Summers should be restorative. Mine rarely are. I am so glad this season it almost over so I can merely continue the daunting job of home education while running a household. I look forward to it like a vacation, and, well, that's just wrong, you know?
The summer (not yet over!) went like this....
At the outset, John was juggling three jobs but his "rowing" car went to car heaven in early June and he has not yet replaced it. The challenges this lack of transportation presented to my life cannot be expressed using words appropriate for this blog (!) But, in spite of this, he held a job as a steel grinder, truck driver, welder and kept his job at Wharton Global Initiatives AND had an internship at a Russian law firm in Philadelphia. Mercifully, this grew his bank account sufficiently to ensure that his stomach will not go empty during his sophomore year at UPenn.
Nora took a part time job at Wharton Global Initiatives, but in late June she left for Malaysia and Singapore, one of 16 hand-picked high school students in America to go! She had an exotic and exciting time in the jungles of Malaysia and under the city lights of Singapore while doing sustainability research. (I, on the other hand, continued to teleport from Philadelphia to NJ at an alarming pace, to keep up with my other kid's lives.)
No sooner did I get her on the plane, that I had to turn around and drive Andy to Brown University where he took a pre-college program in DNA Science and Biotechnology. He had the time of his life! He did not want to leave, but two weeks later, I drove back to Rhode Island to get him and never missed a beat in my rocket-science, precision scheduling in service to the other busy Laberee-lings. Before I knew it, the day arrived to head to JFK airport to pick up Nora! Once home, Nora returned to her job at Wharton and her volunteer work at Academy of Natural Sciences.
And for a few days everyone was under the same roof. But not for long.
Time to go back to Brown to deliver Andy to a competitive row camp and John was preparing to go to Russia for a few weeks and the paperwork needed for this transaction actually does require rocket-science.
Once I got John off for Russia, I headed back to Brown to get Andy. Soon after Andy got back into life at Labereeland, John returned from Russia. By this time, I had confessed to a nagging dizziness.
That brings us to the present moment.
While waiting for phone calls and texts from far-away places to get news about the safety of my brave travelers, I am sure I completed my tragic metamorphosis from brunette to grey-haired gorgon. The mirror does not lie.
The last leg ...the saddest leg of the summer....is preparing to send Nora, my rising senior, to Hungary, where she will live for six months. This is in 4 days.
I can't post about Nora's departure yet, because I promised her I would not cry until she was up in the air.
heavy sigh....
Yes, summers are great. But I'd much rather have September through May, than the bedlam of June through August !
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