If you’re familiar with the phenomenon of “year-round” school, you’re acquainted with the concept of Track-Out. Instead of a long summer break once every 10 months, your kids “track out” for roughly 3 weeks every quarter. They spend approximately 9 weeks tracked in to school, followed by 3 weeks tracked out. For two elementary-school-aged boys, 21 days is just enough time for them to move through the following stages before you gladly send them back to school.
1) Sweetness and gratitude. When they wake up and realize they can stay in their pajamas, it’s like Santa and Pikachu had a baby and called it “Mom”. You are never more loved and appreciated than after you deliver good news you have absolutely no control over. If you toss them a pancake or two and give them the remote, you’ll be automatic Mother of the Year. In the beginning, they’re just thankful not to be at school. They seize every opportunity to play together, happily rediscovering toys they’ve forgotten and athletic equipment that there’s usually not time to lug out. You lavish upon them frequent trips to the park and meals incorporating their favorite foods. You love them. They love you. They love each other. Your home is a blissful utopia of grilled cheese, energetic playfulness, and good-natured potty humor.
2) Aggressive joy. Lazy mornings watching Bey Blades on Netflix eventually give way to chaos like a busted levy. All the energy saved up through extra couch-time explodes into the afternoon. The interior of your home is no match for the ferocity of their joy, so you try to tamp it down by screaming at them about not wrestling in the house, jumping on couches, punting socks into the stairwell, or sprinting through the kitchen like their balls are on fire. But their joy is far too loud. Your words are drowned out. You appear to them like a red-faced image on an IPad with the volume on mute. So you release them into the backyard like a pair of Tasmanian devils in a cloud of laughter and farts. They yell at you through the sliding glass door that you should come outside and watch them fight over this deflated football. You decline, claiming you have to start making dinner. It’s 3:00 in the afternoon.
3) Hair-triggered rage. One minute, they’re best friends living the dream of imaginary soccer championships on the deck. The next, they’re in each other’s faces like WWE wrestlers trying to generate hype for their next beat-down or wailing like someone just pulled out their fingernails with a pair of rusty pliers. Every interaction from playing football to riding next to each other in the car deteriorates into the equivalent of a human bullfight. One kid taunts the other with the infuriating red cape of verbal provocation while the other flares his nostrils and charges like a rabid beast. This cycle repeats itself so often in a day that you gradually stop intervening, as their apparent intention is a battle to the death over something ridiculous, like who gets to use the bathroom first. The honeymoon is clearly over. It’s “War of the Roses” from this point on.
4) Unwarranted butt-hurt. The depth to which your sons are inconvenienced by accompanying you to the grocery store is endless, even when you explain there will be no more peanut butter sandwiches until you physically go there and purchase more bread. When, due to excessive jack-assery, you forbid them from hanging onto the grocery cart like a pair of drunken hobos hitching a train ride, the travesty of this injustice can be expressed only by the volume of their sighs and the intensity of their eye rolls. And if you dare allow one son to put more items than the other into the cart, go ahead and report yourself to Social Services because there is no mother on earth more evil and abusive than you.
5) Debilitating IPad addiction. Despite your attempts to ration out IPad time like wheels of government cheese, the demand has surged to unhealthy levels. Your sons are determined to find the end of YouTube Kids by watching video after video of other children opening toys and playing with them. You try to explain the irony of this to them. They fail to see your point and secretly plot to rappel from the refrigerator to the charging station on the counter, so they can snatch the IPads while you’re in the bathroom.
6) Crippling laziness. The memory of being awake, dressed, and productive before 9 am is faint and distant for them, like a forgotten dream. The sense of urgency you carefully cultivated while school was in session has dissolved into a pile of pillows and pajama pants on your couch. They cannot be bothered to put on the shoes you’ve set out directly in front of them, even if the next step is going to the playground. If socks or jackets are required, you may have to dress them like infants because that level of effort is beyond their capacity for exertion. And when they refuse to play with toys because they’d rather be bored than have to clean up after themselves again, you know it’s the end of Track-Out.
Better get their asses back to school before their brains and bodies atrophy into two boy-sized couch cushions that smell like dirty feet and flatulence.
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