Excerpted from Eve Crawford Peyton’s blog, Joie d’Eve, which appears each Friday on MyNewOrleans.com
I had the week off, but it wasn’t the same.
When I was in high school, “spring break” was something I watched on MTV but never experienced. Whether it was by design, I still don’t know – the rumor was that they only gave us three days off so we couldn’t get into too much trouble, but I suspect it had more to do with the fact that school used to start after Labor Day and we got three days off for Mardi Gras, too. Now, kids at the high school where I work get a week off for both Mardi Gras and spring break, but school starts in the middle of August.
I can’t complain too much, though, because as an employee of my alma mater, I now get the same time off as the students.
There were kids at my high school in the ’90s who made the most of their abbreviated spring break, going to Destin and getting drunk and rowdy and sunburned. But I was not one of those kids, and I spent my spring breaks playing Trivial Pursuit at Shoney’s, pouring Sun-In into my hair at the homes of any of my friends who were lucky enough to have pools, and maybe taking a day trip to Bay St. Louis. It wasn’t glamourous, but it was fun.
These days, though, my spring break looks a little different. Last year, over my week off, I:
- Cleaned all the mail and accumulated debris off of my dining room table.
- Folded 15 baskets of laundry, leaving approximately 87 still to go
- Went strawberry picking with my younger daughter, set the strawberries aside because they were so fresh and delicious that they demanded a special recipe, and then threw them out after they started to rot and leak all over my kitchen counter
- Spent $15 on old ties at Goodwill to use on an Easter egg dyeing method I saw on Pinterest, only to realize they would have turned out better with a $2.99 Paas kit from Walmart
- Grounded my younger daughter from electronics after she hid a dozen Easter eggs all over the living room but could only find nine (we later found the other three, thank God.)
- Somehow got a weird sunburn on one arm only.
- Backed into a tree while parking my minivan and busted out my taillight.
- Went to a wedding that featured a goat wearing a bow tie as the ring bearer.
- Clogged and then unclogged my garbage disposal, spraying myself with potato peels, spinach, and coffee in the process.
- Ate an Easter dinner consisting of a glass of V8 and seven mini-Twix bars stolen from my kids’ Easter baskets.
- Helped my older daughter study for an algebra test, even though I don’t really remember how to do algebra.
- Spilled bacon grease all over my kitchen.
- Watched a lot of true crime shows on Netflix.
- Baked a loaf of bread.
- Wore my monogrammed bathrobe for a solid day.
- Spent too much money at Target, mostly on cleaning products and plastic bins.
- Scrubbed the bathrooms.
- Checked my email a lot.
- Volunteered at my kids’ school.
- Probably got a speeding ticket because I never drive during afternoon school zone hours on a normal day and the school zone flashers never work here.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad week – but I miss the days of streaky hair and Trivial Pursuit at Shoney’s, and this year, I know I’ll actually be just as excited to go back to work as I was to have a week off. (And I’m taking a handful of pilfered mini-Twix with me to the office.)
