Wednesday, May 27, 2015

No more pencils, no more books... Day 1

Today was Awards Day at school. It lasted an hour, and then - boom - it was summer. Hooray! I know some moms dread 24 hours with their kids for 3 months, but I revel in it. At least for the first week or two. This summer will be a little different since we're trying to sell the house. I was really hoping it would be off the market by now so we'd have more freedom to make messes, but no such luck. So I've been thinking up ways to keep us all busy and out of the house without spending a whole lot of money.
I've come up with a tentative schedule of activities in the morning, lunch and rest time at home, then an afternoon of some sort of clean/quiet-ish activity. Today, we went swimming at the in-laws' pool, then came home and had hot dogs, then rested for an hour (I was the only one to fall asleep... haha). I wasn't sure what we were going to do this afternoon, but then - a saving grace - grandma called and wanted to see if the kids wanted to come over and spend the night. Hallelujah! Tomorrow after we pick them up, we're going to pick peaches and then come home and bake stuff with them.
I thought I'd document this summer so I could look back and see the slow gradual descent into insanity. At what point will I start spouting gibberish and let the kids watch 14 hours straight of Inspector Gadget while I hide under the blankets and weep for school to start again? We'll see!

Friday, January 2, 2015

Christmas Break

We're starting to freshen up the house with the end goal of putting it on the market. Today's highlight was painting the trim in the living room: on the front door, the baseboards, and the doorways. The kids are still home for Christmas Break, so I spent my morning freaking out if they even shifted on the couch -- "DON'T TOUCH THE WALL!! JUST SIT STILL!" Mama's a little cray-cray. Speaking of which, cray-cray is Nathan's favorite word. He even introduced it to the four year olds in my preschool class. You're welcome, parents. Why does preparing to move make me hate all of my furniture? We're having a garage sale before we put the house up for sale, but I have to resist the urge to take down my curtains and throw my couch in the sale pile, along with a couple of lamps and the table and, oh, every single other thing I own. I forget that I will have to have something to sit on if we ever get into another place to live. It's all crap, but it doesn't make sense to buy anything new for the kids to ruin. College football playoffs are on and I'm bingeing because I know the drought is coming. I hate January through August. I watched football for 10 hours straight on Wednesday. My youngest participated in our annual family Bowl Pick 'Em for the first time this year and has absolutely annihilated everybody. With 7 games left, no one can catch him. Shawn says we need to take him to Vegas, stat. Also, go Hokies! I know we only played Cincinnati, but with the way the season went, that's a huge victory. School starts back on Monday. I have so enjoyed having my kids home with me for two weeks. Seriously. It's been really nice. I like the idea of going back to our routine school days too, though. We're headed to Orlando next Friday, so it's only a week of normal before we get to have fun again. Harry Potter, here we come!