Summer madhouse open for business

This is my Sunday column for the June 9, 2013 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

Summer madhouse open for business
By Aaron J. Brown

The time is 6 a.m. One of our boys stands four inches from my wife’s sleeping face. We don’t know how long he has been there. “I’m bored!” he screams into her eyeballs. And so it begins. This is the first day of summer vacation.

I can’t even tell you which boy this is. It might be all of them. And I understand that the proper parent thing to do here would be to send the boys out to rake the yard, or better yet down to the salt mines to sweat this out. But it is early and I forgot to set the timer on the coffee maker.

Instead, we take turns uttering phrases like, “Go gggnnnnughg. Fa sompin do!” It doesn’t really matter what we say. They get to watch mom thrash her way out of bed which is apparently the sort of entertainment they crave. By the time I drag my sorry carcass out of bed the house is swirling with thumping feet and threats of brotherly violence, underscored by the soft ambiance of Spongebob Squarepants. Fruit bar wrappers blow across the floor like tumbleweeds.

We are in the Wild, Wild North.

Throughout the school year — our oldest in second grade, our twins in kindergarten — we watched the boys learn and grow in amazing ways. All the boys are reading now and show great curiosity and humor. So why is it 24 hours into summer vacation the boys start writing their letters backwards and speaking in guttural sounds that predate human language?

It’s almost as if sometime in the night they took a school year’s worth of knowledge, loaded it into a rented truck, drove hours into the night, dug a deep hole somewhere in the Chippewa National Forest, and buried their collective education and social skills under the cover of darkness. Almost. Except that would bely a sort of ambition they seem to lack in all other activities, including the simple act of walking across the living room, a task often punctuated by a boy flopping onto the floor in an exasperated heap.

I say again, this is Week 1. We are signed up for three months of this.

Scanning my own memory, I suppose I can’t compare. I remember being an older child — upper elementary, happy to sleep in and bike down the road to a friend’s house. My memories of the time when I was the same age as my boys now are in snippets. And in nearly all the snippets I am running, sometimes covered in red ants or wasps. I guess that makes sense now.

We questioned whether we should schedule our boys in activities this summer. For a time we weighed the notion that the boys are only kids once, they need freedom to explore the woods and their personal interests at home. But fortunately we had the foresight to sign them up for some activities that start this week. Just half days. Best of both worlds.

Kids need structure. We spend a year adapting them to school and society, so coming back to the deep woods where we live is a challenge. If I were a different sort of person, one who digs trenches or skids trees, I’d have something for them. But my job is to read things and write things down, tasks easily disrupted by … what is that? A stick? Get that out of the house! Right now! (CRASH!)

Next week is a new week. Happy Summer Vacation.

Aaron J. Brown is an author and community college instructor from the Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and hosts the Great Northern Radio Show on Northern Community Radio (kaxe.org). The next program will be at 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 29 at the Reif Center in Grand Rapids. Tickets are free, but reservations recommended by calling the Reif Center at 218-327-5780.

Comments

  1. My favorite summer activity is shipping half of my kids off with Grandma and Grandpa for several weeks.

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