Don't Blink

I missed May.

I mean, wow. I missed a whole month!

I didn't miss my brother-in-law's birthday, my Dad's birthday, my FIL's birthday. I did laundry, cleaned house, got my car back, paid bills - and yet the time went by without me noticing. Granted, I was unconscious for about a week of May, but still... that was just one week. I'm talking about a MONTH.

The weather here has been very strange. Normally, we've got highs in the mid- to upper-80s and sometimes the 90s. The lows are in the seventies and it's the beginning of the hot and humid season where you wonder if you will ever stop sweating. But the last couple of days have had highs in the 60s, with rain and blustery, non-stop wind. I have loved it!

So I turned on the weather channel, wondering if ZBoy's last baseball game might be cancelled, and they were talking about Florida and rain and showed a satellite shot of the storm system hovering over the state. A big upper level low. With tropical storm speed winds, beach erosion, and comparable rain to a tropical storm.

Tropical storm?

Then I realized - hurricane season starts June 1. And here we are at the 21st of May. School is out at the end of next week.

I am totally unprepared. For hurricane season. For summer vacation.

Hurrican season is relatively easy. Stock up on the basics and be prepared to camp out in our own house for a week or so if necessary. But summer vacation? Another story.

We can't afford camps this summer. Z has gotten to an age when the cost goes up rather dramatically. We might be able to do one, maybe two. But that leaves another 8 weeks to take care of. We might be able to do the tag-team parenting thing. Work is fairly flexible in terms of hours - as long as I show face everyday, I can do much of it at home and put in two or three face hours a day. Darling Man can go in early, I can do afternoons.

That takes care of supervision, but what will we do with him?

1) Let him sleep in as long as he wants. I can do work early in the mornings while he's still sleeping. I can probably get three hours in during that time alone.

2) Feed him a healthy breakfast in preparation for some kind of intense activity. Bike riding, running, dog walking, yard work. Something to get him outside and moving around. We may be resurrecting the pool for one more season, so he can jump in after our activity to cool off.

3) Life lessons. This summer, he will learn to be more self-sufficient. He will learn how to really clean his room so that the dust is controlled, his sheets get changed and washed by him, he can wash his own clothes, cook one meal a week for all of us, and he can learn to clean the bathroom. My future daughter-in-law will thank me for starting his training early so that it's engrained by the time he marries her.

4) Afternoons, when it's stifilingly hot, he can pull the shades and lie down with a good book. Nap if he feels the need. Maybe play video/computer games a few days a week. And of course, there's always swimming if he wants to be active.

That would be HIS summer. How his father and I deal with splitting up the time, getting our work done and the hours put in will be the real challenge. We've done this before and we never saw each other. This year, I want it to be different.

And I've got a little less than two weeks to figure it all out.