The big kids have been in day camps through our parks and rec offerings in Raleigh. (You'd think this might make my week seem easy and low key, but camp has been a neutral force on that front, at best.) Anneliese does an art camp all morning, and Nathan is doing a lego camp in the afternoon, at a different location. Surprisingly the schedule has worked okay, but it is a lot of driving during trafficky times, and a lot of fussy crying lunch hours while I try to feed all three big kids, and get a bottle into the baby, and get us moved from one parks facility to another. I have been packing lunches to eat while we go, but I'm not ashamed to admit we also drove through for chicken nuggets twice already.
Also the dryer is broken (again!) (whole separate problem from before! what are the chances? please file this under Always Something) so add some laundry drying stops at Another Nathan's house during those lunch runs too. (He is out of town but his house/dryer is near one of the camps, so.)
This is the only picture I got of Anneliese's "camp" and it has nothing to do with art, and it isn't even at her camp, but Nathan's. She was walking in with our packed lunch and her sunglasses and said "Guess who I am? I will give you a clue! I am mommy!" (I don't get it, but okay? She looks sweet though so I will take it.)
And this is the only picture I got of Nathan's "camp" week, again having almost nothing to do with lego camp, other than it was taken in his camp room holding a camp toy and proclaiming he had a solution to how we could make a sperm whale cake for his birthday (which is what he has been asking for, and of course I don't know how to do that, is he for real??) -- just make a cake, and put a sperm whale on the cake, and look wouldn't this one be so cool?
Sperm whale toy has now been ordered, and Amazon officially doesn't understand my purchasing patterns. Oh and also, Nathan loved lego camp. Anneliese loved art camp too, despite my being too beside myself to be super aware or memory-making about it all. *sigh*
In heavier news, I saw a man on a motorcycle get hit by a car (he did not survive) and it is heartbreaking and horrible, of course for the family more than me (not about me at all! I know this! I know!) but it still was somewhat traumatizing to witness. AND in an unrelated incident I hit (bumped) another car in a parking lot and I left a note and asked everyone at the rec center playground if it was theirs and it was not, but no one has called which means maybe nothing will come of it? But it feels unsettling, like, did I do the right thing? Should I have called the police to file a report on myself? (There was no mark. It was nothing. But still.) Bah.
(Car-crash type events, incidents, whatever -- they make me stressy. It is a Thing.)
Unrelated to any of this, my mom is trying to plan her Final Arrangements and they are, um... unusual. To the point that she wants to get all of us siblings on board now, which is fine, okay, but it sure makes for an awkward phone conversation when she caught me with a spare moment ("spare" haaaaa) feeding the baby a bottle while the big kids played on the indoor playset at the rec center waiting for Nathan's camp doors to open. Weird! Morbid! The other parents were backing away slowly, I could sense it.
So ALSO, Mark is traveling a lot. His new job is good for him, for experience and title and interesting things to work on, but he works a lot more. Like, a lot more than he used to, and a lot more than I was expecting. And that work includes traveling, not because the job itself involves travel (it doesn't, in theory), but because there are trainings and meetings and blah blah blah I don't know. It seems to be a lot of Special Exception Case trips and extra shifts and going in for storms, etc etc etc, and I guess Special Exception Case things are normal at the beginning of any job. But it has been several months now and I am ready for him to have more than a day or two off every several weeks. He is finally coming home tonight from his third trip to Charlotte this month and I am just done.
(I normally am more supportive than I feel/sound right now. I promise. It's just that my days feel long and they also feel like they never end, because they go all night too, and I'm at my limit of being... needed. I am feeling a panic-level need to be alone. I am counting the hours.)
This might be obvious, but I haven't been sleeping well either. And ugh there is hardly any feeling worse than being wired and exhausted at the same time. While lone-wolfing it for the third week in this month, with four kids, one of whom yells at unpredictable intervals because she's still at that stage of infancy where if she is awake she is fussy, save lots of jiggling and attention which is sometimes fine but sometimes feels overwhelming with three other kids also needing me, which means everyone ends up somewhere between fussy and frustrated. (I know there are worse feelings. Of course there are. Have some perspective, right? But for where I am this week, it is hard for me to remember what those worse feelings might be, because frankly this sucks. Like, grade-A level suuuuuucks.)
Ready for some brightsiding now?
This afternoon Anneliese has her cutie friend Beatrice over to play, and Nathan is still at camp, and both Charlotte and Ali are sleeping quietly upstairs. (People in my house reliably take naps! I do not take this for granted!) I am sitting by the pool now watching their playdate happen; I brought my leader's manual outside so I could start reading through it and planning my small group sessions for my Montreat conference in a few weeks, but it turns out that blog-venting some frustrations a sentence at a time takes less eyeball- and brain-power than that so I'm doing this instead. And if I am honest, watching them swim and laugh and excitedly ask me for jumping pictures is definitely the best moment of my week.
And my time to be alone will come soon. Not soon enough, but it will come. Please come, alone time.
1 comment:
My washer is broken so too bad we don't live closer.
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