Here it is, nearly the middle of January, and I'm only just now posting about our goings on. Perhaps that is because we have been a bit lazy on the weekends, and perhaps it is due to the fact that our week days got suddenly crazier with the coming of the new year.
Not only is L having basketball practice 2 nights/week (one of those being Friday night), she now has games every Saturday, at a location nearly an hour away. J has started rehearsals for the Spring Musical, which includes choreography 2 nights/week and vocals Friday after school. Both girls also have music lessons after school, and J is still doing dance. Luckily we were able to combine trips to the school campus on Wed/Fri until now...just was notified by the coach that basketball is being bumped from the gym until 7 PM on Wed and Fri, meaning that the end of practice gets bumped back to 8:30 (meaning ACTUALLY 8:45.) This will require multiple trips to and from the campus OR extended periods of one of us waiting there for one or the other child, not to mention that it is already difficult to get L to bed on time on practice nights due to other issues. It's enough to make me lose it...in fact, I DID lose it a little last night - tears were shed. SIGH. For the life of me, I can't figure a way to limit the pointless miles put on the vehicles, the endless hours driving back and forth, AND giving the kids time at home to do such mundane things as eat dinner and do homework.
At home, things have not always been faring much better. Although I did have a couple of wins with a bag of needing-to-be-used apples shared with us at Christmas time: I made a Dutch Caramel Apple Pie, featuring homemade caramel sauce (delicious), and last night an Apple Crisp. There have also been a couple of fails in the cooking department. I put dried navy beans to soak before I went to bed on Saturday night, intending to cook them for most of the day and have them for dinner. After 5 hours of cooking in the oven, the beans were still hard, so we put them to simmer on the stove. By dinner time (approximately 7 hours later) they were still inedible. I transferred them to the crockpot, and after an additional 10 hours, they are soft, but taste burned - so basically edible today. I have no explanation.
In addition, it never fails that just when I am the most exhausted from running and/or working all day, and want to sit down or go to bed, some calamity occurs, involving at least 30 minutes of clean up. Monday evening a can of tomato sauce fell out of the refrigerator as I was putting away things from packing lunches (One of the things I had accomplished that day was mopping the floor.) Several days later, it appears that the lever on our water container in the fridge was compressed while the door was closed, and when I opened it to pack lunches, I found the bottom of the fridge and the deli drawer full of water...not to mention a puddle on the floor.
It's exhausting.
Thankfully we had a fairly restful weekend, and even had the time to play outside in our 5 inches of snow as a family. The sledding was great - we made record runs from the house to the driveway - and the weather wasn't too terribly cold! JP pulled us back up the hill with the ATV until it sustained a flat tire. Even though both girls look perturbed in the pictures, it is because I am TAKING a picture, not because they were having an awful time.
So, we are on to another week. Here's hoping that ALL of us (Electra the Subaru included) make it through to another weekend!
