What I've Actually Tried With Three Kids Home All Summer

Caleb has been standing at the open refrigerator for what I'd guess is four minutes, and I've been watching from the sink with a dish towel over my shoulder, too tired to say anything yet. It's Monday and a little after ten. He is eleven and the fridge is full and twice now he has announced that there's nothing to eat.

Behind him Lily is telling Ben that the trampoline is hers on Mondays, which is a rule she made up on Saturday. Ben is two and has no opinion on days of the week but a very firm one about the trampoline.

School let out the first week of June and I was fine for a while, better than fine really. We did the pool, we did the library program, we hiked up the canyon with a bag of pretzels and Lily wearing her riding boots. Then about three weeks in the whole thing went flat, and now it's the thirteenth of July and I'm a former third-grade teacher with no plan for her own classroom.

When I taught, the first two weeks of school were nothing but procedures. How we line up, where the pencils go, what you do when you need the bathroom. By October the room mostly ran itself. My kids came home in June with no procedures at all and a great deal of time, and I went along with it because it felt like a kindness.

What flopped

The bucket list was a cheerful flop, since we wrote it on the whiteboard in May with all the excitement a May whiteboard deserves and by the end of June we'd done nearly everything on it. What's left is "build a fort" (which needs Emma, and she's down in Provo for the summer term) and "see a movie," which turned out to mean one particular movie that isn't out yet.

The chore chart flopped too. I made a nice one, laminated, because I'm that person. Lily turned it into an art project and drew a horse in every box, and Caleb pointed out that nobody had ever said what happens if you skip a day. He had a point.

Then there was the jar of "boredom busters" that every list online tells you to make. Lily filled most of it herself. Her slips said things like "ride a unicorn" and "bake Waffle a cake," Waffle being one of the chickens, and Caleb pulled the unicorn one, read it out in a flat voice, said "Mom, I'm eleven," and went to find his glove.

What has sort of worked

A quiet hour after lunch, one to two, is the one thing that has helped. Ben goes down for his nap with Biscuit already asleep under the crib, and the other two each get their own corner of the house and aren't allowed to talk to each other. Lily gets her horse books and the beanbag in the basement, where it stays cool. Caleb takes his baseball cards out under the crabapple tree, or lies on his bed with his glove on his face, which I've decided not to ask about.

Week one was a disaster. Caleb checked the microwave clock every few minutes to report on it and Lily tried to negotiate while I told them the hour wasn't a punishment and then heard myself say it exactly like someone handing out a punishment.

By the third week they'd mostly stopped fighting it, probably because it happens at the same time every day and they know when it ends.

Why does everything fall apart at three o'clock?

For us it does, because the quiet hour is long over, dinner is a ways off, everybody's blood sugar is somewhere near the floor, and I've used up whatever patience I woke up with. Caleb and Lily can go from happily building a ramp out of plywood scraps from David's shop to a full courtroom drama in about ninety seconds.

I used to jump in and referee. I was good at it, from practice. Lately I stay out of it for the first couple of minutes unless somebody's bleeding, and a couple of times they've sorted it out on their own, then fought about something else entirely, so I won't call it a victory.

So I changed the hour itself. At three I put out cold watermelon from Saturday's farmers' market, cut up on the big cutting board so there's juice running to the edge, and a pitcher of water with lemon, and at three-thirty everyone goes outside whether they want to or not. The watermelon does more than I'd like to admit. I've also gone back to running at six, before anyone is awake, because it turns out I'm a different person at three o'clock when I've done that.

I skipped it for most of June and the kids paid for it.

Scripture study fell apart

During the school year we read at breakfast, everybody in their seats because the bus was coming. That's gone and nothing has taken its place. For a few weeks I tried to keep it going at dinner, with David tired from work and Ben throwing peas, and we'd get through five verses with the whole table watching the clock.

I kept coming back to Paul's letter to the Ephesians, because it describes my kitchen better than any parenting book I own.

With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Ephesians 4:2-3

Last Tuesday I tried something smaller and read just the front half of it out on the porch steps while the sprinkler ran and everyone was damp and cranky, and asked what "forbearing" might mean. Caleb thought about it with his whole face and said, "It's when Lily is wrong about the score and you just let her." Lily said that she was never wrong about the score. I wrote his line on the back of an envelope so I wouldn't lose it.

Wednesday we read nothing.

Thursday Ben ate part of a crayon during family prayer, a red one, which we found out about later in the diaper. I wrote about this uneven kind of season in a post on the ministry of the messy middle, and I thought then I'd made my peace with it. It seems I have to do it again every July.

The part I haven't figured out

Ben is two and he wants in on everything his brother and sister are doing, and everything they're doing is built to be breakable. Caleb spent most of Thursday afternoon on that ramp and Ben walked straight through it, laughing, and took the ball. Lily shrieked and Caleb yelled, which he does, loudly, and Ben thought it was the best game of the week.

I've told the big two to let him in. They do for about ten minutes and then it ends in tears. I've tried the high chair with a pile of crackers, which buys me eleven minutes at most. What I can't work out is how to protect what Caleb and Lily build without making a two-year-old an outsider in his own backyard. Caleb said to me afterward, "I'm not mad at Ben, I'm just mad," and then he hugged me on his way back out the door, in front of the neighbor's kids and everything. I still don't have an answer for the ramp.

Ben, meanwhile, has found the laundry basket.

The fridge is closed now, by the way. Caleb ate a peanut butter sandwich standing up and went outside. Lily says the trampoline is hers on Tuesdays too.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal for my kids to fight this much in the summer?

Yes, and mine started in earnest about a month in, once the pool and the library program had worn off. They're together all day with nothing to break it up, so small stuff turns into big stuff. Look at when the fighting happens, because mine bunches up in the late afternoon and yours might too.

Should I schedule the whole summer or let them be bored?

I'd pick two or three fixed points and leave the rest empty. Mine are the quiet hour and the snack at three. The empty time is where Lily invents her best games, though it's also where Caleb ends up standing at the fridge.

How do we keep up family prayer and scripture study when the schedule is gone?

Make it smaller. One verse on the porch steps beat five verses at a tired dinner table for us, by a lot. Prayer still happens at meals and at bedtime, and some weeks that's all we get.

Do we have to do camps and big trips for it to count as a good summer?

No. Most of our summer is the backyard, the library and the sprinkler. We do go to a cabin at Bear Lake for two weeks every July, and the kids have been counting down since school let out, but the other weeks look like this one. I don't think they remember the weeks.

Tonight is family home evening and I haven't planned a lesson, so it will probably be popsicles and kickball with Ben as the ball.

with love, Melissa