How many summers left with your kids?

There's a piece of arithmetic that stops most parents mid-sentence: from the day your child is born to the day they turn eighteen, you get about eighteen summers. Not an abstraction — eighteen actual stretches of long evenings and no school, and every one that passes is spent for good. If your child is ten, you're down to eight. It's a small enough number to count on your fingers, which is exactly what makes it hard to look at.

The number matters because summer is where the concentrated time lives. Term-time is logistics — packed lunches, pickups, the seven rushed minutes before bed. Summer is the unhurried version of your child, the one who'll still build the fort and take the long way back. And the count is quieter than it looks: the last few summers before eighteen belong increasingly to friends, first jobs and closed bedroom doors. The summers that are fully yours are mostly the early ones — and they go first.

None of this is a reason for guilt, and it doesn't call for a grand itinerary. It calls for deciding on purpose. Pick one thing this summer that your child will still talk about in twenty years — a trip, a tradition, a week where you're simply, unhurriedly around — and put it on the calendar before the season fills itself in for you. The summers will pass either way. The only choice you get is whether they pass by design or by default.