Day: September 15, 2005

This was supposed to be the week where I finally settled in to the school schedule and got the chores under control. The calendar was fairly empty. Here I am at Thursday. I’ve been busy all week and most of the chores are still not done. On Tuesday I was reporting a lost day. I think I’m really close to having to report a lost week.

TODAY:
6:45 get up
7:00 get everyone else up
7:15 breakfast
7:50 drive Link to school
8:00-8:25 Kiki takes a “quick” bath I seize a moment to read email & news
8:25-8:45 Kiki styles her hair, I change laundry loads & read webcomics
8:45 Kiki announces “look what I did!” Her hair and Patches hair are slicked down with so much hairgel that the hair has formed into a protective helmet. It is too late to do anything but let her go to school that way.
8:50 Drive kiki to school
9:05 we arrive back home and Patches touches his now dried-into-a-shell hair and tells me “My hair is yuck.” I reach to try to ruffle it up a little and the over-gelled hair scratches my finger. A bath is definitely in order, but I come into the house and get distracted.
9:10-9:40 doze on the couch while Gleek and Patches watch Scooby doo
9:40-11:00 Gleek & Patches ride bikes I do some long overdue yardwork
11:00 I get stung by a wasp which somehow crawled up inside my gardening glove.
11:00-11:30 treated the wasp sting, put away gardening gear, and kept close tabs on myself to see if I would have a reaction.
11:30-12:30 lunch, puttering in the house, and putting Patches down for a nap.
12:30-1:45 I think this time disappeared into the sucking black hole that is the internet. Not sure though.
1:50-2:40 Walked to Link’s school to retrieve him, took Gleek on an emergency potty run, sent Link back to his class for forgotten items, walked back home.
2:40-3:15 helped Link do his homework because I knew we wouldn’t have time later
3:30-3:50 Picked Kiki up from school. All the way home I had to listen to plans from her about how she could get to the entire safety fair without having to go to Link’s soccer game first.
3:50-4:40 Food, book, and ignoring of the children.
4:40-4:55 mad scramble to get soccer clothes on Link, shoes on everyone else, load chairs, fix sandwiches, fill water bottles, and out the door.
5:10 we arrive 10 minutes late for Link’s soccer game.
5:10-6:00 Soccer game while refusing to allow Gleek to run off to the park by herself, there was also an emergency potty run involving Gleek.
6:00-6:15 drive straight to Kiki’s school safety fair.
6:15-7:45 School safety fair. This was an event I did not want to attend at all. The kids loved it. They got to play on giant inflatable slides. Kiki got to dunk teachers. Patches got to touch a helicopter, a firetruck, and an ambulance. We got to watch the helicopter take off. They played on the playground for a long time as well. Face painting and freebies were also there. These kind of events when held by Link’s school are almost pleasant because I am constantly running into friends and neighbors with whom I can exchange casual chit-chat. I don’t know anybody at Kiki’s school. I think I just need to stay in this house forever because I have 8 years worth of friendships accumulated. I know pretty much everyone who lives in a three block radius. The isolation at Kiki’s fair pointed out how much I don’t want to have to start from scratch in a new place. The kids loved the fair. I was exhausted by it. We had a lost dollar crisis, a potty crisis, and several “where is my child?” moments.
8:00-8:40 back home, make the dirty sticky hair-gelly children get into their pajamas and into bed. I momentarily considered baths before bed, but I was too tired to want to do that.
8:40-9:15 writing this entry.

So now I guess I know exactly where today went. That’s useful I suppose. I just wish more of what I’d done had a satisfactory “I accomplished something” feel to it.

Yesterday began at 6:45 am. (Theoretically all my weekdays begin at 6:30, but I never seem to be able to get out of bed without pushing snooze at least once.) Thus began the before school scramble. I walked Link to school. That was 1.5 miles round trip, but it should count for more because I was pushing a stroller laden with 80+ lbs of Gleek and Patches. I came home and did some heavy lifting in the form of large loads of laundry, some of it wet. I also mowed the lawn which is a 2 hour long wrestle with 90 lbs of wobbly wheeled lawnmower. By the end of that, my back was informing me that I should spend the rest of the day being nice to it. After the lawn mowing it was time to retrieve Link from school which was another 1.5 miles pushed laden stroller. By that time I was in dire need of a shower. When it was time to pick up Kiki I drove. Then I supervised and early dinner while also chivvying Link into doing his homework. Then we all packed into the car for Enrichment night over at the church where I got drafted into doing 3 10-minute presentations on first aid kits as part of a crisis preparedness theme. At the end of the evening I hauled the kids back home and bundled them all into bed as fast as I could. That’s when I discovered that Kiki did not in fact have a light load of homework. She had a heavy load complete with unfinished make-up work. 2 hours later I put her to bed. Staying up an hour past that to watch CSI with Howard was almost certainly a mistake, but I didn’t want to sleep and start a new day without a little down time first.

That was yesterday.

Today began at 6:45. Thus began the morning scramble to get kids off to school…