Yes, kids are home . . . for 70+ days – Summer counted them and made a point of telling me. She is going to Cedar Point in Sandusky with the “been on the Honor Roll all year” middle school kids. All A’s. Won the science award for the 6th grade for 2007-2008. They go tomorrow.

And tomorrow, her brother starts some three weeks of intensive freshman biology because, well, he flunked the class. I am proud of him: His first term in high school and we had major illnesses in the family . . . and then we find out his grandpa was potentially deathly ill and I took off and left. And he hated labs and was shy and wouldn’t ask for help and got depressed himself and, well, got behind an 8 ball so big it probably was a 100 ball – bowling ball size.

You know what he did? He hitched up his pants, made sure his bootstraps were strong and pulled himself up. At a pivotal point in his life when he could have decided he was a total loser and gone into a funk – sort of like his grandma would have done – he went on and got lots and lots of A’s.

I told him this may be the best thing that ever happened to him. He’ll go in there and come to terms with hands-on science and it will help him will all his science and lab courses. And maybe he won’t blow up the chemistry lab in the next two years. Okay, you know how I am . . . nothing is sacred from a joke.

So think of him tomorrow, please. While his sister is zooming on a roller coaster, he’ll be starting out on a long trek, probably one without exciting thrills – probably one that starts out as a daunting uphill climb and hopefully, somewhere along the path, starts a downward slope toward the finish line.

He can put his hands in the air as he goes across that line, because he will have worked for it . . . he wasn’t just along for the ride.