Summer of '02

Remember in the good old days, when we burst out of school that last day - and faced a summer of raw possibility? Our moms gave us all the empty coffee cans they could spare, a couple of sticks, and told us to "get out."

That was it.

We climbed, and played, and got into our share of mischief. Threw fruit at each other. Walked barefoot through infectious puddles. Got splinters. Touched toads. That sort of thing.

And without fail, we checked back in sometime in early September for the kid-count.

These days, summer is a lot more complicated.

Not so much for the kids, mind you. They get to enjoy their steady stream of play dates and extracurricular enrichment. The only way they can really tell the summer from the rest of the year is the conspicuous lack of homework, and our more liberal policy regarding the garden hose.

For us millennium parents, it's a new nightmare of planning, scheduling, and schlepping.

The nature of my husband's and my work allow at least one of us to be home for the summer, a lucky accident that doesn't buy us as much as you'd think. The other kids in our neighborhood have their own commitments, you see. And the thought of MY two heathens creating their own fun for 12 weeks is roughly equivalent to the prospect of systematically setting each room in our house on fire (which would really only amuse them for 8 weeks, unless you count the bathrooms.)

We aim to put them in "Summer Day Camp" for our own preservation. In the olden days, our mothers were allowed to beat us, and threaten orphanage visits and such. These days you can get arrested for that. Yet, we are expected to (somehow) keep our children under control. And as anybody in the free world knows, the best way to do that is to delegate. So we pay other poor luckless souls to watch our kids, and then we scoot off to our nice quiet, organized offices, and pray for their personal safety and sanity.  The day care professionals', that is.

For the record, these saints earn less than Sanitation Experts (garbage men), the people who scoop poo out of monkey cages, and even the kids who routinely screw up my order at the pick-up window. Frankly, these intrepid souls should be paid at least as much as the average parent would save in psychotherapy bills, should he/she be forced to stay home entertaining the children all summer.

Which would be a tidy sum in our house, seeing as our children are "bright" but not "brilliant." Meaning they can take the television APART, but not put it back together. And then, subsequently, cannot see the correlation of their own activity to the loss of their primary source of entertainment. And will, without guilt, demand that we purchase a new TV. I would imagine.

In my day (once again, feeling old) the standard summer day camp was at the "Y". Period. I went one summer, simply because all the mothers in our neighborhood got tired of putting out fires in the vacant lot down the street, and we all had to go. For the record, I never set any of those fires (I was on the marshmallow stealing committee.)

Nowadays there are roughly twelve thousand day camps to choose from, all of which, for maximum inconvenience, either fall completely short of, or run completely outside of regular working hours, and none of which provide any activity-relevant literature until after you plunk down your money.

They cost either $15 for the summer, or $15000 for the summer (nothing in-between, and excluding 4-6 random weeks, not to include the 4th of July) and have a teacher-to-student ratio expressed in hexadecimal, or Roman numerals, or whatever it takes for the layman to NOT be able to identify that you might do better if only your kids were cattle.

Idealist that I am, what I want for my kids is a safe, clean place to enroll them, say, 4 hours a day 5 days a week for the *whole summer, and which doesn't cost more than the gross national product of Uruguay. It would be nice if they learned something useful. Like sign-language or the formal rules to competition billiards.  But I'm not picky.

I'm immediately suspicious of any place that thinks that carting 100 first-graders to distant theme parks is a *good idea. Especially when said theme park has the word "-Mania" included in its name. I have a hard enough keeping track of my two kids in places like that, even with rope.

I'm also not thrilled with the oft-employed day camp tactic of abandoning them, en masse, at a public pool. I'm afraid I just don't have enough spare children for that.

Unfortunately, it seems that there are only one or two places that meet my criteria, and they're very sorry, but I should have thought to sign up when I was filing the birth certificate paperwork.

I fear we may be back to coffee cans and a fire extinguisher.

Unless YOU aren't too busy…