I haven’t posted anything in a month, seriously A MONTH! How did that happen? How did the end of July sneak up on me? Maybe it’s because summer days tend to kind of run into each other. Also, we’re so busy with all the going to the beach, and playing in the sand, and eating ice cream, time just kind of flies by. (I know, poor me…)

Summer often feels like unchartered territory. A friend of mine asked on facebook what “good mothers” feed their children every day for three months at lunch, and that got me thinking how summertime is yet another thing that serves to mess with insecure mothers’ lives. My friend isn’t the main cook in her house, her husband is, but he’s at work during the day so lunchtime is in her hands now and she hates cooking… and lunchtime is never a problem during the school year for Italian moms because all kids eat in the cafeteria, and cafeteria food in Italy is a long shot from what it is in the US. But now that the kids are home she feels the pressure of presenting her children with a meal they are willing to eat every day that is just as nutritious as the fare offered in school, not an easy feat.

My problem isn’t so much the feeding as the entertaining. I don’t know what to do with them all day for three months. I tend to always try to settle into a routine, cause that’s how I function, but I can tell that after a couple of weeks of the same, or very similar, days, day in and day out, my kids get bored and I have to shake it up. Shaking it up is hard for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be one of those pinterest mothers with the summer bucket lists that actually get done (and also get presented on pinterest with great graphics and interesting fonts) but I’ve never been able to so much as come up with a bucket list, much less put one in action. And yet I sit here thinking the summer is almost half over, (schools start mid September here) and it’s the only time of year where my kids are a hundred percent mine, and I am a hundred percent theirs. I don’t go to the gym, I don’t run errands without them, I don’t have coffee mornings with the girls, and they don’t have all the activities that require me carting them around all day. It’s just the three of us, all day, day in and day out.

We’re leaving the beach on Thursday to go home (finally, I know, right? How could I possibly be complaining about being at the beach?), the Husband is beyond thrilled as he’s tired of seeing us only on the weekends, and I have to come up with stuff to do for another six weeks. Oy Vey!

Anyone have any suggestions? Simple stuff, stuff that doesn’t require four different outfit changes, stuff that even the laziest of mothers can do in the sweltering heat. ( basically nothing from pinterest). The possibilities are endless…

Also, and this is completely unrelated, I have got the world’s noisiest upstairs neighbors in the beach apartment. They assemble Ikea furniture in the middle of the night (believe me, I’ve assembled enough Ikea furniture myself that I recognize the sounds), they come home at four a.m. and walk around in heels for half an hour, and these are just to of a whole host of other random and incessant noises. Tonight, for example, it really sounds like they went out and got themselves a pet elephant.

Speaking of Ikea, last week I went to get some cabinets for my laundry room here (more like laundry cubby, but anyways…), I had a few boxes, unloaded them and carted the to the apartment building. As I was loading them in the elevator one of my neighbors arrives, a sprightly gentleman in his late fifties, early sixties. He tries to bypass my boxes (half of which were already loaded in the elevator) so I politely ask him if he wanted to go ahead of me, (me, the lone woman, sweating and grunting, trying to maneuver boxes of furniture into an elevator) and he nimbly jumps over the boxes saying “I’m only going to the second floor” and takes off in the elevator with half my boxes. Two days later and I’m still getting over the shock. Seriously, how rude can one possibly be? At the very least he could’ve taken the stairs. I mean really, two floors!

I believe I’m starting to get sick of the beach, hating thy neighbors is probably the first sign I need to stop with all the “vacationing” (only mothers will understand the quotation marks) and get home!!