Winter break

For some reason, New York State has a week off school in February. When I was a kid, I first enjoyed it. In my mid teens, however, I started thinking that if we didn't have a week off in the dreary gloom of February, maybe we could get out of school a week earlier in the warm sun of June.

Good luck getting NY to change anything when it makes sense, though.

Meanwhile, my kids just had that week off. An entire week where it's too cold to throw them outside all day. Or it's not *that* cold, but it's wet and muddy. Regardless, there's some unfortunate combination of weather that results in my kids spending the bulk of the time indoors.

I once remember as a kid looking at the academic calendar and adding up all the days off, then pushing them to the end of the school year. It was something like three weeks. Given the schools out here, for some reason, run to the end of June, I felt cheated out of half my summer.