Over the course of the regularly-scheduled week-long break between stories, my son’s time in the fifth grade came to an end and his summer vacation began. And so my time of having regularly-scheduled work days has come to an end for the next two months, and pouring my time to make comics into the gaps between entertaining my son has begun.
It has, admittedly, been a touch easier than previous summers. My son is eleven and can entertain himself for longer stretches than he used to. He’s also less interested in spending lots of time with me, the parent who’s always around and enforces all the rules. He’s not hovering around me as much as he used to, which gives me more breathing room to work. Some, but not much.
We have to carefully police his screen time. He has a hard time powering screens down if left to them for too long, and if he ever gets a taste of “extra screen time as a treat” he turns into an addict and has a meltdown if he doesn’t get it again. We have a good policy in place for this summer, but there have been times when his screen time ends and he immediately begins hovering over me, and constantly asking when his next screen time will be. It is very, very distracting when you’re trying to be creative.
And then there’s the increasing defiance, both to suggestions of how to spend our summer days and just in-general as he gets older. Just yesterday he proclaimed he wanted to go to the beach, and so I scrambled to get enough work done to make it happen, only for him to change his mind at the eleventh hour and turn our trip to the beach into a mild argument.
It hasn’t been all bad, though. When we do hit the beach (which we will be doing several times this week to fight an incoming heatwave) we have a lot of fun together. When he’s not battling for more screen time he’s building creative things with his Legos and reading lots of graphic novels. In the evenings we watch the classic Fist of the North Star TV series, and I read some Discworld novels aloud to him and my wife (we’re on the final book of the City Watch series).
Summer break is tricky, because schedules are tricky and moods are getting trickier. For all my venting and productivity difficulties, I know I’m going to miss all of this one day. But until then, I’m going to vent about summer break.