"He said, 'Mommy, I thought we were going to Kids' Gym,' " Ms. Hart said.
She realized he was right. Months ago she had signed him up for the gymnastics program for the week. So she turned the car around and headed across town, arriving only 10 minutes late.
Ms. Hart's confusion is understandable. Arranging a plan to keep the children occupied during the summer, and actually carrying it out, can be a logistical nightmare.
But that is what many parents must do these days, to a greater and greater extent. And the result is the season is being transformed. What was once a time for relaxing and recharging - those lazy, hazy days of summer, remember? - has become, for many parents, as frenetic as the other nine months of the year.
In some ways, summer is worse. For with school out of session, adults must find even more ways to soak up the time. There are more places to be, appointments to keep and fees to be paid (if they can be afforded). Parents find themselves wishing for Labor Day and the start of the new school year for some relief.
For Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author of "The Over-Scheduled Child," the problems of summer are just a subset of a more general year-round problem. "It's really a cultural phenomenon - the pressure to fill every moment with activities," he said.
"It's a madness that's taken hold," he added.
Dr. Rosenfeld acknowledged that some parents have little choice but to schedule a lot of activities in the summer. "But it's a matter of if every moment is filled, there's no time for creation, no time for reflection," he said.
"There's something wrong in thinking that the Russian gymnastics coach knows more about raising your children than you do," he added.
But for many adults, letting their children do what they did in their youth - spend unscheduled, unstructured time with friends - is not an option.
"I think it's a pity that the capacity for doing nothing has been lost," said Judith Warner, the author of "Perfect Madness," a book about the culture of motherhood, and the mother of two. "For most people, it's the fact that both people work," she said. With neither parent at home, the children have to go elsewhere, often to some structured activity.
But there's more to it than that. A kind of critical mass has been reached, where so many children are doing so many things that parents are often out of luck if they choose to have their children do less.
"My huge ambition was to do nothing in the month of July and go to the pool with my kids," Ms. Warner said. But she found there was no one for them to hang out with there. "Everyone else was at camp," she said.
Lenor Krahn, of Eagle, Idaho, said that in her neighborhood, young people are often gone for long stretches of the summer, to the other parent in the case of divorce or "to the grandparents in Timbuktu." But unstructured hanging out is generally frowned upon anyway.
"Gone are the days when you got to get up whenever you feel like it and hang out in the yard," she said. "Everybody is raging paranoid about somebody snatching your kids."
Ms. Krahn said she began planning the summer activities for her four boys, age 9 and under, several months ago. The plan includes acting camp, extended sleepovers at the grandparents, individual horseback riding lessons and group chess lessons.
Ms. Krahn estimated that she spent three to four hours in the car each day driving her children around town. Toward the end of the summer, she said, she will be saved by football practice for her oldest. "Which means the rest of them have to stand and watch," she said.
The group chess lessons were a concession to save some money. "It all just keeps adding up," Ms. Krahn said. "Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching."
Ms. Hart said that with the costs of day camp, Kids' Gym and other activities for Ryan and his sister, Rachel, "I'm at the minimum doubling what I paid during the year."
For some people, she said, church-sponsored activities are a low-cost option. "I know some friends who will go from vacation Bible school to vacation Bible school," she said.
Linda Schutter of Louisville, Colo., tried to schedule fewer activities for her children a couple of summers ago, but found that all the other children in the neighborhood were busy. So this summer she's arranged several camps and other activities, along with a few weeks of downtime.
The schedule is penciled in on a calendar she prints off her computer. "You kind of have an overview of the summer," she said. "Then I can erase and figure out if it's physically possible to get everyone where they want to go."
Emily Limbach, who lives in an affluent suburb of Boulder, Colo., said she resisted signing up her two children, ages 6 and 7, for anything other than swimming lessons this summer, even though there are a lot of interesting camps and other activities. "It would be so easy to drop them off and pick them up," she said. "But there goes your bank account, and there goes your summer."
Instead, her children stay at home much of the time, and she tries to arrange creative games and other activities for them. She enjoys it, even though it's more work.
"I don't have a lot of downtime," Ms. Limbach said. "And the house is never clean. You think you have more time in the summer, but you have more time to make the house messy. You never have time to clean."
