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Tag: expectations

Keeping the minions occupied…

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Is always a far more challenging task than anybody thinks it will be. You have to keep a balance in mind. If you go and do too many wild, crazy, zany expensive things up front the kids’ll expect that to continue through all nine weeks. So you gotta give them a lull, some down time in order to be feet in the air up a wall off their beds bored, and then pepper in a swim, a farm visit, a zoo trip, Wonderland visit, a movie in a proper theater, a play date with friends. Sounds mean, but if you do it all up front you get nothing but grief for the rest of the summer break. Eek out the extraordinary fun at a manageable pace. Keep the expectations for a typical day on a level you can handle. Will we go wake boarding, yes. But not so much that it becomes blasé. Just like cottage visits, beach visits, going to the gemstone mine, or visiting a national park. Go do it, but not with the expectation that this is an everyday occurence. That’s the gist of it.

Plus, he says, go read a book. Play with your toys, draw something, paint a picture, play in the back yard, ride your bikes, bounce a basketball, practice your serve and volley technique with a volley ball. Run some soccer drills, play catch, use your scooters, play a video game, watch one of the thousand movies we own. There is no shortage of things to do here at the house without also needing to drop serious coin on extraordinary outings. Go read!, especially go read. Between the four of us we own a libraries worth of texts. Fiction, science fiction, historical, romance, fantasy, horror, suspense, thriller, crime, sports related, space exploration, theocracy, communism, business admin, weather and geology, geography. Our interests are wide and varied. Humour, illustrated, technical manuals, wood working, you name it we have it or something adjacent to it by one or two steps.

Also, I think today is Tuesday. Only the second week in and losing track of time. Very peculiar sense to not know where you are in a given week. Calendars are your friends! Sleep in, stay up late, forget what day it is. What am I, fourteen again?

Reading old American Classics…

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And I could tell within a sentence or two that the me in my youth made the correct call in high school to read the Ancient Classics like Homer, the Iliad and The Oddessy, and 1984, and Animal Farm, plus a few others, rather than tackle the American Classics in Lit. That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying it now, but sixteen, seventeen year old me would have HATED every single apostrophied guttural spliced second word in The Grapes of Wrath, and it’s timely ilk. I hated eubonics, pigeon english, and phonetically written spoken dialogue (that was a mouthful). I know it adds authenticity to the speaker, and the times, but what a puddle mouthed bunch of folks they were huh, makes for disjointed reading. Doesn’t bother me much now, I get where Boomhauer was coming from, but as a hearing impaired youth, it had to come to my head clear as a bell or else I would just nod and smile and carry on regardless of what was said. Probably why people thought I was aloof, and kind of an asshole. Sorry love, just couldn’t hear you or make heads nor tails of what you were jabbering on about. Thank god for texting and e-mail. What a godsend that all is. Woah! Yeah buddy.

Once I make it through GoW, I think I’ll give Moby Dick or War & Peace a try. I don’t typically read anything that depressing, but I’ve written a number of sad, depressed short stories in my time. Maybe now I will have the life experiences to be able to appreciate the depth of the work. Or I’ll hate it, and that’s $30 in the toilet. Oh well. Not every piece of literature is for everyone. Know what I mean. Given the times, maybe I should read A Hand Maids Tale. Seems to be on point for the state of the US currently. Or I could try Gone With The Wind? I’m sure there are plenty of semi current literary classics that I’ve missed to choose from.

Today is Tuesday, if I have any sense of time left. Next week we really need to shift our sleeping patterns back to the day shift so we can all wake up and eat before school starts. These first two weeks of school are bad for early mornings. We either have happy kids, or get to school on time. Rarely do I get both in early September. Dressed, eaten, hair done, and teeth brushed. Tall order after nine weeks of zero expectations of that happening before 8:00am. I guess if the kids did day camp the whole summer then they’d maintain that schedule and wouldn’t (potentially) fight it come the first days of the new school year.