And parents everywhere rejoice…

And parents everywhere rejoice…

A scant two months ago I penned a sampling of stories from our school days that made me desperate for summer break. Now that I've endured that very thing, I'm so glad-so thrilled, so delighted, so ecstatic-to conclude summer break. First off, my grocery bill nearly quadrupled during summer break. “Why?” you ask, and that is a very good question, as we eat all meals at home all year long and eat all the time.

All. The. Time.

Those lucky preteens and their puissant metabolism.

Can someone get me that for Christmas? And a carrot cake? Well, during the summer break, I followed a very loose schedule, leaving the kids (and their friends) free to graze all day long.

Which they did. On fruit, cheese, and nuts. (A.k.a. $$$, Cha-Ching, and “an arm and a leg.”) It's difficult for me to tell them to stop noshing on such healthy food.

But now that school's back in session, I'm setting up a dryerase menu board that tells them exactly what they can eat and when. Seven days a week.

When I returned home from my weekly shopping trip this morning, my eighth-grader inquired as to the cost. When I told her, she responded with surprised, “Oooh, good job, Mom!”

It only felt good for a moment, for I promptly spent my savings on school supplies… and a dry-erase menu

board. The second reason I'm glad to start our school schedule is that the kids need supervised occupation.

I admit, I fill my summer days with fluffy reading, finishing an entire cup of coffee uninterrupted, projects, and other me-time, leaving large gaps of time where my children are, shall we say, “relatively supervised.”

This explains why one day, I asked my very competent and capable girls to mop the kitchen floor. An hour later, I double-taked when I moseyed past the kitchen, catching a stultifying sight out of the corner of my eye.

The girls, giving free reign to their every whigmaleerie, poured a generous amount of Dawn dish soap straight on the wood floor and then doused it with water from the gooseneck kitchen faucet.

The whole floor!

They then donned bathing suits and created an indoor slip-n-slide, zooming down the well-slicked galley like giddy sea lions on a glacier.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

This incident both horrified and amused me: horrified because Quality Flooring is already on call to repair unrelated water damage, and amused because it reminded me of a very similar incident I helmed as a child.

When I was in grade-school, my brother and I had a hankering for a pool. So we squirreled ourselves away in my parents' bathroom, clad in swimming attire. We fastidiously stuffed towels under the doorframe and down the drains, foolishly expecting a watertight seal.

Then we turned all three faucets on full-blast.

I think when my parents discovered us splashing contentedly in the small pool we'd managed to create in the bathroom, their bedroom was under a few inches of water.

“The Marion Mom” By Dorothy Wilson It wasn't long until they acquired a pool membership for us.

In fact, thinking about it, I may alone be to blame for this, as I have often recounted this childhood memory to my children, and perhaps I leaned a little too hard on the child's fun perspective and not enough on the parents' perspective of hardship, damage, and repair costs.

I also often tell the story of my cousin who wanted to play hairdresser with me in the fifth grade. She pulled her mother's mousse out of her travel bag and glopped giant handfuls into my shoulderlength brown hair. I objected, because the can distinctly said, “Hair-removing mousse.” But because she clearly had the hairdressing experience, I allowed her to brush and style my hair, until at length, it began dropping off my head with each stroke, the thick, wet strings hanging off the brush like spaghetti.

I said, “I'm uncomfortable with this,” and logically, I added, “So let me do yours!”

There we were, applying Nair hair-removing mousse to our rapidly balding heads, when Aunt Mary checked in on us, to her horror. She marched us to the shower amidst threats of withholding Christmas gifts from little bald girls.

When I tell my children this story, I call us “morons.” Or maybe “idiots.”

So you can imagine my shock when my daughter of roughly the same age and intelligence as I was in the Nair story, relates to me that she gave her sister a massage with body lotion she acquired out of my bathroom.

Yes, it was lotion, and not mousse, but the label still said, “Nair. Hair-removing lotion.”

She completed the massage with liberal doses of Nairwithout even realizing what she had done.

She disclosed the details to me the next day, and I heartily chuckled, thinking it a prank.

The confusion on her face quickly translated into astoundment on mine.

“Did you really use Nair?” I asked, unbelieving.

“Yes,” she responded, matterof- factly. “Why?”

“Nair?” I repeated, hoping to trigger her memory.

“Ye-e-es,” she repeated, more hesitantly.

“Remember the story I tell about my cousin using hairremoving mousse to style my hair? That's Nair,” I practically yelled.

The child laughed.

“Whoops,” she said. “At least it was her back and not her head. I did her a favor.”

Despite my attempts to inculcate common sense, I think the lesson was lost.

Finally, I'm glad to start school because-wait for it-I love teaching. I created desk cubbies for the kids this year by dividing a dining table with a double-sided hutch.

Of course, I had to build the hutch, because it's not a product in high demand. Most people use dining tables for, um, dining.

After my husband and I completed the eight-hour project, my brother, who is a carpenter by trade, inspected it.

“It's not professional quality,” he snubbed. “But it'll do.” Durned right, it'll do. What more does a student need than a plain shelf full of enticing books, a lamp, and a pencil cup?

Maybe some dish soap and Nair?

Let's hope not. Not 'til next summer at least.

Dorothy Wilson lives in Marion with her husband Chris as they enjoy all the adventures their six children provide.