Life Hacks/Notes on Summer's personality
Summer is someone who is constantly stressed out, and she often over-reacts a great deal to relatively small slights due to those small slights being just one more straw on her back. She tries to think of herself as a good person and her first instinct will be to do what would generally be considered "the right thing," but she often harbors dark fantasies where her and all of her siblings get into sex and drugs and takes spiteful delight in the thought of how horrified her parents would be over that.
Getting on Summer's good side is simple, albeit simple does not necessarily mean easy. If you help her with some of her work, she will like you for it. If you help her with enough of her work that she gets some time to relax, she will REALLY like you for it. Conversely, it is also quite easy to get on her bad side. All you have to do is repeatedly make her job harder.
Summer's typical day of babysitting
Week day, no help
- Morning
Wake up early, 6AM. Wake up siblings, start breakfast, wake up Winny, March, Jan, and Febby again, serve breakfast, order a sibling to wake any stragglers again, make sure everyone has their things for school, help July and Octo with their school items.
- Afternoon
Settle siblings in, 1hr for homework, start dinner, serve dinner.
- Evening
Finish homework while keeping an eye out for issues to arise with younger siblings. 1 to 2 hrs relative down time before bed (still watching for issues to arise, including diaper changes,) get June, Lloyd, July, Octo, Nove, Decy, and Hally to bed at 8. 1 hr, 30 min. relative down time, check on Nove, Decy, and Hally then send Autumn, Spring, Jan, Febby, April, May, and August to bed at 10, then go to sleep herself. (Winny and March have no set curfew, but are advised to go to bed themselves soon after this.)
Saturday, no help
Established meal schedule, no other established routine. Just chasing around unruly younger siblings all day while trying to enjoy fleeting momentary periods of down time.
Sunday, no help in evening
- Morning
Get on Winny, March, and the twins to help with younger siblings, parents will also help. Make sure everyone is ready for church. Drop Nove, Decy, and Hally off at the nursery, go to service, corral everyone to children's church, enjoy peace with no younger siblings in teen's group. (Teen's group in church is Summer's favorite 1 hour of the week since someone else is watching all her siblings and she can get away with just spacing out on the bible study.)
- Afternoon
Corral all the children to change out of their church cloths, prepare lunch, standard babysitting and minding of her younger siblings.
- Evening
Prepare dinner, 3 hours of relative down time, but younger kids to bed at 8, put middle kids to bed at 10, go to sleep at 10.
Help she can get
Summer somehow turns into the default person to handle everything, but the others are technically expected to help. On a perfect day in fact, she can get all of her work handled by other members of her family giving her a full day of no babysitting tasks.
- Mother
Mother will occasionally help with any task on the list approximately 20% of the time. Usually does not help in morning, and is working in the afternoon. Will handle half the job of babysitting in the evening and will 80% take over the task while Summer is doing her homework. Will also act as a task master to make sure work gets done.
- Winny
Winny will usually help in the morning. Trade off breakfast and wake-up duty, and will split July and Octo. Does not reliably wake up when it is not her turn to cook breakfast, and sometimes needs extra prodding when it is her turn. She is unavailable in the afternoons and some week-ends until 6, and may be gone for longer periods of time when she has a game or a track meet. Will usually help getting kids to bed.
- March
Will be hard to wake up in the mornings and usually does not help. If present in the evening, he may help cook, but is usually over at Xander's. Tends to arrive home between 6 and 9, will help with putting kids to bed if home.
- Twins
Autumn and Spring will play with June, Lloyd, and July and keep them out of other people's hair, thus removing those 5 all from the concerns list. If those three are playing outside, the Twins may help with some cleaning.
- Jan, Febby, April, May, and August
These five can more or less take care of themselves, but do not take care of their younger siblings. They can help Summer by staying out of her way and not causing trouble. May and August will sometimes play outside along with June, Lloyd, and July, witch will free up the twins to help with other things.
