School’s out

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Anticipation. Anticipay-yay-tion. It’s making me wait.

I had to feel for Hunter this morning, Monday, the last day of the school year.

The little guy woke up before the alarm would have gone off, came downstairs dressed and ready to go. It’s a big clue that he’s ready to move out of second grade, since he’s rarely raring to go before 7 a.m. He’s been counting down the weeks til summer vacation since about April.

Since mom is in Guatemala, we rushed around, trying to decide what he needed in his backpack. I didn’t think he needed his notebook, but he wasn’t convinced school was really, really over for the summer, so he took it anyway. We loaded up on lunch: peanut butter sandwich, red peppers, half a protein bar and an apple. We made sure of the location of the note that would allow a friend’s mother to pick him up from the after-school program. As we left the house for the bus stop at 8:22, the excitement was palpable.

It wasn’t very long before we saw the smoke and flames from a burning house half a block up the street from ours. (Turned out to have been started by an unattended barbecue.)

Hunter’s now 45 minutes into summer, which means he’s probably bored and looking forward to joining his mom in Guatemala in 26 days. Don’t you miss those days when every event was followed by an even better event? When the summer was so long and so … luxurious that you could actually get too much of a good thing?

The concept of summer vacation we develop when we’re young sets us up for frustration later in life. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels abject jealousy at the thought of two-and-a-half months of vacation. Heck, it’s been two-and-a-half years since I had a two-week vacation. Twenty-six days to go. You don’t suppose I’m going to have any trouble concentrating on my job for the next few weeks, do you?