I never wanted to be one of those parents who counts down the hours till
summer vacation ends so he can get a little peace and quiet again. I
never wanted to be a lot of things. I never wanted to be a hard boiled
antihero either, with a .44 Magnum and a taste for fast Irish women,
but you play the hand you were dealt. The fact is, studies show that a
well-trained teacher does a better job of preventing my children from
destroying my sofa than I can. And just being in school instead of home
spilling a blueberry smoothie on my computer can add up to eighty years
to a child's life. You can't sniff at those statistics.

The best answer during the summer is to take the kids outdoors where
they can hike and bike and dissipate their energies without doing any
real damage. So last weekend we drove to Acadia National Park in Maine
and returned with eleven new stitches just below Emily's left knee.
The ten hours in the car and the afternoon we spent in the Bar Harbor
emergency room notwithstanding, our trip was every bit as fun and relaxing
as a moose attack.

Children have always been the worst relaxers ever. They hate relaxing
and campaign hard to end the practice by others. Yet parents persist in
thinking this time, this year's family vacation will be a break
from their jobs sword-fishing in the North Atlantic. Then they return
from Knott's Berry Farm and offer to go out on the high seas any time,
in any weather. Family vacations have been driving productivity in this
country for decades. You practically have to beg American workers to take
a week off. The irony is that if we ever figured out how to stop brothers
from terrorizing their sisters in restaurants, the American economy
would never recover and the terrorists who aren't our children would win.

My idea of the perfect solution--the fantasy getaway for both parents
and kids, would be some kind of cruise, maybe to tropical Caribbean
ports, with exciting supervised activities for kids, and spas, dance
clubs and fine dining for the adults. The whole thing could even have
an overarching theme, like a Disney or Pixar theme. Unfortunately this
idea lives only in my mind. Plus I just remembered I hate boats.

Anyway I'm more than ready for school to start on Tuesday. I just hope
my girls don't hold everyone else back for the first few weeks as they
prod their rusty brains into multiplying, conjugating, and locating
their assigned cliques in the lunch room again. My kids seem to take
the anti-academic spirit of summer vacation to new extremes every year,
refusing to solve any problems, use numbers, or even make the intellectual
effort required to avoid soiling themselves for two and a half months.
When I came home last night to find them all watching Fox News I finally
had to intervene, giving each of them an IV drip and cutting the power
just seconds before The O'Reilly Factor. It was a very close call, but
within half an hour they were lucid enough to begin destroying the sofa
again, and I knew they were out of danger.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset with his fast Irish wife and three antihero
children who aren't afraid to break all the rules... and a few hearts!