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.

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.

I love third party services for this sort of stuff. While I didn’t need them for passports, they have saved my bacon when it came to needing a last minute visa or picking the right itinerary for a complicated international trip.

A friend of mine had to do this. There was a family emergency in the UK and he had to be there ASAP, but his passport had expired. A friend worked for the state department and basically walked over to the passport office in DC, flashed his badge, and said “This guy leaves with a passport today.” It did take all day…

If you expedite and go to the post office, prepare to have the person running your paperwork push back a tiny bit. I’ve had them / heard of them insisting that there’s no need for the rush fee and that it’ll be to you in no time.