Our family is now smack dab in the middle of summer vacation. The tempers are as short as the days are long. It reminds me a little bit of cabin fever in the winter, only with more humidity and less hope that the county will rescue us from our kids by sending them back to school early.
Mrs. Nostrikethat bears the worst of it– for reasons I still cannot fathom the kids will stop whatever it is they are doing to go discover her location, or frantically ask me where she went. According to the children Mommy’s location is a closely guarded secret in the same way that the location of their shoes is a secret: both are incomprehensible Mysteries of the Universe that can only be revealed by wandering around the house yelling “Mommy! Mommy!’
Lately the attention seems so intense my wife and I have resorted to engineering improbable escapes like the Penguins of Madagascar.
My favorite strategy for dealing with the Summer Doldrums is to take something fairly ordinary, like running to the grocery store, and turn it into an Adventure, like EXTREME GROCERY STORING!, which is basically a regular grocery store trip except we make monster truck noises while we’re doing it.
My other favorite thing to do is to schedule routine medical visits, because nothing says Summer Vacation like getting your Tetanus boosters before school starts.
A few months ago our 6 year old started telling us that things look fuzzy.When we arrived at the ophthalmologist office I grabbed a clipboard and got to work with the new patient forms.
I did not realize I had struck comedy gold.
What follows is the actual conversation with my 6 year old while filling out the forms.
So… have you experienced any of the following: blurred vision?
“What does that mean?”
It means your vision is blurry.
“Oh. Yes.”
Really? When?
“Like when I look at things through a funny mirror, or if I scrunch my eyes up, or if…”
…For the purposes of these questions, assume this is just you, nothing else. Okay?
“Okay.”
Are you pregnant?
“Whaaat?”
Do you have a baby inside you?
Barely contained six year old giggling.
What about diarrhea?
Uncontrollable giggling
Constipation?
More laughing
Excessive gas?
Laughing so hard he falls off the chair, farts, and laughs some more.
I’ll go with “Yes” for that one.
No, Strike That 
Funny read! Thanks! As a teacher, I can’t help but giggle a little when I hear about parents during the summer. Of course, now I’m a parent. I wonder how teacher-parents do summer vacation?
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Vodka.
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Yes. **slow clap**
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Mommy is, and always will be, the center of the universe. Daddy is just an orbiting planet or sorts that just kind of floats around in the background until some sort of manual labor needs to be done.
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I think it’s more like Mommy is Gravity. No one notices gravity until it’s missing and then all of a sudden it’s like “Holy heck I’m floating away! I need gravity pronto!” Moms were literally connected to their children, sharing flesh and blood- that never goes away. Dads never get that, but in exchange we get to make fart jokes. I call it even.
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I’m not a parent yet, but this is the kind of thing that makes me laugh and terrifies me at the same time.
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So the good news is that the laughing/terrified thing doesn’t change should you decide to become a parent. the bad news… is that the laughing/terrified thing doesn’t change much should you decide to become a parent.
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