Spring break is upon us.  This means many different things, depending on whom you are talking with. 

If you talk with a teacher today you will notice a certain gleam in her/his eye that wasn’t there last week; the crazed, glazed look is temporarily gone.  They have one week of sabbatical, seven glorious days to regroup and recuperate.  They are a happy lot.

If you happen to be a working mom, this is a week of nightmares.  The kids are home, you’re not; they want to go do stuff, you can’t take them; you want them to keep the house clean, they destroy it 24 hours a day instead of just 8; they call you at work eighteen times a day to ask is friends can come over or to tell you that their brother hit them or a lamp got knocked over during a pillow fight.  They want to stay up late; you have to get up early.  By the end of the week, you are ready to kill them.

If you talk with a college student who somehow scraped up enough money to go to South Padre for the week, he/she stayed up all night last night and will sleep during the day.  There will be ten kids to a room, bodies covering every square inch of floor.  For those of us who are used to beds and soft pillows, this may sound like cruel punishment … but for this group, things couldn’t be better.  They can always catch up on their sleep when they’re back in school next week.

My college-aged son decided he couldn’t afford to go anywhere (smart boy), but he has access to a bay house where he and several friends are spending the week.  I asked who all was going and he said, “it was a last resort for all the people who couldn’t come up with the money to do anything else”. 

Then there are those like my oldest daughter who are spending the week working, either because they couldn’t get off work, or they saw this as an opportunity to make more money.

Friday morning saw a whole gaggle of eighth-graders waiting for a bus to take them on a science field trip to Colorado.  A lot of different emotions well up when I talk about my son leaving for a week.

Part of me will miss him … there were several teary-eyed moms in the crowd.  My younger daughter is leaving town also, so part of me is doing cartwheels because I’m going to have an empty house!  Talk about a vacation!

But my husband can’t leave town, so I’ll spend my vacation (a) doing nothing, or (b) cleaning out the garage.  Pretty exciting stuff, huh?

The bus was late getting there, so by the time they were all loaded up we had been there for almost two hours.  Even the teary-eyed parents were looking at their watches; we were all thinking, “OKAY, LEAVE ALREADY!”

But I couldn’t help but think about those poor chaperones.  Who in their right mind would volunteer to go on a bus halfway across the country with forty eighth-graders?  And then have to come back with them, also?  You couldn’t pay me to go on that bus.

I’m thinking that cleaning out the garage is sounding like a whole lotta fun.