Last day of school

Short day of school for the boys today, last day before summer break. Last day for me of time to myself, too. And there are so many things I need to take care of that would be so much easier to do without dragging reluctant kids along for the ride, and yet here I am, procrastinating.

There have been various end-of-school activities and events, and mostly I have dodged them; the guys are getting of an age now where they don't much care if I'm there and I have felt like I don't have the bandwidth to do all the volunteer things that all of the Good Moms and Dads do. Fortunately Paul has been stepping up and doing some of that stuff. He's been going in and playing music with the fifth grade kids every week all year long, and they finished up the school year at the Talent show with a couple of songs they'd been working up for a few weeks. It went about as well as one might guess. :)

One of the things that got to me, though, was seeing how grown-up all of the kids are getting. We have always volunteered with the boys' classes since Kindergarten, helping the kids learn to read and doing math projects and other things like reading books aloud; Paul's been playing music once a week with all of them since 2nd grade, so they all know him really well. He lets them request songs to learn and sing together, and it means that he ends up learning to play some of the pop favorites out now, which the kids sing along to with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Getting them to be enthusiastic is harder to achieve as they get older and more self conscious, of course, so it was cool to see them all singing loudly during the talent show, even if some of them lost track of the lyrics or the melody.

Today is the last, short day of school and when they all come back in the fall they'll be the oldest, the 6th graders, the biggest kids, for their final year at this grade school. They're really ready, though. And they're really ready for a big break. We've signed them up for various summer sports things; Casey will keep up with gymnastics, of course, but he's adding tennis and they both want to try Aikido, so we'll see where that goes. Riley's going to go to high altitude running camp where his long-distance running coach has a cabin in the mountains and holds a long weekend of distance runs and swimming in lakes and more cross country running and games and exhausted sleep and more running. Riley is of course stoked to do all this. We also signed him up to try a hip-hop dance class, since he's game and he's already doing moves all the time.

It'll be busy, certainly, but there will be time for lazing around and playing games and going out to the beach and exploring in the woods and that sort of stuff.

And much to their chagrin, there will be plenty of chores and getting some of the long overdue clean up stuff done, hopefully. Summer never ends up lasting as long as we want or getting all the fun stuff done that we planned, but that's all a part of summer too. We won't get bored. :)