Kiddo leaves for sleep-away summer camp at the great Camp Highlander in North Carolina in T -minus 18 days. To add insult to injury, she will be leaving to visit with her paternal grandparents for the week preceding summer camp.
So, this is what the next few weeks look like: June 9th is the last day of school. June 12, kiddo leaves to go visit her grandparents. June 18, child returns home. June 20th, child goes to summer camp.
We do not have a lot of time to get ready for her departure. Packing, packing, packing…So far, I have bought all of her toiletries, two new swim suits (not without drama), a pair of sweats ( involving more pre-teen drama) and a small personal fan (for her bunk). Now, of course I know that she must have plenty of summer-camp appropriate clothing. Will she look through her dresser drawers and tell me what she has? Of course not. Can I look through and ascertain what she will wear and what she would rather be caught dead than wearing? Nope. Not a chance. She’ll be gone for four weeks. That’s a long time. She needs play clothes, sort-of dress up clothes for themed nights, looking-cool clothes for “do-your-own-thing” social time…etc. I can’t just pack her up myself because I will get that inevitable call on her third day that she has nothing to wear.
So, 18 days isn’t a lot to work with. Especially since all of her thoughts right now are consumed with school finals and the 3oh!3 concert she is attending on June 8th. Oh, but she already has an outfit picked out for that. Of course.
My real problem right now is not my apparent lack of pre-camp planning, but rather, the reality is slowing sinking in that she is going to be gone for almost the entire summer! I have 2 days with her after school gets out before she leaves for grandma’s. Then I have 1 day with her once she gets home, before she leaves for summer camp. Once she returns from summer camp, I have 13 days until she leaves to visit her aunt and cousins in Georgia for probably 2 weeks. Then she comes home and has about a week before school starts. Yeah, what’s the problem with this? You might be asking yourself as you read this with envy. The problem with this is that I just quit my job to stay home and spend more time with my daughter. And now I’m going to be sitting around the house for practically the entire summer – alone.
What will I do with my time? I have been out of work for about eight weeks now. I have been busy 
almost every single day of that eight weeks. I get up each morning and make my daughter breakfast. I take her to the school bus stop and wait with her until the bus comes. Then I have about eight hours until I pick her back up from the bus stop. Unlike being at a job, working all day, eight hours at home FLIES by in no time at all. Between the showering, dog-walking, laundry, dishes, grocery shopping, cooking, dusting, home remodeling (oh, yeah, I am doing a million little projects around the house we just bought a year ago), before I know it, sometimes I have to run out the door to go pick her up. Time flies when you’re having fun – it really does. I bought a new book a few weeks ago, “The Geography of Bliss” and have only made it about a third of the way through the book. And, honestly, that was all read during last week when we had amazingly beautiful sunny days and I snuck outside for an entire hour each day to read and work on my tan.
Where was I? Oh yeah, weeks upon weeks of summer isolation. Maybe I’ll get a part-time job to keep me occupied? Maybe I’ll repaint the entire house. Maybe I’ll scrapbook the last nine years worth of photos I have downloaded on Shutterfly. I think it might be neat to get a part time job. Maybe at someplace fun, like Old Navy.
Or maybe not. Maybe I will actually do what I’ve been putting off doing since I quit my job. Maybe I will write my novel.
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