Too Soon For School

We had another beautiful day. The nice thing about July is that if it's a dry month (which this one has been), you can often really beat the heat by doing outside work early in the morning. Today, for instance, we mowed our yard shortly after 7:30. It felt good to get outside and get that done. The grass hadn't grown extremely high, but after two weeks it was looking pretty ragged. So we mowed early, then showered and did our podcasts. We weren't too far behind our normal time frame. We took a walk in the park, made a stop at the grocery store, and enjoyed the Mexican restaurant for lunch. I had a lot of other chores to do, but I'm sure they'll still be here tomorrow!! :)

It's hard to realize that July is nearly half over. For those with kids – hang in there, you're halfway to a new school year and the little darlings getting out of your hair again! For the teachers – hang in there, you'll be fine in the new school year, even if you haven't accomplished everything you intended during summer break and it even though it's almost time for those pre-school meetings to start. For the kids – hang in there, you still have half your summer left – enjoy it!

Many years ago, when I first moved to Oregon, one of my co-workers lived in a year-round school district. At that time, I really hadn't heard of that and didn't realize there were schools that did that. However, this co-worker and his family liked it.......the kids would attend school for three months, then have one month off. This allowed them to have off-season family vacations and do things when prices were cheaper than in the summer and the lines weren't so long. When I became a parent, I thought this sounded like a good way to go – it certainly would end that end-of-summer whining of “I don't have anything to do”!

We get so used to things we're used to, like a “regular” school year, that it's sometimes hard to grasp the positives in a different situation. When I first heard of the year-round school, I thought it was a horrid idea. Yet, after hearing it explained by that co-workers so long ago, it sounded more like a good idea. I remember when a family from my school moved temporarily to California one school year, they wrote back to their schoolmates about the school districts being so crowded that they had half-day school........it seems like the morning session started around 6 am or shortly after, and ran until around noon. They ran half the students in the morning sessions, and half in the afternoon session. I was only in third grade or so at that time, so really couldn't wrap my head around that concept. It was just too foreign.

Of course, my “reality” of school wasn't what a lot of people would understand, either. In my elementary years, we had three school buses but ran five bus routes – two of the buses ran double routes. So when school was over for the day, I had time to kill after school. We would walk downtown (a whopping three blocks from the school) and get some candy, come back and in warm weather play on the playground until the bus came for our route, or in colder weather play in the gym. A teacher would be on duty and let us know when our bus came, and we would finally head home. Later on, they switched us around, so we had time to run downtown before school while the second route kids were being picked up. The third bus, with only one route, had a very large area of real estate to cover........but there was the little store in Mandeville, where the kids on that bus could get off and shop while the bus ran a small loop around Mandeville. It worked for everyone. We all got our “junk food fix” on a daily basis!

I still get excited when it's back-to-school time. I'm kind of a school geek, and I enjoy checking out the school supplies on sale. For the first time ever, I may go through that sale this year without buying anything – we're so stocked up on notebooks, pens, pencils, etc., and I can't think of anything I'll need to buy. It kind of makes me sad.