School daze out, summer haze in!
It is that time of year again. When all parents' children become impossible to wake up. This condition is not due to any reported illness on CNN, MSNBC, Fox or any other alphabet soup news medium. You won't find any articles about this condition on the internet. In fact it will go unnoticed if you do not have school age children.
If you DO have children in school, you know what I am referring to. It is commonly referred to as School's Almost Done Syndrome.
Some kids have a similar condition all year round. A School Always Sucks condition....they never wanted to go to school, not from the first day of kindergarten. Not all kids get SAS, but the SAS kids can get SAD. All kids have another condition for a day or two around holiday breaks or final exam times, the Time Off for Present. TOPs is short lived because they all know they go back again in a week or two.
SAD hits 99.9% of the school going children right around 2 weeks before school is out for summer. When the condition strikes they become the unwilling participants in their own lives and make their parents pay dearly for making them go to school.
I will use my daughter as an example. She is usually the one who will get out of bed on a school day with no problem during most of the year. Most days she would get out of bed with little to no prodding. She would be a little sleepy, but quickly the sleepy haze leaves her and she would become acclimmated to being awake and gets on with her day.
Lately, however, it is a little like waking the dead. I am beginning to believe she hibernates for 8 hours a night. She goes into such a deep sleep that, if left alone, she would not wake from until the last day of school. My sweet angel of a childm who once would wave to me sweetly right after she woke up, now peers at me through a mop-like hairdo as if she is coming off of a 3 day bender. It is a bit frightening, as her sleepy stares are turning into glowers....as if she blames me for making school early in the morning and she will have her revenge. Her verbal skills are clearly lacking, the only words I can discern are, "I'm tired." Or maybe it is, "You're fired." Or possibly, "Time fly red." It probably isn't the last one, but I'm not ruling anything out at this moment.
If I wasn't familiar with this time of year I might get a priest out for an exorcism, believing there is no way a child can go from one extreme to the other without a little goofy ghost making them a host for whatever ghostly whims they have. However, this isn't my first time at the dance, I have been around the block, and whatever other bumper sticker cliche fits. I have experienced this with my son, who s now a teenager, and seems to have a touch of SAS since he became a teenager.
All school age children sense that school is almost over, there are no big projects for the rest of the year, and essentially they are just taking up space at school before they can pick up their report cards and get their parents off of their backs. They know they only have 8 days left....and they are in such as daze nothing is getting through to them. The teachers might as well fill the desks with stray dogs and piles of rocks, because the students aren't learning....they are having visions of vacations and meandering from house to house, looking for friends, food and something to do. Each day they come home they do a mental check in their head....another day down, and "x" more to go.
The interesting part of this is once the kids are out of school things get hazy....kids forget that school is how they mark time. Once it is over, the summer haze sets in....Monday is the same as Wednesday. Saturday is when parents who work visit them briefly. Days have no meaning, and months do not matter. They get shuffled from event to event, place to place, and house to house. They have no worries and live like hippies....eating other people's food, barely bathing and sleeping whenever they want. It is this dream that is keeping them in their daze at school. They live to be the bums of summer.
Until around....August. Around the middle of August the "I'm boreds" set in, aka the How Many Times Can I Bother My Mother Before She Enlists Me In The Foreign Legion Syndrome. That is a whole other story I will probably share....the day before school beings in the fall. Until then, I'll be dragging my carcass out of bed in the morning to wake them up in the morning, which is getting harder because I don't want to do it either. Yes, I have SADs, too. but don't tell them.
If you DO have children in school, you know what I am referring to. It is commonly referred to as School's Almost Done Syndrome.
Some kids have a similar condition all year round. A School Always Sucks condition....they never wanted to go to school, not from the first day of kindergarten. Not all kids get SAS, but the SAS kids can get SAD. All kids have another condition for a day or two around holiday breaks or final exam times, the Time Off for Present. TOPs is short lived because they all know they go back again in a week or two.
SAD hits 99.9% of the school going children right around 2 weeks before school is out for summer. When the condition strikes they become the unwilling participants in their own lives and make their parents pay dearly for making them go to school.
I will use my daughter as an example. She is usually the one who will get out of bed on a school day with no problem during most of the year. Most days she would get out of bed with little to no prodding. She would be a little sleepy, but quickly the sleepy haze leaves her and she would become acclimmated to being awake and gets on with her day.
Lately, however, it is a little like waking the dead. I am beginning to believe she hibernates for 8 hours a night. She goes into such a deep sleep that, if left alone, she would not wake from until the last day of school. My sweet angel of a childm who once would wave to me sweetly right after she woke up, now peers at me through a mop-like hairdo as if she is coming off of a 3 day bender. It is a bit frightening, as her sleepy stares are turning into glowers....as if she blames me for making school early in the morning and she will have her revenge. Her verbal skills are clearly lacking, the only words I can discern are, "I'm tired." Or maybe it is, "You're fired." Or possibly, "Time fly red." It probably isn't the last one, but I'm not ruling anything out at this moment.
If I wasn't familiar with this time of year I might get a priest out for an exorcism, believing there is no way a child can go from one extreme to the other without a little goofy ghost making them a host for whatever ghostly whims they have. However, this isn't my first time at the dance, I have been around the block, and whatever other bumper sticker cliche fits. I have experienced this with my son, who s now a teenager, and seems to have a touch of SAS since he became a teenager.
All school age children sense that school is almost over, there are no big projects for the rest of the year, and essentially they are just taking up space at school before they can pick up their report cards and get their parents off of their backs. They know they only have 8 days left....and they are in such as daze nothing is getting through to them. The teachers might as well fill the desks with stray dogs and piles of rocks, because the students aren't learning....they are having visions of vacations and meandering from house to house, looking for friends, food and something to do. Each day they come home they do a mental check in their head....another day down, and "x" more to go.
The interesting part of this is once the kids are out of school things get hazy....kids forget that school is how they mark time. Once it is over, the summer haze sets in....Monday is the same as Wednesday. Saturday is when parents who work visit them briefly. Days have no meaning, and months do not matter. They get shuffled from event to event, place to place, and house to house. They have no worries and live like hippies....eating other people's food, barely bathing and sleeping whenever they want. It is this dream that is keeping them in their daze at school. They live to be the bums of summer.
Until around....August. Around the middle of August the "I'm boreds" set in, aka the How Many Times Can I Bother My Mother Before She Enlists Me In The Foreign Legion Syndrome. That is a whole other story I will probably share....the day before school beings in the fall. Until then, I'll be dragging my carcass out of bed in the morning to wake them up in the morning, which is getting harder because I don't want to do it either. Yes, I have SADs, too. but don't tell them.
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