I have to admit, I am enjoying my free weekdays.
Even with the freedom though, things are still so busy. And tonight’s post is a random bunch of thoughts, observations, and questions I have that I meant to put out there this week but never got around to.
First, last night was our fifth open house.
Holy shit. Thank God those are done.
But I was talking to another mom last night whose daughter went away to college and now the only kid left at home with her is her son who is in the same grade as Number 3. And she was saying how she has two hours of free time every afternoon, and she’s so not used to it that she’s basically been wandering around her house and ultimately not doing anything.
It took me until today, the 12th day of school, to actually be productive and semi-efficient.
It’s fucking hard to go from having to budget just about every second of your time in order to get anything accomplished to having hours and hours available to you!
I actually wrote my masters thesis on this topic — athletes and their grades in season vs. their grades out of season. And the findings were the same as what we parents go through when all the kids are finally in school. The majority of athletes have better grades during the season than they do once their season is over. More free time can be difficult to manage at first!
So if you have found yourself walking around in circles like an idiot and getting pretty much nothing done, you are in good company.
Second thing.
You know Number 7 had a pretty impressive meltdown after school on Wednesday.
You also know that I finally bought Awesome, and it took the stains out of her favorite shirt so she could finally wear it to school.
She wore it to school on Wednesday.
Then after the meltdown from hell on Wednesday, she woke up on Thursday and told me she wanted to wear her favorite shirt again.
And not having the energy to deal with a pre-bus meltdown, I let her wear it.
Oh — our dryer also shit the bed last week, so I have to hang everything out to line dry until we get a new one. And while I kind of find it to be cathartic, that shit takes time. Normally I do at least one load of laundry a day, but there’s not really time to do it in the afternoon when the kids get home from school and before we go to practice and have it all dry before dark because once it’s dark there’s now way I’m taking that crap down.
So anyway, today when Number 7 woke up and asked if she could wear the same shirt again, well, I let her. It didn’t smell. And it didn’t have visible stains on it.
And even if it did, I think I would have let her wear it because there are only so many massive Number 7 meltdowns I can handle in one week.
So Number 7 wore the same shirt to school three days in a row this week.
Two or three or five kids ago, this would have mortified me.
But now?
Whatever gets them the hell out the door and on the bus works for me.
So if you have a kid who only wants to wear one thing to school, well, I get it.
And you are in good company.
Third thing.
How often do you guys change your kids’ sheets?
Because I can’t remember the last time I changed some of the sheets in the kids’ rooms.
For real.
The kids who still have an accident on occasion are good, cause every time they pee in their bed their sheets get changed.
(Well, I might just cover that shit up with a towel until the morning, but then at least the next day I change them. Unless I forget until we go up to bed that night and I see the towel and remember, FUCK. I forgot to change the damn sheets. So I check to see if the towel smells and if it does I just take it off and put a new towel on top and then wash the sheets the next day…Am I the only one who does that, too?)
Anyway, I think college freshmen might wash their sheets more often than I wash my kids’ sheets.
And thank God the dryer broke, because now I still have an excuse not to wash them as often as I should.
So if you can’t remember the last time you washed your kids’ sheets, you are in good company.
Finally, I spent some time on Pinterest this week looking at lunch ideas for the kids, and (because I was struggling with time management) about four hours later I ended up on a blog post about how kids’ lunches are never cold enough, even with an ice pack, and they sit in the danger zone sometimes for like four hours or something like that, and two hours is okay but any longer than that and you are basically giving your kid some sort of bacterial infection that will kill them in a matter of hours.
And I don’t know about you, but there have been many, many nights where I’ve made something for dinner and had a bunch left over, and I’ve fallen asleep or something and realized several hours later, like that-temperature-danger-zone-blog-post-lady-would-have-had-a-fucking-heart-attack amount of hours later, and we are all still alive.
And none of us have had a crippling bout of diarrhea.
So anyway, do you guys stress about that? Cause I totally don’t.
And if you are like me and you don’t keep your kids’ lunches in the arctic temperature zone for the duration of the school day, well, you’re in very good company there, too.
Oh yeah. One last thing that makes me super excited because I’m a mom and this is what my life has been reduced to.
I just discovered last night that the latest season of the Blacklist is on Netflix. I feel like it’s the night before grown up Christmas. It’s pretty much the best show ever.
