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Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Why couldn't I have just stayed in bed this morning...?

Today has been an odd mix of good and bad stuff. It reminds me of those stories we used to do in elementary school, where we had to alternate "Fortunately" and "Unfortunately." Here's today in second-grade-ese:

FORTUNATELY, I did not have to drag LT out of bed at an un-Godly hour like I usually do, much to the consternation of T, who thinks we should all be in our places with bright shiny faces at the crack of dawn. However, T isn't the one who's home having to stir that heavily-sleeping enormous boy out of his comfortable bed. And there are plenty of advantages to homeschooling, one of which being that we can start whenever we want to each day.

UNFORTUNATELY, LT dragged me out of bed at 7:30 instead. [grr]

FORTUNATELY, we had plenty of cereal and milk for breakfast, thanks to T's trip to the grocery store last night.

UNFORTUNATELY, both children managed to spill their cereal all over the table within about 30 seconds of each other.

OK, I can't think of a "fortunately" for that one.



School went well, and the kids and I had some good quality time outside. There is one section of our yard which will not grow grass no matter how hard we try to grow it there. I think this is a combination of too much shade, too many tree roots, too clay-ish soil, too much slope, and too lazy lawn-care. Anyway, that area always ends up being The Digging Zone for the kids. This year LT has made an intricate series of canals and islands (since I told him he could not "play river", wherein he digs rivers and islands). At least this year he is more persnickety about mud on his person -- he is his father's child through and through and is becoming more so every day in this regard -- so he prefers the neater method of filling a 2L bottle with water and dumping it down the canals, to last year's mud-hole method wherein he would just turn on the hose and put it at the uphill end of the river. So I sat outside and read a book while he and his willing slave (I mean assistant, I mean sister) dug happily and interrupted me periodically with "look at this!" -- at which I would look, pretend to notice the difference, and go back to my book. Then I had to stop procrastinating and actually (sigh) clean the kitchen. My roll of kitchen trash bags has mysteriously disappeared, so LT "loaned" (little egghead) me one of his trash bags (which I bought for him to make his recycling area neater and easier to deal with... but who's counting...). T called in the middle of me taking out the trash, which is, suffice to say, not the best time to try to have a loving conversation with me. It was such a tense conversation that he called back half an hour later -- he said he was just checking to see if I felt better, but I think he did it to make sure that I was OK and hadn't gone completely psycho and started killing the neighbors or anything newsworthy like that.


Once the kitchen was clean, things were going along pretty well until I had to stop procrastinating again -- I hate that -- this time at the last possible moment when I could start making dinner rolls for our potluck tonight if I wanted to have them done on time. All was going swimmingly until I looked down at the recipe and remembered that I didn't have any eggs. When I made cookies last week I used our last egg and had to send one of the kids down to borrow two from the neighbor ladies, and I didn't want to do that again. And there's no way I could make it to the store and back in time to make the darn rolls. And the restaurant (my very favorite restaurant in the world, have I mentioned that place before? ;) which I was going to call to order a dozen of their scrumpdiddlyumptious rolls to go, since my procrastination had landed me in such hot water, turns out to be closed on Wednesdays. sigh. I guess I'll make garlic bread. But first I have to wait for some actual wearable-outside-the-house clothes to finish in the dryer.



Too bad I couldn't just stay in bed this morning. I need to schedule an illness or something. [g]

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