Five Reasons I Can’t Sit Around During the Summer 

Everyone hates on teachers during the summer. I totally get it. But we need those summer days away from kids and work and thinking and solving problems for kids. We just need a brain break away.

On the flip side, when you don’t have many friends or family around, it’s hard to find things to do. I send my daughter to daycare most of the summer because she needs that interaction with kids so that leaves me with not too much to do. So that leaves me with the sun and my wallet. Why is this a problem you say? Well, lots of reasons! Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons why I can’t sit around and do nothing this summer as a teacher.

1. I will buy everything. This is not an exaggeration. If I have nothing else to do, I will start shopping. I will buy stuff for my classroom, I will stuff for my daughter, I’ll buy clothes, food, coffee, plants, stuff for my house, my backyard and literally anything else that I can do which usually requires money. Amazon Prime is my serious downfall but now that I have nothing to do during the day, I go visit stores and keep a’chargin. The worst part is that I am not making extra money (although I keep trying) so the more I spend is just out of my regular pay check…. all equaling down to the key word: BROKE.

2. I think too much. Right now my mom is here and my dad will be here next and last week I was away in New York with family and friends, but when they all leave, I will just be left with my thoughts and my broke credit card. During the summer, I have too much time to think. I think about life, my friends, dwell on things that happen and what doesn’t happen. It is not surprising that last summer I started this blog! This blog was my focus last summer so that took away a lot of my thinking and then I was able to focus my thinking on blogging. This year I am focusing my thinking on Instagram and Facebook audiences but still… too much thinking time!

3. I dress up my daughter and take way too many pictures of her.  Not that everyone doesn’t loveeee pictures of my daughter, especially when I dress her up in cute little dresses. But she doesn’t always love it! So I think that when it’s summer time, Hailey gets dressed up way more than normal and social media sees way more pictures of her than normal!

4. I start reorganizing, cleaning, selling and throwing away things.  Usually this is a really good thing, however, when there is so much time, it ends up turning into a bad thing. I will start selling things that I probably will need eventually but not at the moment, I throw away lots of things that maybe I should keep. I basically do some purging (last summer we moved – so the purging was the real deal) and everything gets changed around and then….. I refer back to number 1, because now I need to buy new things.

5. I wish my friends from home were around. Going back to #2 where I think too much, it takes me to wishing that my friends from home were here. It is always a tease when I come home in the beginning of the summer and get to see everyone and then all of a sudden, I am back at my house and have no friends around to hang out with. There are a few of them but a lot of them keep to themselves so I end up spending a lot of time by myself. But always during that time I am wishing my friends from home were around so I could see them and talk to them and hang out with them.

This is a drastic cycle. It always circles back. #1 never goes away and it is definitely the worst. There is nothing easier to do than spend money when you are bored.

I wonder if this list is something that other teachers out there can relate to. I think my next post will be how I can beat these 5 and actually not be broke by the end of each summer month!