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I was reminded recently that this is our last official summer break. When my son returns to high school in a couple of weeks, he’ll begin our family’s final year in public school.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I want to do cartwheels and cheer kicks. On the other hand, I want to do cartwheels, cheer kicks, and toss in a human pyramid for good measure.

Mixed emotions. No doubt about it.

There are parents who will tell you that childhood passes oh, so quickly. Savor every moment, they’ll say, because it’s gone in the blink of an eye.

Don’t listen to them. They’re making these observations from the No Sharp Objects wing of their local funny farm, and simply cannot be trusted. Childhood in this house has lasted 792 years, not counting the three centuries it took each of our kids to finish junior high.

Of course, I’m talking emotional years,’ much in the same way one measures the relative ages of dogs. “How long has your daughter been in the seventh grade?” is a perfectly legitimate question, and the answer is usually, “Decades.” Both of our girls started bawling on their 12th birthdays and didn’t stop until they went away to college. (Technically, I’m not sure they stopped bawling then. We just chose to ignore requests for face time’ during the first six weeks of school.)

Our sons, on the other hand, became enraged with humanity somewhere around age fourteen. It was the craziest thing: one day they were at peace with the world and their place in it, and the next the entire solar system was conspiring to inconvenience them. This would start at the time that the earth, with malice aforethought, rotated toward the sun-known to sane people simply as morning’-and continued throughout the day as teachers, bus drivers, scout leaders, girls, facial hair, pencil sharpeners, floor wax, and their pores went about the business of making them look stupid.

No amount of logic could convince our boys otherwise. “Son,” we would say, “your gym teacher did not major in Public Humiliation of a Minor. As you point out every time we’re at the mall, Public Humiliation of a Minor was our course of study, and your gym teacher is never at the reunions.”

This isn’t to say that after this last summer break, we won’t remain on a school year / summer vacation-type schedule. How many of us have to resist the urge to buy college ruled notebook paper and assorted highlighters during the first week of September? And if we’re being honest, most of us will admit we feel a little shafted when we’re still going to work after Memorial Day. No yearbook, no locker cleanout, no senior trip.

Besides, if your kids are like ours-who hate school and yet have decided to keep taking classes until we’re dead-there doesn’t need to be an absolute end to summer break. Play those college cards right, and every June will bring fledgling adults winging back to the nest, where they’ll spend the next three months explaining to their parents how everything they’ve ever thought, done, or believed was socially irresponsible hogwash. There is no one on earth more brilliant and insightful than a 19-year old who has just passed Psych 101.

We’re not entirely there, of course. We’ve got one more senior year to navigate. One more year of group projects, book reports, civics class and show choir. A final round of sports seasons, school dances, ditching English and sleeping through Seminary. Months from now we’ll attend our last high school graduation, proud and happy and relieved.

As for now, we’ll make the most of these last days of our last official summer vacation. We’ll sleep in, cook out, and maybe get in a little midnight putting on the golf course behind our house.

And if, on summer breaks to come, our kids choose to reclaim their old bedrooms for a few weeks and wipe out the pantry each night after their dad and I go to bed, well, I suppose that will be all right, too.

After all, these years go by so quickly.

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