Bye-bye Tuesday

I think of all the parts of summer, I will miss Tuesdays. Since June, the kids and I have had the same Tuesday morning routine - swimming lessons, coffee/snack downtown, followed by a trip to the library. Sometimes we'll top it off with lunch at Bela's infinite cereal bar, and on really great days we have to swing by the bank which lands the kids a dumdum sucker.

I remember when Allison was a baby I used to scoff at routines. Perhaps it was the barrage of parenting magazine articles about parent-directed scheduling and baby routines which seemed destined to turn you into one of those cookie-cutter, dull, "my Susie is already playing Chopin" parents. Even now, though the YMCA program guide looks so appealing, I hesitate to enroll the kids in more than swimming + one other weekly commitment.

But I think perhaps I was confusing 'routines' with 'schedules.' 'Schedules' are full of stress and now require the computing power of google for me to keep track of what they all entail. Routines, on the other hand, are the neat little predictable things that you learn when you repeat something on a regular basis. For example, my former student works at Brewed Awakenings every other Tuesday. The guy who works every Tuesday now gives the kids a little extra gelato because one day I bought coffee for a women who forgot her wallet. There is a group of older women who have also made Tuesday mornings a coffee/snack time. We run into school friends at the library, and we relish the opportunity to refill the "quiet time" DVD coffers for the week. The kids know what's coming and instantly head off to the "yellow sign" when we come out of the Y. The kids are also usually on good behavior because they know treats, books, and computer time comes when things go well.

When Mom visited in June, she called our Tuesday "very busy." Perhaps it is. Perhaps it's even "scheduled." But I love our Tuesdays. I love our routine. And I will miss it until next summer.