Day 5 - Silverman-Akande Summer Vacation

Don’t you just hate it when people lucky enough to be blessed with children complain about raising them? Don’t you just hate when parents, who have put forth considerable effort to acquire these children through say, adoption and extensive and expensive fertility treatments, complain about raising them? I totally hate them too, which is unfortunate, given the fact that I am most certainly the complaining, blessed, effort-full parent of five beautiful living children. Yes, that’s right, living, I even know what it’s like to lose a very wanted baby and I still complain about my brood.

This parent gig is crazy hard! I hate it only a fraction less than I love it, and I LOVE it. A lot. Every single one of my children was truly, truly wanted – including the ones that came in pairs. In fact, when my fertility doctor transferred our last three embryos into me, I spent two weeks rubbing my belly whispering, “You are wanted. All of you.” To some people, this may seem crazy, and poorly thought out. Three embryos becoming three babies? Who tries to make that happen? Look, we wanted another child. I didn’t think that I had actual embryo implanting powers, I was just putting out my intentions to the universe. I was going all “The Secret”. So yeah, we wanted a big family. Four kids, was probably our magic number, but how lucky are we to have one more kiddo to love? (Very lucky, Mr. Lee. Isn’t it funny that because he was the last one out, I think of him as our extra, unexpected blessing?)

So you get it, we love them. They’re beautiful. We can’t imagine life without ALL of them. What a blessing. We are single-handedly repopulating our city’s school board. We rock. But, holy mother of God (whichever you believe in or don’t believe in) who thought that summer vacation and quite frankly any school break longer than a standard weekend, was a good idea?

The Big and The Middles finished school last Friday. This is the fifth day of summer vacation and I can honestly say, I hate my kids a little bit. Okay that is not true, I hate much (so, so much) of what my kids do. The sad thing is, I’m not even one of those amazing, impressive parents who actually if they can, use this time to be with their children all day, every day. I send the big ones to camp. The only break from camp they get is when we are visiting their grandparents and when we are up north at my family’s farm. Out of a nine-week holiday, we are really only going to be with all of them for two weeks.

It won’t always look like this…

…or this.

The problem is, camp is nothing like school. It lacks the structure and discipline and pressure of school. This is amazing for children. I am all for a break from the rigidity of school – for the children. Unfortunately, I find the happy, spirited, creative, fun-loving children that come home from camp utterly exhausting and fairly annoying! The “rest” that comes with seven hours of parenting only the little ones (with Wife who is off work for the summer) is completely cancelled out within the first hour of The Big and The Middles being home. It’s only five hours from them getting home from camp to bedtime and it nearly kills me! Furthermore, don’t even get me started on summer bedtimes. Damn you daylight savings time! If I wanted it to be light out until 9 pm and therefore totally reasonable to be at the park until 8pm because it’s way cooler than the house, I would have sent a memo to whoever is in charge of this time nonsense!

 Now, all of you parents rolling your eyes like I am some ungrateful, horrible mother, (“Doesn’t she know her children will read this blog one day?”) don’t think I haven’t noticed how many of you have posted on Facebook about your kid or kids heading off to overnight camp. Sure you’ll miss them, but if they’re absence improves your parent to kid ratio, sometimes down to one or two to zero (yes we mean you, our neighbours two doors to the west), I imagine you’ll find a way to deal with missing them and get your (own) vacation on!

Seriously, our blessed life is like a really bad start of a joke: A busy seven year old, two five year olds with sensory integration issues and one on the autism spectrum and the other with significant anxiety plus a couple of almost three year olds, appropriately called The Force walk into a bar (looking for their mothers)…

So what I am trying to say is, if how I am feeling today is any indication of how I am going to feel for the remainder of the summer, we are in truuu-bullll! You all need to pray for me, if praying is your thing, or meditate on it, or send the vibes; whatever, just do something! Help a sister out! I love these small humans of mine but so far, they’re kinda ruining what could be a perfectly good summer!

Stay tuned. I will let you know how the Silverman-Akande Summer 2014 is going.

XO Ajike