The moment we all stopped talking about whether school would stay open during Omicron we shifted to talking about summer plans. It was about where we wanted to travel and where we hadn’t been able to travel for years because of COVID, about the return of summer camp, about the new options available now that many parents can work remotely. But this also seems to come with the simultaneous and constant lamenting of the summers we had in childhood—unstructured! full of nothingness! —and the 2022 reality of planning-researching-comparing-and-optimizing for the annual summer shuffle kicks up a potpourri of feelings.
In NYC (and I’m sure elsewhere), summer camp sign-up starts in January, and it is a bloody expensive affair. Regardless of whether you choose science camp, chess camp, dance camp, or theater camp, it seemingly averages out around $600-700/week per child for six hours a day of activities. Multiply that times multiple kids, the childcare you need to actually work full-time after camp and it’s truly untenable, and maybe better to just run camp yourself with a slip n’ slide and some dollar store bubbles at Prospect Park.
I spent a few hours sometime around February or March attempting to make a spreadsheet that balanced the logistics of drop-off/distance with which camps took both 4 year olds and 6 year olds, which camps operated which weeks of the summer, with which camps were on the more affordable (none of them) to very expensive scale (all of them). I texted some friends and some of my kids’ friends mothers and we compared notes as moms do, and realized we all had different then-non-committal plans in place and were all also kind of waiting for each other and all feeling '“behind.”
Ada voted for science and art camps and vetoed chess camp and Julian said he had no interest in any camps at all and just wanted to play Minecraft all summer (lol, he’s never actually played Minecraft). I then booked things, changed things, asked for some refunds, compared things, resented that mothers are now (have always been?) also in charge of planning summers, wondered how i’d balance the patchwork situation with work, and went back to feeling remorse for the expectations we project of how edifying summer ought to be for kids, and who carries this emotional labor and so on.
In my recollection, my mom signed my brothers and I up for our town’s summer tennis camp a few miles away from home, which we rode our bikes to, tennis rackets strung over our backs. It was $45 per child per week. We played tennis for 3 hours, sometimes hung out at the park a while longer, then rode our bikes home and then she dropped us either 1) off at the town pool for the entire afternoon with a few bucks for the ice cream bar or 2) left us at home where we played a combination of video games, soccer in the backyard with neighbors, or watched a lot of TV. Once or twice a week we went to the library where they had a summer-long reading contest where after reading 5, 10, 20, 50 books you could win ice cream and other prizes from Stewart’s, and we were motivated enough by this to be fairly dedicated readers. My dad’s contribution was buying us those math workbooks with stickers sandwiched in the middle that we’d be expected to do for 30 minutes a day. We mostly took out the stickers and ignored the math sheets, which turned out to be irrelevant for our advancement.
While I’m sure I’m misremembering all the various forms of labor that surrounded these supposedly self-sufficient summers (driving us, feeding us, clothing us, etc), the entire structure of it feels aspirationally wholesome and analog. It also allows for a level of parental absence that’s no longer kosher or possible, and instead we’re entering the multi-month phase of existing week-to-week. We’ll do a week with grandparents and then a week of Brooklyn camp and then a family trip and then some camp at the kids’ old school and then another week with grandparents.
I’ll take my zooms from some awkward desk just out of my kids’ view while they run through the sprinkler outside. I’ll lather the kids in sunscreen and bug spray in between meetings and reassure them I’ll join them outside to make an extra long hopscotch out of sidewalk chalk after the next call. It’ll be fine and it’ll even be fun and maybe they’ll even remember their summer break fondly—as unstructured, imaginative, dirty, itchy, full of scraped knees, late baths, lots of swimming, many sunsets, drippy ice creams, and lots of TV—and also try and emulate whatever this is when they’re older, with their own form of nostalgia.
Recommendations:
Read: This 2018 NYT piece where the writer asked parents what they do for summer and the answer was that it’s piecemeal and expensive everywhere.
Shorts: It’s very hard to find cut-offs of just the right length so I was pleased to discover the Levi’s store in Williamsburg will customize your cut-off lengths to your liking on the spot. I got the 501 mid-thighs, then trimmed ‘em to my liking. I’m also enjoying the linen boxer shorts from Everlane even though when I wear them Julian says he likes my pajamas. If you live near an actual Everlane store they have other colorways than online.
Playlists: Been enjoying jogging to the Runcast with John Richards from KEXP.
All day cake: The spelt almond cake from Violet Bakery, inspired by my friend Mollie, loaded with summer fruit (sans the icing). Eatable for breakfast, snack, and dessert. I could only find this version of the recipe online, so just do some googling to convert the amounts to cups.
Adulting: Set up a SEP IRA (basically a self-employed person’s retirement plan) this week; major check off the to-do list.
Reading: the poetry collections of Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things and her more recent collection The Hurting Kind. She writes extensively about grief, animals, nature, infertility, place. It’s really beautiful whether or not you consider yourself a reader of poetry or not. Related: “Ada Limón Makes Poems for a Living” in the NYT.
Last, but not least, here is a collection of kids’ books that are great for summer. See you next week.
As a teacher, I continue to be shocked that parents are (seemingly?) not protesting summer break, especially given the amount of structured, in-person schooling lost due to Covid. I am personally in favor of an alternative calendar model and adding days to our school year.
My son is a toddler and will stay in childcare over the summer full time, and I am working my district's summer school program during the month of July.
This makes me think of another theory I toss around: the new latchkey kids. I grew up in the 80s, the peak of the latchkey kids. My own elementary daughters are, in many ways, a new generation of latchkeys. Parents are home, but they're on virtual meetings, so kids are left to fend for themselves during the afternoon. In some ways I find it sad, but I suppose better than the 80s iteration. And anyway, even though my mom was home, I certainly don't remember spending much with her after school. Maybe it does give kids more freedom, or as much as we can stomach in 2022.