Poem: Beautiful Bird

Beautiful Bird

Beautiful bird

All red and gray

Taking a shower

On a hot summer day

Spreading your wings

You take to the air

How I wish my life so fair

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If you are bored…

Said every mom at some point in the summer months. Kids on vacation from school means kids that get bored. Often more chores are heaped on or they are sent out to play so they don’t make their parents psychotic. But sometimes we turn to crafts…

A long time ago we found these at the dollar store. Discovery Digging In. A small block of supposed sandstone hiding a treasure for your intrepid young archaeologist to discover!

I thought this would be great for my autistic son, because he loves digging for treasure.

Ummm, yeah, right.

After working away for a while and asking for help repeatedly because motor skills and strength were not cooperating, we got a bit of the treasure uncovered.

We were both covered in the most powdery nasty substance known to man and that I’m sure was designed to suck all the moisture out of any bit of skin it touches. He got bored and started playing with other toys.

After 20 minutes of, “Are you going to finish digging for treasure?”

“Yeah, mom, help!” Over and over again. I finally gave in and finished breaking the little toy loose.

All that hoopla for this tiny little warrior.

So basically, the lesson learned is…if they are bored don’t give them something that will make more work for you because they’ll still get bored and you and up with a mess on  your hands.

Ah well, I tried.

So what happened to summer vacation?

Yes, it is only June. I realize some schools aren’t even out yet. Ours ended on May 30th. At least I thought it did.
Then I looked at the calendar. Days are filling up with school stuff pretty fast. Extended school year with speech therapy for my son, volleyball fundraisers for camps, camps for said volleyball, driver’s ed, gym sessions, and various other activities my kids are involved in are scrawled all over the calendar already into July!
What happened?
When I was a kid, school STOPPED when it ended and didn’t start again until about a week before the official first day of school when sports practice started. We never had this much going on during the summer. Summer was when you got to actually be a kid and enjoy yourself.
If we are going to have so much going on for the kids during the summer why do we bother ending school? If we are trying to keep them out of trouble why not just have school year around with a couple of breaks here and there. It would be a lot easier than trying to organize child care around all the craziness.
I would imagine the teachers would like a break but they don’t get it because they are still at school doing all the extra summer stuff.
I just really don’t understand this arrangement at all. Anyone care to explain?