Dear Summer Vacation...

Dear Summer Vacation,
Have I done something to piss you off? We've always gotten along in the past. I mean okay, in recent years we haven't been the best of friends, what with you constantly pestering me to put a bathing suit on. (Come on, is that really necessary?) But when I was younger I adored you.

Your arrival meant I would spend long, carefree days with you running through the sprinklers, hanging out at the pool and waiting for the ice cream truck to drive down our street. Wearing flip-flops and halter tops and inhaling the glorious smells of chlorine and coconut-scented sunscreen. I always hated to see you go and I would spend the whole school year missing you and waiting for you to come back.

I was looking forward to you showing up this year. I really was. I was so excited about Amanda's very first school vacation. But now that you're here I feel like you're hellbent on killing me... one brain cell at a time. I should have figured something was up when the night before Kindergarten graduation included a heated email battle of the Kindergarten mommies. It got ugly. Really ugly. It was the kind of drama I didn't expect to see until junior high. So you didn't exactly make a smooth entrance.

But graduation went fine. It was a very hot day but that was okay because after the ceremony, the kids got to change into bathing suits and break out the water toys, kiddie pools, bubbles... Then after school we drove to Grandma's house so Scott could have a relaxing Father's Day weekend. Well what we hoped would be a relaxing weekend anyway. But oh no. You were already screwing with us, Summer. He played golf Saturday but then serious work-related drama broke out. Almost as soon as he got back from the course he ended up in serious stress-mode, on nearly hourly conference calls until the problem was finally resolved in the wee morning hours.

Was it your bright idea to send Amanda's best friend, Rilie, away for a month? I mean come on. A MONTH? All Amanda talked about for weeks was how when school got out she would get to play with Rilie all day every day and then this? Thanks a lot, Summer.

I was okay with the major heat wave you sent our way. I blew up our teeny pool and after much begging, dragged it to the bottom of the slide and the girls had a blast on our somewhat lame version of a water-slide. When my friend, Wendy, sent me some great pictures of her kids playing in their blow-up pool, complete with a blow-up slide it made ours look just that much more pitiful and I just HAD to have one like she had, especially when she offered to have her husband pick one up for us and deliver it to us at Luciana's birthday party that weekend.

We continued to use our teeny pool while we waited and I felt a teeny bit guilty about my impulsive purchase. What with being married to Mr. Frugal, do I really need to buy new water toys every year? He was not going to be thrilled about this. I felt that way until on day two of operation-teeny-pool-at-bottom-of-slide, Amanda showed up in her old polkadot bikini and I asked her why she didn't have her new suit on. She thought it WAS her new suit... Really? Doesn't that thing look familiar to you? I admit I was less worried about her circulation being cut off than I was about what kind of mother people would think I am when they see photos of the kid wearing the same suit year after year. Later I dragged out an old scrapbook and showed her some pictures from summer 2005 when she was wearing the same suit! Then she pointed out that she was standing in front of the same teeny pool.

Oh, well maybe these pictures would do us some good after all! If Scott had any complaints about the new pool I'd just drag out the photos from four summers ago and talk about how deprived Amanda has been. In that same pitiful little pool and the same pitiful suit year after year after year...

S.V., I was so excited to bring home the 14-foot Banzai Cannon Ball Splash pool after Luciana's birthday party. I was ready to set it up immediately but Scott said no. He was being all practical, talking about water rationing and such... Plus he'd spent the day cleaning and refilling our hot tub (yeah, uh huh, water rationing). So we all jumped in the hot tub and I told the girls to wait til Daddy went back to work and we'd blow up the pool.

Except that when Monday rolled around, so did the cool weather. Too cool for the pool. Thanks again, S.V.. But there are some things I just HAVE to let my kids try specifically because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my mom would have said NO, NO, NO... so with that in mind, I blew up the slide and set it up in the living room. My mom would have said no way, perhaps with good reason. But channeling my inner 5-year-old... what could be better than a big inflatable slide in the living room?

S.V., I didn't like it all that much when Amanda was on the phone with my mother-in-law and reported that "Mommy just tried to go down the slide in the living room except she couldn't 'cause she's huge." Uh... did you have to tell Grandma I was playing on the slide in the LIVING ROOM and worse, did you just call me HUGE?!?"

Thanks for the colds, S.V.. First Alyssa got one... then she started to get better but not before passing it to Amanda... who then passed it right back to Alyssa who ended up in full blown misery the second time around. So I haven't slept in days because either Amanda is up having coughing fits or Alyssa is waking me up at all hours of the night to say, "Mommy, my nose is blowing." All this time I'd been blaming Kindergarten for getting us sick but this time it was YOU!

And did you think I would let you off the hook for the fires? Seriously? 400 wildfires throughout Northern California? Really? The dry lightening. The crazy winds. Now that it's finally cool enough to open the windows we can't because it's so smoky outside. And everybody is nervous because nobody is really safe. Way to go, Summer.

