Or as I like to say, “Hooray! It’s September, and I survived another summer without bankrupting my company or misplacing a child (mine or someone else’s)!”
They say it takes a village. I had never really thought I had a village, but looking back on the summer of 2017, I now know I do. Sometimes you don’t have a ready-built one, like a big family in town, ready to babysit at a moment’s notice. Sometimes you have to create a village, and some of that requires getting out of your comfort zone and asking for help. I managed to piecemeal a successful summer together, inviting friends to join the kids at some great summer camps in exchange for some help getting them back and forth. I took client calls from the parent lounge at Sky Zone and squeezed in coffee meetings in between play dates. I dragged the kids along to deliver magazines and put them to work helping me load and deliver more than 400 pounds of Dunk Hunger food donations to FeedMore (which was a great experience for us all). The kids were invited to friends’ houses to play often enough, but living in a neighborhood with not too many kids around, there were times when I had to ask their friends’ parents if the boys could come over for a bit. I always tell the kids it isn’t polite to invite yourself over to someone’s house, but desperate times sometimes called for desperate measures, and I figured the parents could always come up with an excuse for why it didn’t suit. Reciprocating is important in the world of kid-swapping and village-building, so we were always happy to have friends and neighbors come to our house as often as we could. Bribery works well too, so sending them to a friend’s with say, solar eclipse glasses to hand out, seemed to be a good trick, for this summer anyway.
Only once this summer did I completely forget about one of my kids (not something to brag about, you say?). I was mortified when it didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t made a plan for my younger son until one hour and fifteen minutes after his camp ended! Thank goodness the neighbor who was in charge of carpool that day noticed my car wasn’t in the garage when she dropped him off and took him home until I came to my senses (And boy, it takes a real friend to not even interrupt my meeting to let me know I had forgotten about him!). I’m sure I’ll always remember exactly where I was when I realized I had forgotten about my own kid! #parentfail
It takes a village to run a successful magazine, too, and as always, members of our tiny team have powered through their own busy summers full of family juggling to make sure the RFM Street Team was at all of the fun summer events we sponsored, kept the RFM Insider coming to your inboxes with weekly calendar highlights, contests, and more, and of course, to produce an amazing magazine each month.
I hope we’ve helped your summer run a bit more smoothly – with parenting tips, travel ideas, recipes, book recommendations, and the RFM calendar!
Enjoy reading this issue of RFM. I can’t wait to see what fall has in store for us all!