Like it’s right up there with Breaking Bad as far as I’m concerned.
So I won’t be getting any sleep for the next three nights.
But that’s okay.
Because once Monday rolls around, I’ll have plenty of time to not use effectively, and I can waste a bunch of it by taking a nap.
And those are my deep thoughts for the week.
TGIF Everyone!
Like stream of consciousness! Like deep thought served just made and warm! Delicious. My little one ‘s sheets must be changed everyday- It is me , I have made him paranoid that way! I ll have to change that as in not change the sheets each day.:):)
Every day? Holy shnikes, Swati. Come to my house 🙂
My son is 10. He has chores. He strips his bed every week and washes/dries his sheets (he has two sets of sheets so if he flakes and forgets there is another set). I strip the 5 year old’s sheets every week (he washes hers with his) and I strip our bed every week as well.
It’s a spillover from my upbringing. Saturday was chore day….one of those chores was stripping and washing/drying the sheets.
We all have chores here, too, but changing the sheets obviously isn’t one of them…
I do the same… oh crap, there’s a towel there from last night’s accident… Smell it and just double-check. We have lots of late night bed changes. We’re in a situation where there’s an accident a week, just one normally…. so that’s my Forced changed of sheets.
Refrigeration, meh, not so big on. Food needs to be cooled before it gets covered. I do agree with that one. At home… put it in the fridge Un-covered for a while, so it’ll cool. This works well for a pot of something that you just don’t want to deal with for a while. Cover later before you go to bed. And for lunch, well, we only do meat & veggies… and everything is already cooled so putting it in a container is OK. (chicken apple sausage is actually really yummy cold… it’s my go-to staple for the lunchbox).
Netflix and otherwise surfing… I could go on. And so could others. You should ask us just that and we’ll diatribe on what’s keeping us entertained 🙂 Note: I have never watched so much TV but the past 3 weeks of… he’s Finally in school! Thank you for a little me time!!!!
That blog post about the food put me over the edge, I think 😉
Lol! Love this post. I get you in the sheets. I wish I had your “free” time. I put that in quotes because I’m sure you have a ton to do. It looks like “uninterrupted” time to me. I homeschool so I pretty much never get that.
You’re right. It’s not exactly free. I work from home, and I also work part time and go into the swim office during the day and then coach every night. But to have the luxury, and I definitely feel like it’s a luxury, to have six hours of time where I don’t have to work anything around the kids is really awesome 🙂
The best idea I’ve seen for keeping lunchbox food cold is to wet a sponge, freeze it and put it in a sandwich bagno fuss, no mess
LOVE this! I totally used to do the towel on the pee trick!! (I THINK we’re past accidents?) I send my kids with ham and MAYO and no ice pack ???? – and they are totally still alive 🙂 I have a date with the Blacklist tonight!!
OMG! I am horrible at changing bed sheets! I mean I only know the last time I changed them because we just moved and I thought it would be a good time to change them, but that was the end of July, before that, no idea when the last time I changed them was. Glad I am not the only one! I don’t have any kids in school yet, but working from home I rarely get free time anyway, so I don’t think sending them to school would change much for me.
Ha! I just finally today washed my son’s sheets thanks to this post. Maybe the next post could be about scrubbing the bathtub to get me to do that too?!
I read an article a while back that asked, “Do you really need to wash the sheet every week?” And the answer was “Yes!” Apparently they get all dead skin, dust mite nasty super fast, so changing them once a week is imperative. That motivated me to change the sheets every other week (bc seriously, every week is impossible). That lasted a while. Now I’m lucky if they get changed once a month. That build-up nastiness hasn’t killed me yet! (or even made me sick for that matter!)
We are all still alive here, too. I’ll aim for improvement, but it’s never gonna happen once a week!
I love your blog in a narcissistic way. It’s like reading my own blog minus 5 kids. I change the sheets when it comes to mind or when the last set of sheets finally makes it through the wash and back to my bedroom, which is probably weeks. And my kids don’t even sleep in their own bed so I’m only changing my bed sheets! that’s hard enough LOL
This article made me so happy. I change my kids sheets once every 4729 years unless he pees on them or spills his sippy cup, or unless they get to the point I can crack them in half. Why else would anyone change them so frequently? I don’t see what the big deal is lmao and I have enough laundry to do without adding my 2 year olds IKEA duvet to the mix.
Wheres the laundry man?