i have my nephews, it means, they still dont do parties but their mother and father dont know what to do, they would want to go out, they dont like to be day by day at home without activities, their parents because of work cant do much for their wishes

it is boy and girl and summer vacation means more fighting verbaly with them, that's their thing and they are so loud when they start arguings

their parents already worry or think what they can do to get them out, they are full of life, not to spend summer vacation at home

The summers I was able to spend at home with my kids were the best medicine this traumatized piece of white trash ever had. Helped me right through those agoraphobia phases with their enthusiasm. Being one of the few adult supervised houses in the neighborhood gave us support beyond my belief.

Accepting adults in the place of my children was REALLY hard. Still is.

I'm still a college teacher, thankfully, so I still live by that academic seasonal conditioning. What was weird for me was that from elementary through high school, I was conditioned to the school year of South America's Southern Hemisphere.

Where I lived we had four seasons with hot summer and cold winter and snow. But we had them in the exact opposite months of the year. Under the equator, school started in March and ended the last days of November. Summer vacation was December, January, and February. So Mardi Gras, which we called Carnaval, wasn't just a fattening bacchanalia before Lent. It was also the summer's end transition to school beginning. And looking forward to Christmas was looking forward to the big year's holiday that came after school year let out. You call your school year 2012-2013 this year. For us the school year and the calendar year match, all being 2013 only. It was nice.

Weird, huh? You can imagine how weird it was for me to come up here to college, then. My senior graduation down there was in the last week of November, and then I began college up here in the first week of January-- in the COLD.

I'm used to it now, though, and just came back from our year's end college awards ceremonies, so, arfie if you want to piggy back on my year end experience to move to the pulse of the academic year, you're welcome to.

One thing I find: in PTSD recovery I take refuge in being a creature of habit, so the change in schedule at school year's end can be challenging to sleep patterns and such. I actually can get a little anxious even as I welcome the needed time to rest that summer offers. PTSD giveth and PTSD taketh away, I guess.

I sometimes think that habitual nature is the main cause of PTSD. My habitual nature rebels at any event which disrupts my routine or linear progressions. I have learned flexibility, but nature still calls. Make the disruption a traumatic event which calls for healing time and the traumatized reaction becomes the new habit.

I think that sometimes. In between, I let the mystery be. It is what it is whether I understand it or knot. It has been what it has been through many name changes. Psycho names are still changing names faster than a new age Mrs.

Yes. I've had to deal, as others have mentioned doing here too, with having acquired the habit of chaos. In my 6 years of war, bombs and such became the new normal. When peace came it was completely alien. Not just in my public life, but in my personal life.

Peace and quiet can make you crazy if you're used to the opposite. A milder example is that of city kids who go to summer camp in the country and are spooked by the silence at night. Happens every summer at summer camp. The city kids are used to car horns and car alarms and trucks, buses, trains, sirens, and shouting all night. Remove all that background city noise in the country and night time sounds dead and spooky to them.

It's a really humbling experience to come to the realization that you have to work hard at accepting peace as you accepted war. It makes you sound like a warmonger to say that. That's not what it is. It's just that you got used to surviving the noise, to expect the dangerous interruptions throughout the day. Power outages become normal so you always have candles and flashlights on hand. You keep the bathtub full of water so when war action cuts off the water supply you can use the water you saved in the tub to flush the toilet. And so on.

Becoming used to living without those new normal habits is the natural journey of the war and/or abuse survivor, whether the war was in the streets or in the home--or, as in my case, in both.

Yet another engineering maxim:

There is no perfect system. The known flaws are easier to plan for.

Good to know your flaws!

yes, when we are used to chaos and have become 'adrenalin junkies' then peace and quiet seems... weird, like the calm of the eye of a hurricane, waiting for the other shoe to drop. In the oddness of prolonged quiet being so restless that I want to start something just to feel 'normal'.