There It Goes...

I’ve been AWOL. I’m sure the whole planet has felt my absence from blogging (major sarcasm). But the small but sweet group that reads my blogs may have noticed (or not) that it’s been nearly four weeks since I last blogged, and that’s longer than usual for me to keep quiet.

It’s been an extra insane month. School started, which some parents acknowledge with back flips and the happy dance. But I have mixed feelings. Yes, there’s a chunk of time in the middle of the day when I might get a few things accomplished. But before that and after that it’s complete pandemonium, so it’s a trade-off. I like the less structured vibe of summer. You float through the morning and into the afternoon and evening and even though you’re mediating an average of 87.3 fights per day, at least there aren’t the deadlines involved with school. There’s no racing to get up and get to school in the morning. No racing to get as much as possible done while they’re gone because there’s no hope of getting anything done once they’re back. Then there’s the racing to pick them up, careening through the afternoon with reminders and re-reminders and threats about homework, making dinner (or some approximation thereof), packing lunches, finding clothes for the next day, a scavenger hunt for missing toothbrushes, herding them into bed, and collapsing into my bed with a thud, like a felled tree.

Now where was I going with all this? Oh yes…Something about how crazy September has been. School started and the kids promptly got sick. This is somewhat rare for them but I suppose grammar school always includes a fog of germs hovering around kids’ heads, and they all came down with stuff. They passed it to one another, which—in a twisted way—at least confirms that they’ve heard my lectures on the value of sharing. On the other hand, it also confirms that they have not heeded my warnings on the value of washing their hands. Constantly.

While they were passing germs around, we had three batches of relatives visit—one group from another continent, one batch from another state, and one from another city. We had a major heat wave, two family birthdays, awful news about a friend who was gravely ill, several trees-worth of paperwork coming home from school, a 25-page newsletter emailed from school (I am not joking)—which I did not read but opened just to see how pages of updates I would not read--ants in the house, my sister’s baby shower, two kids’ birthday parties to attend, Oktoberfest to reschedule once Hubby got sick, and mountains of housework (that were ignored for the most part because of the aforementioned Other Stuff Going On).

What was that multi-colored blur that raced by? That was September. And there it goes…