Just Stuff

I was sitting here, lamenting the fact that no one blogged anything for me to read today, and I thought perhaps I should take some time and blog something myself. Which would be a great idea if I had anything at all even remotely interesting to blog about.

We're down to the last week of school. Things are starting to finally calm down. The past couple of weeks have been absolutely crazy. Crazy! If I was lucky I'd get to go home after work, then it was off on various activities. If you have three kids and each kid has two activities, that means mom has six activities. And in the past couple of weeks, we've also had extra projects and concerts and other end-of-the-year things.

We had the science fair, wherein Sam asked the question: "Is Double-Dipping Dangerous?", and he determined that it is, and won a blue ribbon for his project. We had the final band concert of the year, and fortunately, they did a combined elementary/middle school concert, so we only had to go to one. That went well, and the kids sounded very good. We had Sam's school's 70's Disco Fever choral concert, we had an open house for the middle school, featuring performances by the school band and drumline, so we had to go to that. We had open house for the elementary school and went to that. In and around all of those things, we also had baseball practice and games, cub scouts (which, as a leader, I have to go to as well as Sam), Squig's math tutoring, my chemistry tutoring, piano lessons for all three kids, plus their group theory lessons. And we're all trying to squeeze in learning Spanish for our upcoming summer plans.

Yesterday, Saturday, John and I went to a wedding in the morning, Sam went to a baseball game while we were at the wedding, John changed when we got home, then went straight to the baseball game, while they were there the girls and I got dressed up for the reception and went in our dresses to a year end/welcome to new students band BBQ at the high school, where we met up with Sam and John, then the girls and I left early to get to the reception, while John stayed for a parent band meeting, then he and Sam went home and changed and eventually we all ended up at the reception, which John left a little early to try to fix a broken sprinkler pipe. It was a super busy day.

Last week Sam went on three field trips, one to a park across the street from the school for a picnic for the kids who reached their goals in the reading program, the second to a minigolf/arcade-type place for the kids who read a million words or more this year (he read more than 2 million, thankyouverymuch), and the third to see the movie "Rio" for the second trimester honor roll students. On Monday he's going bowling for the third trimester honor roll field trip. That kid hasn't been to school in weeks! On Monday Squig is going to John's Incredible Pizza for a band trip (they didn't raise enough money to go somewhere really fun, so this is kind of a consolation trip), and on Tuesday she's gone all day long for the 8th grade graduation trip to Great America. Then she graduates from 8th grade on Wednesday evening.

Thursday is the last day of school because they made Friday a furlough day. Whew! Before we can officially start summer vacation, we still have to get through three piano lessons, two group theory lessons, one final chemistry tutoring session (for the student I tutor), one cub scout pack meeting, two baseball games, one orthodontist appointment, graduation, and that's just the stuff after school. We also have field day, year-end assemblies,

As busy as we are now, I'm sure it will only get worse as Squig moves into high school, Sam moves into middle school, and Ruby starts having her own activities (she'll start activity days for the girls at church in February, and wants to take dance classes, which we're thinking about). Sam's talking about playing a sport in middle school, maybe flag football, maybe basketball, and he's planning to continue with the trumpet in the band and wants to join the drumline. He'll have to make some choices there, because there are conflicts. We already have the preliminary schedule for the high school band/drumline, and since our school is only one year old, we don't have a marching band yet, and the drumline will perform at all the home football games, then start practicing in earnest for the winter competition season. I'm sure there will be band booster involvement of some sort.

There's just a lot going on. I'm really looking forward to summer vacation. I'll be blogging about it. There will be a lot of sand, sun and ocean involved!