Back. To. School.

Please understand, I love my babies with abandon.

But don't let those cute, chocolately faces fool you. Two whole, looooooooooong months of them running amok around this house? Drinking up all the punch, leaving potato chip crumbs all over my good couch and sticky toxic waste-like juice spills on the floors and counters, watching endless SpongeBob, iCarly, and Phineas and Ferb reruns, slamming doors, screaming like lunatics, tattling like little rats, engaging in straight up Ali/Frazier hand-to-hand combat, and interrupting my business calls, talking about, “I’m bored”?

Oh yeah, it is time for them… to… go.

I mean, we had our bright moments this summer, Mari and Lila and I: Those Christmas presents—particularly the Tasty Science, Chemistry Lab, Fashion Studio, and countless Wii games—helped break up the monotony. And my sister-in-law Angelou and my mother-in-law, Helen, are complete saints for taking these little nuts off my hands for nights at a time to hang with Miles and Cole, my equally zany nephews who, somehow, manage to cancel out the girl craziness by being crazy—in my in-law’s house. For like, five minutes a piece and whatnot. And importing their little friends over to the house kinda took the drama down a notch or two, too, except that five little giggly girls decked out in “party” dresses for fancy guest room soirees replete with a feast of Tostitos, Cheez-its, and Chewy Sweet Tarts, can trash a room better than Axl Rose on a post-concert adult elixir high.

Mostly, Mari and Lila wanted to hang up under Nick and I. We went to the Atlanta Zoo. We hung out at the Atlanta Aquarium. They took cooking camp at the Young Chef’s Academy (as chronicled here on MyBrownBaby), and art camp with a fantastic teacher I wrote about here on The Parenting Post a few weeks ago. We even all got bikes and went riding through a new park near our home, and my Dad pinch-hit when he visited for a week, taking my girls to the movies, long walks around the neighborhood and for ice cream at Carvel.

Some days, when my girls are acting human and the sun isn’t totally broiling us to a crisp and it’s peaceful and I’m not feeling overwhelmed, I think maybe this summer vacation stuff isn’t a bad thing—that it’s nice to have my babies here with me, enjoying a life of leisure and endless downtime, totally unstressed by homework and tests and soccer practice and trumpet and piano lessons and PTA meetings and fast food dinners and the wicked after-school schedule that makes life with kids feel like some kind of ramped-up super treadmill you can’t get off.

Of course, all of this is really sweet and great and all for, like, the first few days. But 60? 60 days of Mari and Lila acting a straight fool in this house?!

Uh, uh—no ma’am. Jesus be the homeroom bell on the first day of school after a long break.

Come Monday, they’ll be gone.

Let the church say, Aaaaaaaaaaa-men!

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