Day: April 23, 2007

Tomorrow Patches has been invited to go to a local farm/park. I’ve been invited to go along if I wish. I don’t wish. The prospect of having several hours free of all children is more attractive to me than the prospect of going with my friend to watch our kids enjoy farm animals. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll go. I feel bad for sending my child and not helping with the outing management.

Wednesday is the cub scout Pine Wood Derby. There are people who consider turning a block of wood into a car to be a delightful challenge. I am not one of them. I do not have a table saw and sander in my garage. I don’t have that other tool which I don’t even know exists, but which would probably have made construction much easier. What I do have is a pruning saw, a sheet of sandpaper, and very tired arms. Link did most of the sanding and now he’s doing the painting. But on Wednesday is the big event where Link will be very sad to discover that his car loses to the cars of kids whose parents have power tools. Then after the chaos and emotion management of the pine wood derby, I get to go to a girls camp preparatory meeting with Kiki.

Thursday is Kiki’s big Shakespeare play. She has been working on this for months. I have to attend. I can either attend the daytime performance, but duck out to retrieve Gleek from school in the middle of it. Or I can arrange for babysitting and attend the evening performance. This is also the day I’m supposed to volunteer in Gleek’s class. I’ll probably cancel that. And Gleek has a birthday party to attend. At least I have the costume ready. Now we just have to do costume, makeup, and hair before school both Wednesday (the dress rehearsal) and Thursday (the performances.)

Friday Link has a field trip to the hansen planetarium. He informed me of this today and asked me with big sad eyes, could I please come with him? I have never been on a field trip with any of my kids. Going on field trips is supposed to be something that involved parents do, but I’ve never made space for it. Friday is otherwise empty. I could arrange babysitting and make Link very happy. But shepherding hyper children-on-a-field-trip is not restful. It is a high energy activity. I have no energy now and I haven’t even gotten to the busy part of the week.

All of that doesn’t even begin to take into account all the house and yard work chores that I want to have done. I’m tired of being embarrassed every time I look at my front yard.

I’m still on the stairs and though I’ve tried all day I haven’t managed to kick the mood yet. At least Howard comes home in the next hour.

Recently Kiki watched Tomb Raider. She was entranced. She loves the Laura Croft character and now aspires to be like her. Kiki doesn’t want to shoot guns or punch people, but she wants some of that fearlessness. She admires how Laura is very centered and confident. Laura always knows what she wants and she goes to get it.

Kiki didn’t discuss this in detail with me. She just dropped a few comments. But she also started setting her alarm to get herself up in the morning. She made a list of how she wants to run her mornings and it includes meditation and exercise. I love seeing Kiki take the reins of her life and deliberately choose who she wants to be.