Spring Break

It is Spring Break. When I was growing and in public school, we always had a few days off school in April. Usually, we had Good Friday off and then maybe, but only maybe, the week following Easter Sunday. This meant you had just enough time off from school for your parents to the throw you and your Easter baskets into the car and drive five or ten hours north, west, or east (but never south) to see their parents, so that the whole family could bitch about the cold and the snow and the general greyness of springtime in the Midwest while you played Uno with your siblings and waited for the real cartoons to show up on your grandparents limited reception t.v.

When I switched to private school in the seventh grade, I was introduced to a whole new concept - Spring Break. This was revolutionary. Not only was Spring Break totally unrelated to Easter, it was two weeks long! And the same two weeks every year - the last two weeks in March. In this new Spring Break world, families would jet off (I say "jet" because that’s what they did, they flew on a jet) off to all sorts of exotic points south - Florida, Georgia, islands like Aruba and Jamaica. And return two weeks later, well tanned and grumbling about the unnatural cold of Cleveland weather. While I found out about this kind of Spring Break from my friends, I never actually experienced it (we did get to go Washington D.C. and Colonial Williamsburg one year though). I can tell you as an adult, I’m not experiencing it either.

Our family’s two week long Spring Break experience officially starts tomorrow, and I can already tell you that I wish the schools would go back to the old long weekend routine of my elementary school years. In many ways I am thankful for the break, the kids can sleep in (but they won’t), I don’t have to make any lunches (except the ones we all eat together everyday), no one has to get dressed (this will cut down on laundry), and I don’t have to pick anyone up in the middle of anyone else’s nap. Those are the upsides to the break. Oh yeah, and the ideal of spending two weeks of quality time with my three beloved children. But as thankful as I am for the time away from the school routine, I have this sinking feeling of dread when I think about the next two weeks. Especially when I hear the three of my kids talking at me all at once (and saying nothing) and think about how that sound will not stop until nine p.m. tonight. And I am racking my brain to figure out how we will all make it through, of course I would love to have us make it through, bathed and clothed and enriched with cultural experiences and spilling over with freshly minted childhood memories, but I have a feeling I am going to have to settle for making it through alive, without strep throat or ear infections, and having eaten pizza for dinner less than six times.