It's official, summer vacation is here

Summer vacation has started. As if entertaining my kids while I am trying to keep up on work and the household weren’t clue enough, their friends are sure to drive the message home. Starting at 8 am, the doorbell begins to ring with friends wondering if my kids can play. If you don’t mind me sounding like an old fogey, back in my day we were taught that we do not ring anyone’s doorbell before 10 am. And this is a quality I am instilling in my own kids (note: by loudly complaining about being woken up by the dang doorbell).

Just this morning, the neighbor kid came back every 20 minutes to see if the Taz could come out, true to his 8 o’clock fashion. My son insisted that he couldn’t leave the house until 9:30 am, but this kid apparently has a hearing problem. So my son remedied this by posting a sign out our door.

5 minutes later (time now is 8:30 am) our doorbell rang again.

“Doesn’t he know how to read?!?” I asked the Taz.

“I think the sign blew off the door,” he explained. He fastened it again and came back inside. “What can I do now?” he asked me. I was knee deep in work, trying to form at least one more sentence before the doorbell rang again. Our TV is on the fritz, and I was on the only computer. My technology slaved son was left without anything to do, since I was also hindering his use of music for at least some semblance of quiet.

“I don’t know, read,” I instructed him.

“But I’ve been reading a whole bunch lately!” he complained.

“No you haven’t, you haven’t read a book all summer long,” I told him, knowing full well that we hadn’t even completed our first week of summer vacation.

“But I read two of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books,” he argued.

“Just pick something that you haven’t read before.”

“Can I read 30 pages and be done?” he asked me.

“Read until you can go outside,” I said, exasperated.

He pulled out one of the books that had been gathering dust on the bookshelf and got caught up in the world of a vampire bunny that was sucking the life out of all the carrots in the garden. And when the clock struck 9:30 am, we heard the familiar skateboard of his friend coming down the sidewalk, and the Taz was out the door.

I am considering getting my parenting advice from this website so I can learn ways to scare my kids’ friends away – at least until a decent hour in the morning. Answering the door in my bathrobe with unbrushed teeth and hair (pre-coffee) just isn’t cutting it anymore.