Summer Workbook: It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Here we are with about three weeks to go until the first day of school, and I realized last night that all of my best intentions for summer workbook-ing were kind of an epic fail this year. You know the drill: as the school year dwindles you have workbooks, reading lists; your kid is not going to fall victim to the summer slump! Really, it seemed like a good plan at the time…So this, dear readers, is an ode to all us parents who dove into summer all those weeks ago with the best of intentions for all kinds of brain-stimulating summer studying.

I tried…Really I did

It must be noted that last summer we had this MASSIVE workbook and I stuck to my guns and fought the good fight (seriously, the fights that were fought…) and she was working on that beast almost daily. In preparation for this summer I bought us another workbook (months in advance, mind you), and this one was far smaller than the Summer of 2014’s Big Bummer – I should get points for that. Unfortunately the excitement our budding third grader felt when she first laid eyes on that fabulous new workbook did not hold into the summer.

Of course it didn’t.

I’m telling you, though, the pages in this workbook – well I was geeking out over the whole thing. Seemed like great times to me as I flipped through the pages, pausing occasionally to point and exclaim. Apparently that awesomeness did not translate to our 8 year old (who, I might add, loves to play school, ironically enough) and gave me more than one "Really" face. So, we got off to a slow start with the workbook mostly because I had made a major miscalculation heading into this summer: the girl was no longer coming with me to work and taking care of her pages -- we were already at work because I now work from home. Clearly the distractions at home are far more plentiful than those at mom’s former job.

Distractions aside, there’s a whole list of reasons that can be attributed to, well, an almost complete lack of follow through:

• School might be over, but softball season wasn’t. Who can focus on workbooks when there are games to play?
• Battle worn. Frankly, I was still recovering from the homework battles that ensued during the school year.
• Vacation. Who in their right mind is going to make their kid do workbook pages on vacation?! Not this mom.
• Summer Track. We started many mornings walking the track at the local high school with my sister and her kids, by the time we got home, well, that leads us to...
• Failure to remember. We (probably more me than we) plain old, straight up forgot. Of course no one was rushing to remind me, either.

The list could go on, but you get the idea.

Now, three-ish weeks to go until school starts and the empty pages far outnumber the completed ones in our little workbook. We’ll do some math facts, for sure (at least we did today – go me), but I might have to officially let the dream of that beautiful workbook go for this summer. At least we’ve been reading…