Papa Bean's Crappy Summer Vacation

If you listen quietly at night, you can hear the whine and moans of teachers nationwide lamenting the return to school.

If you are married to a teacher, August is your least favorite month.  "I only have three more weeks left of vacation..."  And you grit your teeth thinking about your entire three weeks of vacation for the whole year.  Their argument "I need that time off to regroup."  Because my job is roses and sunshine all year long. In the business world we sit around and drink cappuccinos laughing at the rest of the world in between tee times.  Sure.

It sucks.

However, this year, I completely understand my husband's sadness.

This summer was going to be the first summer in 10 years that he didn't have a class to take.  He usually spent the summer days working on his masters or continuing education classes.  Last year, he maxed everything out.  This year, he was looking forward to a summer of fishing, relaxing, enjoying life.  He had new golf clubs and I'm sure he envisioned using them every day either on the course or at the driving range. 

It started with me.  I had my surgery in June which had more complications than we anticipated. Nothing awful, but he had to take over rowing the boat for about 2 weeks.

On Father's Day, as I lie on the couch with tubes in my side, we realized the kids and me had lice (so glad we snuggle so much).  I couldn't raise my arms, so he was stuck giving everyone a nice lice hair treatment.  Even me.  I have a LOT of hair.  And he had to strip the beds, the blankets that we had been snuggling in on the couch.  That's a lot of extra laundry.  Every day for 5 days.  That, my friend, makes for a crappy Father's Day and week.

Then our vacation that he had been looking forward to for months fell apart.  Our daughter broke her leg on the second day of a cross country trip.  Because I couldn't lift, he was left doing most of the carrying of our baby girl with her giant leg cast.  Then his wife (moi) started to lose it being trapped in a cabin, with record heat, the Cartoon Network playing non-stop to entertain our daughter, kamikaze mosquitoes, frizzy hair and a slowly deteriorating Congress and financial market.

Then our son got strep throat.  Pretty good case.

Then the market started to fall which made his lovely wife stay up late watching the Asian markets and leave early in the morning to get to the office. 

My old dog is peeing everywhere.  Which my husband has developed a gift for stepping in.  While he's carrying our daughter.

Then our daughter had her cast removed and is in a decent amount of pain transitioning to the walking cast.

We haven't been able to even stick with our regular date nights because we don't want to leave our teenage babysitters with a kid with a broken leg.

And now it's time to go back to school in a few days.

His summer officially sucked.

Nothing tragic to him.  Nothing insurmountable to our family.  Just a series of really annoying, inconvenient things.



I think he's even too tired to whine.
He's clearly lost it.

Comments

Helen said…
I would think he'd be rejoicing at the thought of getting out of this summer vacation from hell and heading back to school!
Mama Bean said…
He is. I can honestly say I don't know how we would have managed had he not been off for the summer. It was just one of those times... again, nothing awful (even my daughter's leg is healing remarkably well and we got amazing care), but we couldn't make it a week without something "not fun" happening. It's like starting your day with a smile only to have your battery be dead in the car. For 90 days straight.

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