How I Keep from Going Crazy all Summer (A Half-Assed Plan)

You count down the days. You may even have a paper chain or a calendar to cross off. You fill up water balloons and super-soakers to meet the bus. You plan a bar-b-cue at the neighborhood pool with popsicles and icees and it's like one big town-wide party for everyone with school-age kids.

No more poster board projects your kid remembers at 10:37p.m. the night before it's due! No more mountains of papers requiring your signature that you sign away hoping that none of them gave over the deed to your house! No more convoluted list of "90s day" and "sports day" and "wear blue for whale/earth/clean-water-for-all day" because, God forbid, your kid wears green (unless it's St. Patrick's Day and then your kid had BETTER wear green or he will get PINCHED. And, also, make sure your kid knows that pinching is sometimes called assault and if he does so you will be called to come get him from school.)  Hooray for SUMMER!

And then you're slammed upside the head with the reality that your kids no longer have an exhausting 8 hours of school to attend that will mellow them into normal(ish) people and you are solely responsible for finding SOMETHING, for Pete's sake, ANYthing to do all day long.

For two months. Two WHOLE months. That's the same amount of time you spent feeding the little buggers every 2 hours at the beginning of their lives and you knew at the time it would NEVER END and you would always be tired. And it did end, but you were right about the tired part.

How can summer be so much fun and also make you want to send your kids to boarding school?

As the daughter of teachers and, eventually, as a teacher myself, I have spent my entire life counting down the days to summer. By the time I quit teaching, I had school age children myself and so the counting has never stopped.

When summer finally came during my teaching years, I wanted to lie in bed until 10 and then do all the household projects that I never had time to do for the other 10 months of the year. And I did do that for the first several years.

But then I had kids and they kept waking up at 6:30 and expecting to be "fed" and asking "what are we going to do today?" That's when I realized that I had to actually come up with something to do today.

During school, kids don't have much free time and they are, therefore, obsessed with the "plan" for each day. I found myself rather exasperatedly yelling "the PLAN is to finish your laundry, make a grocery list, and pick up the dry cleaning! What do you people want from me?"

Clearly, they wanted a plan and I did not really want to make one all that much.

Which is unfortunate. There are the weeks when the kids have various day camps or we go on vacation for a couple of weeks and there will be some time spending the night at grandparent's houses, but the rest of the days are up to me and I need to make the all-important plan.

Here is where, if you want some really cute craft ideas or an adorable calendar, you should go to Pinterest. There are wonderful tutorials on all sorts of crafts and creative games. You will not find that here, because my plan is not like that. My plan is half-assed and it goes like this:

I make a check-list. Each kid has to complete their check-list every day. That's it. That's the whole plan.

Each kid's check-list has the following items:

• School Time
• Clean Something
• Go Outside
• Read Something
• Creative Time
• Help the Family Team
• See Someone Else
• Make Your Bed
• Exercise

And I don't even tell them what the specific activities are. Bwa-ah-ah! It is evil parenting genius.

See, I don't like being told what to do even if I am the one making the assignment. So if I plan our weeks out hour by hour I am just as likely to rebel against our detailed plans as the children are. I don't like to be pinned down to one particularly activity or itinerary days and weeks ahead of time. I am fully aware of how immature that is, but so what, you're not the boss of me and I don't care what you think!

So I made a check list. If we go swimming with some friends at the YMCA pool we can check off Outside, See Someone, AND Exercise! If a kid can't think of anything to do they can clean something. I get to vasssilate between Benevolent Dictator and Best Mom Ever and the children stop asking me what we're doing next.

I say it's reading time--I'm the Benevolent Dictator!
We take a surprise trip to get frozen yogurt--Best Mom Ever!

Really, the children just want to know that there are some rules and some sense of direction when there is no school. I do actually buy workbooks for them to work through and make them do the work regularly enough that they know how and when to do them during School Time. I give them cleaning tasks they can accomplish without me--laundry, sweeping, dishes, etc.

Creative time means we spend some time making art or music of some sort. I have a craft box that I put on the kitchen table and tell them to go nuts. Or we have a dance party. It depends on whether or not I want to sweep the kitchen again.

I have found that if I try to implement too strict of a schedule that it falls apart because there are so many odd days--visits with friends or trips to see family or a late night out all mess up any plan I may have. My creativity also peters out as the summer wears on and our activities become a lot less exciting--what was Water Olympics in June becomes "getting hosed down before you're let inside the house" by the end of July.

So the checklists work for us--some structure, but a LOT of freedom. And if for some reason, I don't make them wipe down a bathroom, they are just happy they didn't have to clean (Benevolent Dictator strikes again).

Happy Summer!

Love,
Sally the Benevolent Dictator (aka Best Mom Ever)

Best Mom Tip #191: Don't buy groceries??!!

My beautiful friend Clare and her family of 5 have committed to living for a year without purchasing groceries. Yes, you read that right--and if you want to see what she has to say about the experience you can read her own lovely words about what they're learning here.

