It’s Labor Day weekend, that last hurrah of summer here in Northwest Ohio.
It’s that last chance to relax and enjoy all the wonders of the hottest season here.
Unfortunately, around my house, Labor Day weekend really focuses on the “labor” part of it.
We just don’t see enough three-day weekends, so it’s when our biggest projects generally fall. We’re weekend warriors when it comes to fixing up our house or organizing our increasingly disorganized lives.
It’s funny how hard we work to afford a house we like living in, yet we get to spend so little time in it. You know what they say about raising kids: The hours go by slowly, but the years fly by quickly.
We don’t have much planned over the weekend. For our 8-year-old, she was so excited about that: “It’s going to be a long weekend!” she exclaimed joyfully. I responded, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be a long weekend,” I responded with a great deal less enthusiasm.
Our schedules are busier and busier with the kids’ activities, especially now that we have two high schoolers each playing separate sports (one golf, one volleyball). Add in our fondness for watching football, and there just isn’t much room for the little projects that make such a big difference at home.
We’ll be out cleaning up the yard before it becomes too cold to do so.
My wife plans to repaint the posts on the front of our house and the front door. We’ll be updating the locks too.
There are other less difficult jobs that will only take a few minutes, like replacing a toilet seat that likes to wiggle around as if it’s dancing.
There’s some new technology floating around our house that needs a little bit of the head nerd’s expertise.
None of these things are that difficult, yet finding a few days in a row to handle them is harder and harder to do.
So, too, is finding time to lounge around the house with all of our children together. They’ve somehow grown up to be social creatures despite my own reclusive ways. They like spending time with their friends and often require rides to other houses. Sometimes I feel more like an Uber driver than a dad.
So we’ll spend our final weekend of the summer doing a lot of labor at our house. Fortunately, it’s all a labor of love.
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David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.
