What I Did on Summer Vacation

Time for school to start again. Parents everywhere exhaling sighs of relief. It’s not that we don’t love our children. It’s just that serving as their directors of entertainment for two and a half months drains the parental life out of us. So we’ll pack their little book bags, dress them in their Back to School Sale-purchased clothes, and send them off for another year of educational bliss.

And one of their first assignments will be to write that time-tested beginning of the year essay entitled “What I Did on Summer Vacation.” So to honor these pupils, and to help prod them along, I now share my version of the aforementioned essay with you, the sometimes interested, sometimes bored reading public:

Dear Teacher,

I did lots this summer. You’ll be proud to know I studied History. Me and my family went to Gettysburg. All that Civil War stuff. I’ve been three times now and for the third straight time, the South lost the war. While we were in Pennsylvania, we went to see my favorite baseball team, the Pirates. They won the game but history repeated itself a few days after the game when they traded away their best players to save money like they do every July.

I studied Health and food group stuff this summer. I discovered seedless watermelons taste great and better yet, you don’t run the risk of swallowing the seeds and dealing with melons growing in your stomach like they did when I was little. I also learned that your belly will scream at you if you eat three bowls of homemade banana ice cream at the church picnic.

I learned some stuff about Economics this summer. You can save $50 a month on your power bill if your dryer breaks and your wife has to hang out clothes to dry on the back porch. A family can spend $7 to see a movie at the Drive-In and take our own snacks instead of forking out $50 or so to catch a flick and munch some popcorn at the regular movie house.

I did some Physical Education, too. We played wiffle ball in our front yard and badminton in our backyard, which only needed mowing over the septic lines thanks to the drought. I went parasailing at the beach even though I’m embarrassingly fearful of heights. And I rode some waves even though I have a ridiculously unrealistic expectation of becoming the next recipient of a shark nibble.

I didn’t forget to work on Math this summer. Did you know you can take 3 boys, 1 loaf of stale bread and it will produce 50 or 60 ducks at the lake at Gardner-Webb? And if you’re talking science, I can tell you about our experiment where my kids laid perfectly still on the ground with chunks of bread resting on their noses. Ducks will eat off your nose if you play dead long enough, and interestingly, will flee the scene when kids raise up and chase them like lunatics.

Add to all that a mission trip, baseball All-Stars, Legion baseball, Dad’s heart surgery, Mom and Dad’s 50^th anniversary, and the day I got sick on the Hurler at Carowinds and you have an eventful summer full of educational experiences. I’m glad school’s starting back so I can finally get some rest.