This is the first day of The Boy’s summer vacation,  so by all rights things should be hectic – no schedule, two kids instead of one, and so on but this has been a lovely morning so far.

Sure, the kids are entertaining themselves with a computer game, so that’s something, but my peaceful morning has little or nothing to do with that.  It has to do with the fact that I could pretty much set my own pace for the day, and I have gotten a ton of stuff done already and it’s only 9:15.

I am soooooo not a morning person, but one way for me to conquer that is to get up and get going, doing a bunch of mindless but necessary task before I get my breakfast and then sit down with a bagel and tea and do some reading or writing.

I can’t do that on school days, unless I get up at 6 and that’s not happening.  A school day schedule means either that the boys wake me at an ungodly hour in a  bad mood, or that we all get up an hour or so before we leave for school,  we get breakfast, get ourselves dressed,  get teeth brushed, hustle and bustle our way to walk to school (or drive if it is really raining out) and then me and TLG come back to the house by 9.  By 9 I’m fully awake, and it’s too late for the mindless housekeeping/organizing tasks but they need to be done anyway so I’m puttering through them, feeling like I should be playing with TLG and he interrupts the flow of my tasks constantly so they take way longer than they should.  And then I settle into playing with him but he is usually desperate to play a video game by that point and then blah de blah it’s time to make lunch,  after lunch it is only an hour and a half before it’s time to pick up the boy, and so on and so on (no need to bore you with all of the details – too late!).  My day is all chopped up into bits by the school schedule and The Man’s lunch schedule, and homework and it’s so far from the natural work rhythm of my brain that I feel like I am swimming upstream all the time (and unlike the proverbial salmon, I don’t get a reward for my efforts).

But in summer I can move closer to my own rhythm, finding ways to entertain the boys first thing in the morning so I can get the shitwork out of the way and then match our activities to my brain.  It doesn’t ALWAYS  work, but it works often enough for me.