Awkward Mom vs. Invisible Grandpa's Summer Bucket List

Summer expectations are difficult to manage. What looks like acres of time and energy to learn a new language, bond with nature, complete the summer reading list, and travel to exotic places somehow becomes 2 abandoned attempts to make homemade chalk and 85 episodes of Paw Patrol. It can be discouraging, so I go online to distract myself, but there I am only met by Perfect Mom's Instagram feed, where she is detailing their epic journey to all the national parks in a tiny house she made herself, the coding homework she developed to battle the Summer Slide, and an actual slide she built in her backyard from sustainable and recycled materials. Ah, summer; how relaxing.

Invisible Grandpa (Super 1st Grader's Imaginary Friend, if you are new to these parts. Welcome, by the way!) has no fear of summer expectations. Huge shock there. Nope, he goes all out. Here, in no particular order, are the summer plans of Invisible Grandpa and Super 1st Grader.

1. Jump off all the trees in the backyard as a way of measuring them.

2. Find a volcano and go swimming in it.

3. Play hide-and-seek with some people who can't see Invisible Grandpa (this would be everyone except Super 1st Grader) and laugh wildly when Invisible Grandpa wins every time.

4. Go to the top of the tallest mountain to meditate for awhile or "maybe do mountaintop stuff."

5. Read everyone else's summer reading lists and then shout the endings at them while they are in the middle of the books.

6. Find out where the stuff in our house was made and take it back there because "they might want it back and we have too much stuff anyway."

7. Go to islands one of three ways; race car that can drive on water (may need to build this), plane that is probably stolen, or speedboat but that's kinda boring for Invisible Grandpa so it's really a transformer.

8. Continue work on the time machine.

9. "When we come back to where we started, we will build things and it will probably take 200 years and that's why we need the time machine."

10. Eat seeds and grow stomach gardens.

11. Try at least 7 new things a day. "Even the stuff we end up not being too great at."

12. Sleep one minute. Just one.

13. Plan the trip to the north pole "but we're not going until winter because Invisible Grandpa wants to kidnap an elf and they are more likely to be sleepy and easier to catch near to Christmas."

Checked in this morning 

and apparently they are midway through #6.