Could you possibly make my children bicker any more, S.V.? I swear there are days when I think if I have to hear even one more minute of arguing and complaining my head might explode into a zillion tiny little pieces. It's mine, no it's mine...no it's MINE. I wanted the red one! I hate the blue one! She got more than me! And the worst: I'm bored. There's nothing to do, Mom... This day is so boring!

School hasn't even been out for two weeks and I feel like we've run through all of our options. We've played games, we've played Barbies, we've played school, we've given each other manicures... I've even already dragged out the big guns: the paint, the 6 billion piece craft kits, the moon sand... Was the moon sand your idea, Summer? Because it really wasn't a GOOD one. Just sayin'. Let's give the kids sand to play with. Let's bring the beach INSIDE! Yeah really bright. We've made trips to the park and the dollar store and Target and still, they're bored.

I thought my mom had the ultimate cure for boredom but it's not working for me, Summer. When I went running to my mom whining about being bored I always got the same answer: "If you're bored, go clean your room." Umm. Did I say I was bored? I didn't mean bored. I meant... I'm gonna go play... Or read a book... Or... yeah... anything but clean my room. Brilliant, Mom. It was brilliant.

And I might as well mention that unfortunately my dad used the same tactics to permanently cure me from punctuality. If I was ready for school early or ready to go anywhere early he'd say, "You have extra time? Why don't you go clean your room?" So I get ready early and I get punished for it? I think not. I haven't been ready on time for anything since. Not my dad's smartest move.

But back to you, Summer Vacation. We'll be together for a couple more months. Cut me some slack will you? Send Rilie back to us. Heat up the weather enough for the pool. Put out the fires. And if there's anything you can do to cut down on the whining at my house that would be fabulous. Oh and stop bugging me about the swimsuits. Either that or make my thighs smaller. And if there's anything I can do for you, just let me know. Thanks!

Love,
Dione

(Photos to be added later... maybe.)

Shutterfly

I'm so excited! Shutterfly is featuring two more of my photobooks in their Gallery right now! The first is a book called This is What Kindergarten Looks Like that I made as a gift for Amanda's teacher. Several parents of her classmates bought copies as well. How cool is that?

The second is a storybook I made for the girls out of the last three years worth of Halloween photos: The Princess and the Pea and Other Halloween Tales.

Just another day

Yesterday was the worst day of Amanda's life. First a birthday party at school, complete with frost-it-yourself cupcakes followed by a playdate with Brandon who is the boy Amanda is just friends with but might marry. Then she played with Rilie for a few hours and they had a tea party with real food and apple juice which they managed to enthusiastically spill EVERYWHERE.

That was followed by this sweet and seemingly harmless request to play a board game which actually meant they were going to remove every single these-toys-are-on-the-top-closet-shelf-for-a-reason games, toys and crafts and spread the parts and pieces as far as they could within a three mile radius.

When I went in to check on how the board game was going, Rilie was trying to tear open a baggy of glitter glue with her teeth. She managed to get all the tubes of paint and the petrified clay that smelled like a toxic waste dump open all by herself. "Umm, yeah... Rilie we don't paint on Amanda's bed."

Oh! But I was proud... I'd spent hours cleaning her room this weekend because it was BAD so I was being all MOM with Amanda and Rilie and kept telling them they had to clean up one thing before they started on another. Figured they'd be in there FOREVER.

But a couple of minutes later they reported they were done and started their next project. I thought they must be lying so I went in there and the place was spotless. I checked all the obvious places...under the bed, in the drawers... and then finally found all the stuff crammed haphazardly into the closet behind the loft bed. Definitely not where it was supposed to go. Yet I was proud. Another milestone... Amanda's first time cleaning her room in the sneakiest way possible.

Then Rilie went home and I made Amanda take a bath without her bathing suit because I am the meanest mom in the entire world. That's when it became the worst day of her entire life.

Alyssa insisted on wearing her ballerina dress to pick-up Amanda from school yesterday. I compromised and said yes to the dress and no to the slutty princess shoes which turned out to be a wise decision considering the impromptu playdate that followed Amanda prefers to just call it a "date" as she's getting a bit old for playdates. And because it was with Brandon and any girl would be lucky to have a date with him.

A while ago Amanda and Alyssa were blocking the walkway in my bedroom and after I'd asked about six times for them to move so I could get to the bathroom while they completely ignored me, perhaps because they thought I was talking to someone else, I finally said loudly, "BOTH OF YOU MOVE IT NOW!!!" and then continued to rant about how I expect them to listen when I talk and haven't I told them a billion times not to block the walkway and...

That's when Alyssa looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Mommy why you tabby?" which when translated means, Mommy why are you crabby?" or more likely, "Mommy why are you acting like a crazy lunatic bitch when we were just trying to play Barbies?" I started laughing and then we all did, as we all repeated what became my favorite phrase of the day. "Why you tabby?" Great question.

A while after I'd put Alyssa to bed she came running out to see me and I said, "How about you go get back into bed now?" and she jumped into my lap and said, "How about NO?"

She's full of them this morning too. Before school she informed me that my butt was upside down and as I put her into her carseat she said, "It tastes like a dirty muffin in here."