With every serious relationship, I’ve had to sit the other person down around late March and tell them absolutely NO pranks on April Fools Day. Not even harmless ones. Not even cute ones. If this is a dealbreaker, I wish them well.

Honestly? Same.

This.

I had a summer WFH with both kids due to planned entertainment getting cancelled at the last second. After the first week, I forbade the kids from coming to me and saying that they were bored.

When schools in my district have been shut down due to flu, it's never been due to kids being sick. It's that there's not enough staff to keep it open. Subs can only do so much.

The snobbishness thing is real.

I was getting a ton of email for a woman who kept putting down my email as hers. Some of them were NBD, but others included sensitive information, like rental agreements and medical stuff.

Oh, that can totally happen. In my case, I found I liked the cleaner look, so there wasn’t any urge to fill them up again.

I donated anything in good condition. I didn’t feel like having to deal with the hassle of selling, and I was doubtful that I’d get enough for most of them to justify the time spent.

It’s taken me years, but I finally learned to let go of nerd trinkets. The turning point for me was when I realized I had a bunch of crap lying around for things that I didn’t really like anymore, and yet I was still dusting them or trying to find storage space for them.

This kind of review serves several purposes. It does catch some kids up, but it can also help kids who moved into the system over the summer get their feet under them.

I tend to go easy on my kids over the summer, and I’ve never had them struggle when going back to school. The only things I required were summer reading and staying off of screens until after lunch. My youngest does a camp or two because she likes art, but my eldest has always preferred to chill out around the house.…

I’m an only child, as is my oldest friend and my ex. My takeaway: We all had one less thing to be angry about in adulthood.

This.

THIIIIISSSS.

Bless my teachers, because I didn't even know this was a thing.

I feel like I was one of the few kids that actually liked The Great Gatsby, but that was probably because I was already a lover of moody, existentialist crap where you kind of wanted every character to be set on fire.

Our county did away with required summer reading a while back, and I’m so happy. They do encourage kids to read and offer a suggestions list, but that’s it. Heck, even the suggestions are amazing. The HS list was filled with books I could totally see taking to the beach by choice.

The problem we had in our house: Middle Grade books can be hard to track down.

This was why I gave my son a phone in middle school. A teacher could tell a kid to stay after school if they felt they needed help for something coming up (a good thing), but the front office would often close, meaning there was no way for the kid to call home (a bad thing). A cell phone made this a non-issue.