If Wednesday can be known universally as “hump day”, then I believe that the first week of August should be forever-more referred to as “SLUMP week”… that nasty week in mid-summer when you suddenly realize that the summer is more than half over and you haven’t gotten to even half of the “absolutely, positively going to do this” items on your summer to do list.
We start experiencing “SLUMP week” when we are children going to school. As kids, the sobering realization that there are only 24 or 25 days remaining until school starts again is enough to spur a frenzied round of play-dates and trips to Wonderland.
It is during this week that parents are routinely berated for wasting precious summer daylight hours by doing totally superfluous and unnecessary things like tending to personal hygiene, earning a living or grocery shopping. Why, during “SLUMP week”, even the hint of rain is cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth. How dare it rain when precious summer hours are draining away like so much fine sand through the hourglass of life…?
Speaking of rain, (yes… I am going to go “THERE”, but I’ll try to be brief) this year, “SLUMP week” is particularly hard to bear, because we haven’t really had much summer weather at all. In fact, I'll go as far as o suggest that - if the months were named after the weather we’ve had - this year to date would go something like this:
January, February, March, March, April, April, May.
Now it remains to be seen how the month of August will go, but based on the first 4 days, I’m not feeling very optimistic. I’m awfully concerned that we may be stuck in May for another blasted month.
But getting back to our original topic… I think I’m going to have to do something drastic to pull us all out of our mid-summer slump. With that in mind, I’ve already initiated the “lets visit your cousins” gambit and scheduled that much anticipated annual visit as something to look forward to - knowing that an event you WANT to happen (2 days visiting with cool, older cousins) will take MUCH longer to arrive than an event you could very well live without (the dreaded start of yet another school year).
So now I have to get serious... I need to start working on getting a few of those items on the summer “to do” list crossed off so the first week of September doesn’t end up being “DOWN IN THE DUMP” week.
Happy “SLUMP week”!
Your timing is bang-on. Wednesday, the kids were bemoaning that summer was almost over and they hadn't done half of what they had intended, when I came home and read your post. Too funny.
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