I read her article and was floored. How could a family of five really just live off of local, in-season foods that they traded or grew? I mean, I guess it's a possibility, but it seems so hard. How would I get pasta? Or chocolate?! For heaven's sake, think of the chocolate. So to satisfy my curiosity... I went to go see Clare.

Clare feeding our kids lunch

I totally just contacted this woman I have not seen for 10 years and asked her if my kids and I could come stare at her beautiful house and rich garden and learn from her.  Because she is Clare, she said yes.  And (because she is Clare) I knew she would say yes when I asked, so I think that makes me doubly evil.  

When we were back at the University of Georgia, where I met Clare some 20 years ago, I was jealous of how easily she seemed to march to her own drum. While I was buying XL twin sheets at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for my dorm-tastic bed, Clare was purchasing the most beautifully crafted bed made of logs that looked as though it was growing out of a living tree. I had a room with a hot plate and some Christmas lights my roommate and I taped to the wall.  Clare had a room decorated with fairy lights and nature.

So imagine how happy I was to see Clare, still dancing to her own tune, truly living out a life that is different from those around her.

The logistics of what they're trying to do are pretty interesting.  They bought some staples in bulk back in December before they started.  The idea was to live more like the pioneers Clare's son Jack had been reading about than to totally take themselves off the grid.  Community and leaning on your neighbors is actually one of the things they like most about this experiment.  They buy toilet paper and other necessities (that's for you, Allison) when they need them.  They go get medicine from the pharmacy. And Clare said that when they all caught a stomach bug they broke down and bought some real tea because they couldn't keep anything else down.

Most of us would have a much harder time committing to this lifestyle, even for a year, than Clare's family. They already owned chickens (which she slaughters for meat in addition to using the eggs) and sheep and her husband hunts.  They already had a pretty big garden that they are looking to expand--and living in the South doesn't hurt because there's such a long growing season.  These are people who built their brick home with their own hands and have carved a life out of a pretty rural area that would not go over so well in suburbia.

Don't get me wrong, they are definitely feeling the bite of this commitment.  Clare said that not eating out was one of the hardest changes.  She said she constantly just swung by Chick-fil-A before they started this. And she's not happy with the bread she makes so she tries to buy from a sweet lady whose lemon -poppy seed bread I got to taste for lunch (and it was delicious).  I learned a lot about some different ways to approach food in my own household (even though we will still be going to the grocery store). Things like, not every meal needs to be so hardy or we don't always need meat.  I'm also seriously reconsidering what I consider to be a snack.

Mostly, though, it was just really good to see Clare.  We talked almost constantly for 4 hours while our kids ran around and played toys.  My boys thought her boys' army men were amazing.  My daughter played dress-up with her daughter.  We picked blueberries in a rain shower while little children danced and giggled and I thought, "Yep, this seems about like how an afternoon spent with Clare should go."

My Jack trying to catch chickens

I thought that I was making my little trek to learn about her food experiment, but what I really learned was about freedom.  Clare said she feels kind of like a fraud for the attention she's getting about this year.  She said that there are people who really live this without it being for fun and it was surprising how much attention she's getting.  It makes her feel uncomfortable--as though she shouldn't be the face of providing your own food.  I asked Clare if she ever doubted herself--living so differently from most people. Do you ever worry that you're not doing it right or that you're swimming too hard against the stream?

Her answer was "Really, only when I look at Facebook or something and I see how everyone else is doing it." How funny is that?  This amazing woman in the middle of her own land, baking her own bread with wheat she ground herself, with her self-made home and her kids who build their own playhouses worries that she doesn't put her son in Little League.  At the same time, she worries that she isn't hard core enough to really be considered a homesteading expert.  It was an epiphany for me.

It was like when my teeny-tiny friend couldn't fit back into her pre-pregnancy clothes after the baby and I thought "oh, even if you're really skinny it still hurts if your old stuff won't fit."

Even if you're living an interesting life outside the box, you still worry that it might not be the best for your kids.  You still worry that you're not doing enough--whatever enough might be for your life and your community.

We had a great time.  I am inspired to try to grow some food that we actually eat and so I will be creating a small garden in my back yard over the next couple of weeks (I'll let you know how it goes).  I'm going to ask my neighbor for help because her garden is awesome and I loved what Clare said about connecting with their community in such a meaningful way. But mostly, I am going to try to live with more freedom.

Our afternoon with Clare showed me that I worry about things unnecessarily (although I'm still not going to let my son Harry have access to a lighter like Clare's son Jack does.  He will burn down something and it will NOT be an accident.)  I realized that all the moms I know are probably wrestling with the same fears--is this the right path for my family and my kids? and how am I viewed by the outside world?  What could we do or be or change if we let go of these two questions?

So, thanks Clare.  Thank you for lunch (especially that goat cheese--it was the best I've ever had) and for the afternoon.  Thank you for blueberry picking and the dry clothes while ours were in the dryer (yes, she has a washer and dryer). Thank you for talking about the difficulties of smart women without careers and of working parents gone from home too long.  Thank you for the strings recital from Jack and Esme and for letting my kids roam all over your house. Thank you for reminding me that it's worth trying to swim upstream because nothing feels freer, or more beautiful, than a life you've chosen yourself. Thank you.