S doesn’t travel for work often (Thank God!!!), but when he does being home alone with the kids isn’t me at my best. I won’t lie. It’s stressful. I feel like I jump into planning/prep over-drive because the unexpected ALWAYS happens, and anything I defer to tomorrow, becomes mission critical due to something invariably pops up. A routine helps a ton, and thankfully we have a flow in the morning and a flow in the evening. That keeps things doing, but the kids in the past few weeks have been turning into puddles of silly after dinner. It’s nice they are silly with one another (it’s kind of sweet), but when you’re trying to keep the train moving it’s irritating.
After dinner I need them to get their jammies on, pick out clothes for the next day and get their teeth brushed. Then it can be free time until stories… unless there’s other stuff they haven’t done from earlier in the evening. Case in point: homework. G gets a homework packet every week. He usually finishes it within a day of bringing it home, but this time it had two assignments which involved computer access at home. i.e. = me! I told him we’d do it as soon as he was ready for bed. He didn’t get ready in time the first night… or the second night… or the third. On the fourth, S2 and G were running around like someone had spiked their dinner w/ meth. THEN they decided they wanted to play a game of barnacle. What’s that you ask? Lesse – they each attach themselves to my legs and hope they’ll go on a ride. Guess how that one makes me feel? If you guessed stabby, give yourself a pat on the back. I’m not sure how I escaped, but I went and locked myself into my bathroom. It’s the only place w/ a door lock they can’t pick. So I spent some quality time in there.
It took the two of them some time, but they finally got in gear and got dressed. They passed me a note under the door. It looked something like this:
Let me write it out… and then translate
Original “We are rie jres. We are jres. We did got are james and we buzn are teth”
Translation “Wa are really dressed. We are dressed. We got our jammies and brushed our teeth”
G wrote it (if you couldn’t guess). It’s both terribly bad and terribly awesome. He’s trying so hard to figure out how to spell, and I admire that. I don’t have the heart to correct (just about) every word, so for now this stays.
THIS is the first letter from my sons. I will cherish this forever, and it’s hard to stay mad, when your insides are laughing this hard.
PS. If you’re curious what happened next, I opened the door. Only to see that they had tricked me, and were totally still goofing off. I went back to my sanctuary, and waited until they were really done. Sadly for G it was now bed-time, and he had to go to bed without the last bid of homework. But that’s another story for another day.
