of gluttony and sloth, but the additional human contact will be worth it. As for me, I’ll spend the rest of my life pondering how my kids managed to do so little and so much at the same time. They’ve given me a whole new goal in life.

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My children’s book, You Can’t Be a Pterodactyl, comes out in eight days! That exclamation mark was completely deliberate. You should hear how loud I’m typing. I have a lot riding on the launch of this book, and pre-orders help me out more than you can imagine. Don’t just take my word for it. Check out this ad I made with my kids. If you already saw it on Facebook or Twitter, feel free to watch it again. That loud thud in the middle never gets old.

Check out the story here: THE BOOK. I spent Sunday afternoon signing hundreds of pre-orders. The first ones should be in the mail as we speak. Grab one at the link above before they run out.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James