This has been a weird summer.
I knew it would be because our kids are getting older. This is our first summer with Nicky driving and working. Our kids are also involved in new things - Nicky is on seminary council (or whatever it's called now), Zoe is doing a theatre camp, and Nicky and Daisy have more camps than ever before. Daisy had her first week away from home without any family members (she didn't like it very much). Nicky is taking an online summer class, and he kind of has a girlfriend but won't admit it (she's just his "best friend" that he texts all day and night and holds hands with and sends gag inducing emojis to). Scotty and Nicky have been working at a concert venue for a school fundraiser (this week was Snoop Dogg), and Scotty has recently started his mid-life crisis.
On top of all that, my teenagers have begun sleeping like teenagers. This is new. My kids have never really slept past 7:00 a.m. The first time Nicky “slept in” until 8:00 (back in June sometime), he woke up lost and confused. He said, “Mom, I slept past 8:00. Is that okay?” and I said, “Yes, it’s fine. You didn’t miss anything.” (I have to admit that I did poke my head in his room twice to make sure he was breathing). Then as the summer has gone on, he’s slept later and later. Last week he slept until 10:30, and today* he slept til almost 11:00. Daisy, meanwhile, has started regularly sleeping until 11:00.
When I was finishing my degree a few years ago, I decided to take an adolescent development class, thinking it might come in handy someday. I tried to file away knowledge to come back to when I had teenagers (I could definitely use a refresher now that it’s here), and I recall learning about teenage sleep needs and habits. There has been a lot of buzz in recent years about school start times with some pushing for them to be moved back. This is because teens have a biological delay in their sleep-wake patterns usually beginning at the onset of puberty. It’s been found to happen across cultures and among various levels of technological accessibility. When those hormones set in, teens have a harder time going to sleep before 11:00 pm. One theory is that this is something that helps them prepare to become independent from their parents. In essence, they shift their sleep schedules so they are awake later than their parents and asleep when their parents wake up in order to have time away from them (although with the unhealthy sleep habits of most people I know, parents aren’t sleeping either). So as I learned these things in my adolescent development class, I cataloged the reminder to be patient with my teenagers’ sleeping needs. So fine. Stay up until 1:00 and sleep til 11:00. It’s part of your weird development.
Normally I’d be taking my kids out to do stuff early in the mornings, but that’s not happening so much now between the teens sleeping in and Zoe going to theatre at 8:45 everyday. Mornings are just Eva and me lately, and she’s not exactly happy with all my suggested plans.
Since everyone has been doing this and that, we haven’t really done much as a family. I usually take the kids on lots of outings - hikes, lake days, park hops, etc - just to get out of the house. But this year, I only have one or two kids at a time to “entertain,” and we have small time increments because there’s usually someone I need to be back to pick up. I’m still overwhelmed by the need to bust boredom all day and night, but it’s coming in different forms now.
So, like I said, it's been a weird summer. It’s not better or worse than other summers; it’s just different. I’m trying to get used to Nicky not being around as much. I’m also trying to enjoy some of the perks of having older kids. I actually really like the phase we’re in right now. Having an extra driver is amazing. Being stroller-free is fantastic. Everyone is tall enough to go on every ride at Disneyland… not that we’re going to Disneyland, but this is still a wonderful thing.
*My posts are often written across the span of multiple days, so my “todays” and “yesterdays” are usually inaccurate by the time they are published. So if you’re observant enough to note that this was posted before 11:00 a.m. and yet I’ve claimed my son slept until 11:00 today, that’s because when I wrote “today,” it was actually yesterday. (This is one more reason you can’t believe everything you read on the internet!) Today Nicky woke up at 4:00 a.m. to go to the temple with friends, so he’s probably going to come home and need a nap later, which brings me to another new thing we’re experiencing in our family… Nicky has occasionally been napping. Prior to this summer, I think I could count on one hand the number of naps Nicky has taken since he stopped having regular naps as a toddler. This summer, he has taken a few naps, and when he wakes up, he’s completely delusional. He doesn’t know what day it is or where he is. He can’t figure out what going on, and he doesn’t comprehend that he has been asleep. It takes him a good two hours to be functional again. We tried to feed him dinner after one of his naps, and he couldn’t understand what was happening. He sat down at the table and stared off into space for a while, then he got up and wandered downstairs, and when we called his name, he wouldn’t respond. Is this even safe?
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