Escape From Summer
Written by Jen Friday, 19 June 2009 13:45
Blog
We must quickly escape from the herding groups of teens that gather nightly, cell phones in hand, to eat large quantities of food and plan their next adventure. Sometimes they swiftly enter and exit with nary a word. Other times they linger as their numbers grow until eventually there are 15 such nocturnal creatures texting among the shadows in our back yard. Sometimes they talk, loudly. Always the door slams, loudly.
I can only compare it to Christmas Eve years ago, when our first-grader ended up in the hospital due to what was deemed food-induced anaphylaxis (for him, a reaction to eating peanuts or nuts). Imagine a seven-year-old on steroids on Christmas Eve. That's what summer has felt like so far. Teens pumped up on freedom.
It's time to save our sanity, though we admit it's hanging by one sleep-deprived thread.
We broached the subject to our kids at dinner last night.
"If we can find someplace affordable and arrange four job schedules (unbelievably, two of these offspring have jobs), we just might be able to pull this off," I explained. "We need family time. No friends. No distractions."
"What this means," I elaborated, "is no cell phones, no video games, no electronic devices whatsoever."
Silence.
"Can we at least have a toilet?" asked my son. He's a charmer.
And so the quest for solace beyond home-sweet-home begins, without full cooperation of the children who, at present, prefer to "hang out" with their youthful friends and persistently attempt negotiation of curfew and chores.
Why all the fuss? We old folks want to know. "It's not that we don't like you and Dad or anything," they qualify. "But, well, you know."
Yeah, we do. We nod understandably as we plan our escape.
