How to End a School Year: Limping

Last night, I fed my family dinner at 8:30 pm (a pizza from Little Caesars) and then finally got my kids in bed at 10:10. Bottom Line: I tucked my 4^th and 5^th grade daughters into bed after 10 pm on a school night – however, they had both eaten and slept in a 24 hour time period so we’re chalking that up to a win. This morning, they were 12 minutes late for class. More confessions: My older daughter has one pair of shoes that she can wear to school, and her big toes have started wearing holes in the front of them because she’s growing so fast. I keep begging her to hang in there with the shoes because I don’t want to buy her another pair before the year ends. Everyone knows kids don’t wear real shoes during the  summer and whatever fits her now won’t fit when she goes back to school in the fall. The next two and a half months of shoeless bliss also mean something else that I’m looking forward to waaaaay more than is socially acceptable…throwing away all their socks so I can start fresh in the fall. When I did laundry last week, I counted 42 socks that did not have a match. Forty. Two. How does that even happen? Where do 42 individual socks hide? An unsolved mystery for another blog. A summer of bare feet and flip flops means no need for socks and so all the socks will go to sock heaven…and all God’s people said amen! My kids took their standardized tests the first week of April, and after that we all hung up our book bags and went on auto pilot. Except that there were still 6 weeks of classes, reports, school plays, field trips, rocket launches and a school-wide marine biology event requiring participation from both the kids and volunteer time from the parents. Pretty much the only thing our family can take any credit for these last few weeks is that we showed up, albeit late and insufficiently shod. Two weeks ago, on Wednesday, one of my daughters realized she hadn’t read any of the book she was supposed to do a report about on Friday. Bless it. Perhaps her lapse in memory can be attributed to the squeezing of her toes. Wednesday afternoon and evening she read 105 pages of the book but still had at least that many left. After school on Thursday, I did what any good mother would do: Rented the movie version of the book on Netflix and helped her cut pictures out of a magazine for the report poster WHILE WE WATCHED IT. I’m not sure if my kids have had homework since then because I haven’t asked, they haven’t brought it up nor have they done any. Thus, we are limping across the finish line of another school year. Limping, but finishing. Alleluia, we will give our last stumbling efforts and limp across that smeared chalk line between school and summer. But verily, verily I say unto you, 10 weeks from now, we will humbly bow our knee at the school gates and beg the saints that serve there to take our children back – new shoes and all! Why am I telling you all this? I guess I’m hoping I’m not alone…I suspect I’m not. But, sometimes you need to hear the weary Battle Cry of Finishing from other moms and dads. Who’s with me!?! How are you finishing?