Tag: #Summer

  • ODDS and ENDS – Euro 2020/21, Summer Camp, Sleep!

    “Odds and Ends” is my continuing series of random thoughts and follow ups…

    Again, I will be talking about Euro 2020/21. As of this moment, Switzerland just got bounced by Spain, and Italy and Belgium just started. Though I was completely wrong about Sweden last week, I still hold that the final will be Belgium against England. Yes, over the Fourth of July Weekend, I will be rooting for England.

    Finally, some good news with Summer Camp, as it has taken up my whole week. The pediatrician’s office got the revised vaccination form to me today; a whole day earlier than they said. The weight taken off, not only my shoulders, but my wife’s shoulders, is enormous! The kid will get to go to summer day camp! She gets to be around kids again! We all get a break from each other! I feel like I won the lottery!

    One last thing. After my wife’s birthday, which was in the middle of June, I decided that I would do another thirty days of no alcohol. I did it last year as a sort of detox and reset on getting healthy. I was told that when you stop drinking you begin to notice changes such as, the ability to sleep through the night, your complexation clears up, you become more focus, and relaxed, and you lose weight. When I did it last year, I noticed none of those benefits. Nothing. I couldn’t sleep, I had a bad complexation, I was foggy, not relaxed, and I put on weight. Sure, it was the middle of the pandemic, but I thought I would have got something. This time around, I can report that I am, in fact, sleeping better, and through the night. As for the other benefits, again, nothing. Seems to be that I might have to do this five more times before I start seeing all the benefits at once.

  • Summer Day Camp Anxiety

    This is the first Summer that we are dealing with sending the kid to day camp. All the pre-schools that our daughter has been in were all year, so there really wasn’t a “Summer” time, as the school never really came to an end. Now that we have finished Kindergarten and are going into First Grade, that means real Summer Camps.

    I will admit that I started this whole process way too late. But, I do have the kid in a day camp that starts next week, which is a relief. But we live in the time of COVID, which means a crap ton of hoops to jump through.

    There was quite a stack of forms that needed to be filled out. They were a stack of online forms, but it still did take me an afternoon to fill everything out. And I am still fill out stuff. And I just found out that she has two vaccines that she hasn’t received yet and needs for camp. Her yearly physical is in August, but now we have to go to the doctor’s office and get them. And then resubmit all the forms!

    And then there’s daily lunches that I need to send with her. I don’t know why this is giving me so much anxiety, but it is. The place is a nut free camp, not surprised or upset about that, but as I look back on what I have been feeding the kid over the past year, nuts shows up in about half of the stuff. And I also feel that I need to be really creative when it comes to her food.

    This is our daughter’s first chance to be around kids her age for about six hours a day, and I just want it to go right. I want her to have fun, and make friends, and learn stuff, and… be a kid with kids. She hasn’t had that in over a year and I desperately want her to have that again. Just to have Summer fun.

  • Summer Grocery Shopping

    The school year is coming to a close here in NYC. As of this moment we only have 6 days left of remote school, and we all can’t wait for it to be over. Come September, the kid will be back in class, like a normal elementary schooler, and there will be so much joy and excitement for that occasion, it already feels like it’s going to be Christmas Morning on that first day of school.

    In the meantime, it’s still the Dad/Daughter Experience for the Summer.

    Yesterday, as we got out of class early, I had to go shopping at Trader Joe’s. I didn’t see any reason why the kid couldn’t come with me, as the store is allowing people to shop together again. If nothing else, it would kill an hour of the day, which was better than her watching TV.

    Getting there did mean a subway ride, which is slowly beginning to feel normal to me again. For the kid, mass transit is still an adventure, and now it’s more exciting as she can read, and loves checking out all the ads on the train. Stepping down into one station, and then appearing out of another, is like magic as you get transported to a whole new world; Like the Upper West Side. Once in the store, she was a good kid, and is now big enough to push the cart for me, unassisted, so she was really helping out, and not fake praise helping out.

    As we walked to the subway station to go back to Harlem, the kid was excited about the ice cream we had bought, and I wondered how much of this she would remember later in life. I have foggy relocations of going grocery shopping with my mother during summer vacation when I was my kids age, and at the time it was just a thing we did, but now it has taken on more of a melancholy reminiscence. A very important mundane experience that I value more today.

  • Summer is Coming

    For the first time, in a very long time, I’m actually getting excited for Summer. Usually, Summer in New York means loud window a/c’s, hot/sticky/smelly subway stations, sweating outside and then freezing when you step inside a store. Really, it’s just the oppressive and, honestly, offensive humidity, which blankets the City for two months and sometimes more, that really killed me.

    The heat of New York City was optimized for us, as we got married in 2011, outdoors, on the hottest day of that year, with a temp of 104. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great day, and I wouldn’t change it, as it was a day we will never forget, for multiple reasons. But after that day, my tolerance for heat just went down the toilet. I have been living a decade in dread when June approaches.

    Yet, this year, I’m looking forward to it. I know that this is due to being vaccinated, which is giving us the ability to go forth, mask-less in most situations. The idea of being outside in the heat sounds like freedom to me. The ability to travel, and see friends again; it’s like Christmas morning. I’m looking forward to a car trip. Driving to some faraway place, and getting out of the car and not worrying about being near people.

    Also, this will be the kid’s first real Summer vacation out of school. She might do a day camp, and we have an idea of a small vacation, but on the whole, she will be free to do nothing during the Summer. Splash parks and pools will be visited, and sleeping in late because it’s a Tuesday seem to be in order. It will be fun to live vicariously through her Summer experience, because out of everything that has happened in the school year, at least the Summer will be close to normal for her.