The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, June 28th, the summer break edition.

I'm Gabriel Roth. I'm an editor at Slate, and I'm the father of Eliza, who is seven, and Leo, who is almost four. I'm Rebecca Levoy, a journalist and podcaster in New Hampshire, and I am Mom to Henry, who is 16, Teddy, who is 15, and my stepdaughter, Lily, who is 18. And I'm Carver Wallace, a writer and podcaster in Oakland, California, and I'm the father to Georgia who was 12 and Ezra who was 15.

Today on our show, we are going to be talking about summer vacation.

Plus, as always, we'll have questions from listeners.

We'll make recommendations on Slate Plus.

We will talk to a new dad who is already worrying about how to get his kids interested in sports without going overboard.

But first up, let's talk about this summer.

Rebecca, what are you guys doing for this summer?

We have one real vacation planned.

We like to rent a house on Plum Island in Massachusetts, not the other Plum Island, where the hoof- mouth disease like research place that is featured in Sounds of the Lambs, the other one, the nice one in Massachusetts.

And so we spend a week there. This year it's going to be a little bit different because Henry is now driving. Teddy will be at his music camp that week. So Henry is now driving and has a lot more freedom to invite friends to kind of come and go and spend the week with us.

So this year we rented a house that sort of has like an annex that we are thinking of as like the teen annex so that we can, you know, let them do their teen stuff. And we're going to see how it goes. It's an experiment in free teen

parenting styles that we're trying this this year with that. We're looking forward to that,

though. It's my favorite week of the summer. And of course, we're doing our annual trip, as we do

every year, to the local water park up in the White Mountains. I think I talked about this last

summer where we rent a cabana and pretend we're on a tropical vacation when we're really just at the White Mountains water park. So that's all we've got in the books right now, maybe that in some college tours. And that will be both of your teens? Any other teens? Is that a two-teen household or multiple teens? How many teens are you going for? I think it's going to end up being perhaps like a 20 teen household. What?

Yeah. household or multiple teens? How many teens are you going for? I think it's going to end up being perhaps like a 20 teen household.

What?

We don't know. I mean, Henry is inviting a bunch of friends from school.

He's also inviting a bunch of Senate Page friends to come up.

And he's got like a bunch of now Senate Page friends from the New England area.

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