And The School Year Wraps Up

This was the first normal-feelings school year since the pandemic. We stopped wearing mask when the Covid and Strep numbers went down. Sometimes I’ll find a used masked under the seats of the car and I’ll remember that this was once a daily used product. How quickly they fade from memory and how far away that time feels, even though it was about March that we stopped using them. But it wasn’t the not wearing mask that made this school year feel normal. We got to do things again! There were a lot of “first time since the pandemic” school events: Lunar New Year festival, basketball, Black History Month dinner, spring concert, and yearbooks. I’m first timer to the busy-ness of a parent to elementary-age school kids and I’m getting hit hard by all the things. Growing up, my immigrant parents didn’t get involved much. We didn’t do sports. Correction I didn’t do sports, but that’s a story for another time. My parents weren’t part of the PTO and when they did volunteer for anything school thing, it was a rare appearance of only one parent or a Pyrex pan of pancit that I’d bring to a school party. The only extracurriculars I was allowed was church on Wednesday nights and that one time I was in seventh grade honors band and I stay at school an extra hour which was convienient for my parents. And unfortunately for my dreams of finding my secret twin, I never went to an eight-week long summer camp.

Which is why I reacted with much dumbfounded-ness when school parents were asking me about what camps my kids were doing this summer. My childhood summers were full of endless play, of family reunions, the one or two out of town vacations, and the occasional boring days where I wished school would come back. My family is just entering that phase, but because of the pandemic, we escaped to Idaho for the entirety of both summers. This is our first summer staying put and I’ve come face to face with competitive parents who want to get their kids into competitive programs. When I’m in those conversations I just want to fade into the background. Summers are for wonder and I love when I catch my kid using their time to awkwardly lay in their dad’s office chair, with one leg pushing the wall, spinning in circles and singing, “I love you baby, and if it’s quit alright, I need you baby!” I told my kids that Linda Cardellini as Velma singing that song is my favorite version.

So here we are at the close of the school year. My kid is on the waiting list for one summer camp and has baseball until mid summer. The another kid is in a one-day-a-week camp and summer preschool. That’s it. Those four events have me so busy I’m wearing workout clothes most days and haphazardly throwing on a decent shirt or blazer on top to be presentable to zoom meetings. I’m sure by next summer I’ll have things down and I won’t be surprised by the questions of how I’ll survive the summer with my kids home. But by then I hope I’m booking flights instead of camps.