A perfect day for Summer would look like this. The five middle kids, Jan through August, will not cause any trouble. May through July may play together outside, freeing up the twins from their babysitting duty so that they can handle cleaning. March or Mom will make dinner, Mom and/or Winny will look out for Nove, Decy, and Hally and her Mom will act as the task master while, in appreciation for how much work she usually does, not include Summer in the list of people she orders around. This results in her having almost no work to do other than her homework and some light cleaning. It usually does not go this well, but a typical day is somewhere between this and the zero help version. (at the very least, either she has to take the task master role or if her mom takes it then she does not get out of having to work.)
Relationships (start of story)
Her younger brother's friend. Summer is a bit irritated whenever Xander is around because when he is not present she can make her brother help her. However, he is also the one non-family guy close to her age who might just be able to satisfy her dark desire to get herself knocked up. As such, she has a secret sexual desire for him. She does not consider him her ideal to get married to, but he is nerdy, witch she acknowledges means he can probably earn some money in the future.
Is not quite so irritated with her father as she is her mother. She acknowledges that he has to work to earn money for the family, but she still resents that he isn't doing more to make her mother treat her fairly.
Summer has grown to really resent her mother who seems to just use her as slave labor whenever she's home so that she can keep working on her stupid book. Summer knows she does around twice the amount of work with her younger siblings compared to what her mother does, and she wishes she could just defy her mother but can't find the will to overtly stand up to her.
Summer is split about her opinion on Winny. On one hand, she loves her sister and understands the sentiment behind how she tries to escape into her sports for a moment's respite from the babysitting madness. On the other hand, she resents the fact that Winny has an out but she doesn't. She is so unable to rectify these two parallel thoughts that you might as well say she has a split personality on the matter.
Occasionally, while Summer is stewing in her dark desires to get herself knocked up, she recalls something that Winny once said after her sex ed class about how she wouldn't have sex with a boy because her getting pregnant would mean she has to quit her sports teams. These thoughts have made wishing pregnancy on her sister a not so infrequent part of Summer's spiteful revelings.
Summer's thoughts on March are not so dissimilar from those she has for Winny. He is out of the house even more frequently than Winny is in order to be over at his friend Xander's house, but he is old enough to help babysit and she thinks it isn't fair she has to do it but he can avoid it. However, due to her somewhat more traditionalist values learned from her school and her mother having a stay-at-home job, she does not resent him quite as much as she would if Winny were doing the exact same thing. Because he is a boy, she simply accepts it as that being the way things are.
Autumn and her twin sister are at the point where they can just babysit 3 of their younger siblings between them if they work together. As such, Summer regularly assigns them the troublesome trio of June, Loyd, and July who are the three siblings most likely to get into everybody's way and demand everyone's attention if not assigned to someone to keep them out of other people's hair. Summer does not really differentiate between the twins other than the fact that Autumn is a little easier to talk to and she feels the message will be effectively carried out if she gives it to Autumn.
Spring and her twin sister are at the point where they can just babysit 3 of their younger siblings between them if they work together. As such, Summer regularly assigns them the troublesome trio of June, Loyd, and July who are the three siblings most likely to get into everybody's way and demand everyone's attention if not assigned to someone to keep them out of other people's hair. Summer does not really differentiate between the twins other than the fact that Spring's more bubbly personality creates an impression where Summer is not quite sure her requests are going to be carried out effectively, even though they usually are.
Jan is someone who Summer essentially tells to "stay out of the way and take care of yourself" since she is at an age where she can do most of her own self care. If Jan comes to her with a personal request or anything other than a report of how one of her younger siblings are causing trouble, she is likely to just yell at Jan to get out of her hair.
Summer does suspect there is something wrong with Febby, but she doesn't really worry about it. In fact, her withdrawing and confining herself to her room tends to make things easier on Summer, so she actually has subconsciously re-enforced this by sending Febby to her room every time she starts fighting with one of her siblings.
Summer HATES the fact that April keeps bringing her friends over. It has become her practice to chase them out of the house to play outside any time they come over. When she is by herself though, she tends not to be too much of a handful, and occasionally she will get the nice gift of April being the one to go out to her friend's house. Overall though, April really doesn't cause that much trouble, so Summer doesn't have much issue with her. In fact, Summer sort of envies her as a source of vicarious wish fulfillment that she can have such a healthy social life.
