I never gave much thought to summer school when I was growing up. 

When I was younger, it was the place where the bad kids had to go.  When I was older, it was the place where the bad boys that looked like members of the band RATT had to go.  You know…the ones who sat at the back of your English class, wearing sunglasses and ripped jeans with a pack of cigarettes in the pocket…the ones with hair longer than yours…the ones you would have dated if you could have figured out how to pull it off without your mom knowing.

Did I just say that out loud?  I should never blog using stream-of-consciousness.  It gets me in trouble.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that summer school was a foreign place to me.  The summers of my youth were spent playing softball and laying out on big sheets of tin foil in my backyard.

When I grew up and became a teacher, summers were spent working at a day care and crying to Big D every morning, telling him I had a stomach ache and couldn’t go into work.  He’d tell me to suck it up, get dressed and go to work.  Big D is not easily fooled.

I realize that many homeschoolers do school year-round, so summer school is commonplace, just a way of life.  Not so for us.  Oh, we’ve done a little bit through the years….some math sheets to stay sharp or a book or two that we didn’t get to, but for the most part our summers were free.

Until this year.  It was probably mid-April when I looked at my plan books, realized how much we still had to accomplish in order to be finished with 7th and 3rd grades….and I cried.  I cried hard.  The kids cried too.  We all said that we had stomach aches and couldn’t get out of bed.  Big D told us to quit our whining and get our school finished.

So that’s what we’re doing.  *sigh*  We’re almost finished with math, but we’ll have to work on history through the summer, and Harrison will have some science to catch up on.

Why are we so far behind this year, you may wonder.  It’s all his fault…

The little saboteur.