Summer Longing

"Mom, I'm ready to be done with school. I want it to be summer. When I'm at school I miss you. Summer and the weekend are the only times that I feel like I'm living."

Peter shared these thoughts with me one day last week. I admit, I agree with him. The school day feels so long and then homework and chores seem to take forever. We just had our first really beautiful week and we spent most of it at home, doing homework or cleaning something. I would love to be the mom that says, "Today we're not doing any chores! We're just going to play!"

But I can't.

If I do that once Peter will bring it up everyday and insist that it's our new normal. He'll say, You let us not do our chores last Thursday, so I think you should let us skip them again. And I'll say no. And I'll tell him that until he graduates from law school and has passed the bar he needs to stop lawyering me.

So instead we stick to the "work first, then play" routine. Our day would be so much happier if we just went to the park, or if we came home and played video games. Sure, our house would be a disaster and the boys would never get their homework done, but we probably wouldn't have as many tantrums and timeouts.

Here's the thing though, I'm looking at this whole mom-game long term. I want these kids to have a happy childhood, but I also want them to someday be functional adults who can take care of themselves. Last night at dinner Phoebe and Cooper had a conversation about which rooms in the house they were capable of cleaning. You know what? Except for the kitchen and the bathrooms (and only those because I haven't taken the time to teach them how yet), they could clean most of it. Yes, they might need direction on where to put things away, and they definitely need encouragement and pep talks, but they can do the bulk of the job on their own.

And so we continue to do homework and chores. We keep on working before playing. And we all look forward to the summer when we can fulfill our responsibilities and still have time to lay around reading books or going to the park or the library or the pool if that's how we want to spend our time. And someday they will tell me that they're so glad they learned how to work hard.

I hope.