Summer juggle: For some families, balancing kids and other obligations can make summer more stressful than serene

So it's summer vacation time — or summer juggle season, depending on how much vacation you have and if your company vacation rules make it easy (or possible) for you to get time off during the summer months. Of course, even if you do book holiday time off, sometimes there's a last-minute snafu. Your time off gets cancelled at the last minute or, worse, you get a panicked call in the middle of your vacation, saying there's an emergency at work that requires your attention pronto.

A few years back, our family was vacationing at one of those family-friendly resorts up in cottage country. I was sitting by the pool one morning, chatting with a couple of other moms, when one of the moms got a work-related SOS via her Blackberry. She had to head into the city — two hours away — to troubleshoot a problem with a client's advertising campaign. The friend she was travelling with offered to watch her two kids for the day so she wouldn't have to drag them back to the city. The ad agency mom was a single parent — but you could tell by her face that her vacation was shot. Her attempts to get out of town with her kids for a couple of days of R & R had gone up in flames quicker than a marshmallow at a campfire.

I wondered if she'd ever plotted the demise of her Blackberry. It would be so easy for an "accident" to happen up there. "Hey, kids, do you want to try some fun Blackberry science projects? Can you hear a Blackberry ringing if it's buried in the sand? Does a Blackberry float? What happens if you tape a Blackberry to a beach ball and set it free in Georgian Bay?" But I had a feeling that even if she got rid of one Blackberry, someone would just hand her another one to replace it.

While most of us don't have to deal with being tethered to a Blackberry 24/7 — even when we're on vacation — it is getting harder and harder to enjoy uninterrupted time as a family. In dual-parent households, the two parents' vacation times may not match up or both parents may be forced to take separate vacations in order to ensure that the kids are adequately supervised throughout the summer and during the various school-year breaks.

Tag-team vacations simply don't provide the same opportunity to reconnect with one another as the vacations that were more typical for kids in generations gone by: family road trips to visit relatives in other parts of the province or country; a trip to a cottage (someone else's or a family cottage, if you were lucky); a stay at a hotel or motel with a pool while you took in all the tourist attractions in a particular town.

With our oldest teenager working and the other two teenagers looking for jobs and/or volunteering, we'll likely have very few days together "as a family." Half the family is in one location; half is in another from day to day. But the preteen is having a fabulous vacation — and those of us who are with him at any given time are reminded to snap the laptop shut and just have fun. Summer is short and childhood is fleeting.

How is summer playing out for your family so far?