Summer vacation is over – hold your applause, I still can’t hear myself think

In these parts, lazy days of summer have mercifully come to an end. Just a few days ago, as the weather grew ever more humid and children tried to make the last few hours of fun last and last, the rest of us came perilously close to court-ordered commitment hearings.

Frustrated moms threatened to leave town without telling anyone and frustrated dads threatened cardiac arrest if one more ball, bike, or bat was left in the driveway.

But now parents can go back to resembling human beings again with fully functioning frontal lobes.

I looked around my own surroundings and could tell a while ago, even without a calendar, that summer vacation needed to end. For example…

We ran out of clean glasses back in June.

I could no longer stand NOT to write about it.

Husband finally stopped yelling and just accepted that an open refrigerator *is* cooling the entire house.

For twelve weeks, two days, and nineteen hours, no adult in this house was able to go to the bathroom in peace.

Every other raving lunatic over at The Buzz finally told *me* to calm down.

Dad actually said “Shut the door behind you!” more often than “Grab me a beer!”

I no longer felt the need to sit right by the pool and supervise two preteens who know how to swim. I could see them just fine from the bar in the family room.

My kids whispered, “Nana, please save us” when I placed yet another meal in front of them to try.

Mom introduced me to something called salt and the rest of the table gave her a standing ovation.

Dillard’s, Kohl’s, and every other department store ran out of uniforms the first week in August, as if that’d make school come quicker.

Mom took a job, polling the elections, because explaining to senior citizens how to properly fill in circles they can’t even see, despite four different kinds of prescription eyewear, is still more fun than supervising two kids for the eighty-eighth day in a row.

I got so excited when asked to participate in a broadcasted and grown-up conversation at Creative Loafing that I spent two hours fixing my hair. Turns out the conversation was a podcast. My hair did look fantastic, by the way.

Tuesday morning, as Oldest and Youngest began their last year of elementary school, I felt my blood pressure and breathing return to normal. My wrinkles started to fade and that throbbing vein went into hibernation. By noon, I kind of missed them.

Kind of.