Yes, I am behind. Way behind. I'm not sure how I got that way, but I did. Last week Andy was at Camp Thurman everyday between 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. Everyday. You would think I would have had plenty of time to get everything done and then write a little blog post at the end of the day. Somehow, that did not happen. In fact, on Thursday I got nothing done all day. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and was busy all day, but didn't get a thing accomplished until the kids went to bed. After 9:00 p.m. Which means I did not have time to write my blog because I was too busy doing all the crap I was supposed to be doing all day.
So, today I am going to write a post I should have written last week, and, not only that, I'm going to combine two posts into one. I'll try not to make this a habit, hopefully this time at my parent's house with nothing to do but hang out with the kids all day and play and play and play and not do any household chores will allow me to get caught up in the blogosphere of life. However, I'll never say never. Let's just pretend that it's Friday, July 2.
Andy had been at Camp Thurman all week with three of his friends. Two of them live nearby so we were carpooling. I got the afternoon shift, so it was fabulous in the morning when I just got to send him off, but a little more work in the afternoons when I needed to pick him, and the others, up. Camp Thurman is a 30 minute drive from our house when there is absolutely no traffic. However, at 3:15 p.m. when I left my house every afternoon, there was traffic. I'm not sure who or how or where they were coming from, but there was traffic. It was it fine, it just made the entire trip to pick them up and drop everybody off and get back home a two hour ordeal. Again, no big deal, just hard on the girls and a lot of time in the car.
The first day I picked them up I threw a few snacks in the diaper bag in case they were hungry. I also had a couple of snacks that were left over from something else, which is unusual, so I was good to go. Or so I thought. I stopped carrying snacks in my diaper bag awhile ago. I got very tired of the kids yelling at me because they didn't like the snacks I brought, or because I got too busy to refill the snacks and didn't have anything at all. How dare you not know and anticipate that I was going to be hungry and want to eat Sun Chips? Not pretzels, I hate pretzels. Why do you always have the worst snacks? Yeah, that gets a little tiring. So I basically told the kids to suck it and stopped carrying snacks in my bag. Now I remind them that they may want to get a snack before we leave the house but I don't bring anything for them. The only exception is Amanda. I usually have Cheerios or puffs or something for her to a)entertain her and give her something to do when we have to sit through two hours of gymnastics and b) because she gets hungry when she has to sit during the aforementioned class.
Where was I? Oh yes, or so I thought. So when the boys got in the car that first day I casually asked them if they wanted something to eat. They ate it all and then asked for more. I couldn't figure out why they were so hungry. Come to find out they had a snack at camp but they ate it super early in the day and then rarely had time to eat all of their lunch so four or five hours later when I picked them up they were famished. I started bringing a variety of things for them to eat and choose from each day but tried to limit it to two snacks per kid. I figured they would eat soon after I dropped them off and didn't want their moms mad at me because they weren't hungry when they got home. By Friday I was a little lenient and one of them ate four snacks. I'm not exactly sure which one, I just know it wasn't Andy (only because I stopped him before he had a chance to eat the last one). Oh well, the week was over and they couldn't yell at me because I'd be out of town.
Now, most of the days I dropped the boys off I did not see them get out of the car with their snack wrappers. There is a little space in the way back of the car where Andy sits where he likes to put his wrappers. He calls it his trash pocket. I don't know what it was designed for, probably a space to put your DS or books or other things, but it has a little top that lifts up on hinges and is about the size of half an adult shoe box. A couple of times I heard Andy tell them to put the wrappers in there, and then a couple times when I was in the trunk during the week I saw a few of them lying around. I should have made Andy pick them up everyday, and one or two of the days I did, but by the end of the week the car was trashed. I knew we needed to clean the car, but I was trying to get ready to go out of town and take care of everything else I needed to do and just let that one slide.
The last day of camp I decided to take Ethan home first. Every other day I had taken Mark home first. I always had a reason to take Mark first, much to Andy's disappointment. It's not that he doesn't like Ethan, he does very much, it's just that right now Mark is one of his best buds. They have a lot in common, they are both seven going on forty, and they like to spend as much time together as possible. So, in taking Ethan home first I went a little different way than I went every other day. As we're driving, the boys asked me where we were going. I explained that today we were taking Ethan home first. Then Ethan said, "This isn't the way to my house." I smiled and told him it wasn't the way we normally went but that I could, indeed, get to his house this way. Then Mark piped up with, "Where are we?". I told him we were on Glade, not Hall-Johnson. Mark and Andy both live off Hall-Johnson. To that Mark said, "Ah, Glade, of course I know where we are now", which I found difficult to believe, but I told you, he's just like Andy. I kind of laughed at the thought of my three back-seat drivers, eating everything in sight, and mentally compared them to Sarah who is at the point right now where every time we see a stop sign says, "Mommy, that says stop sign." She loves to tell me how to drive. So, I dropped everybody off, the week was over, we left on our vacation and life was grand.
Yesterday Charlie got home from the long weekend with us and decided to clean and vacuum my car. What helped him make this decision was all of the ants he found in the car. Red ants. Apparently, I should have been more careful about making the boys pick up their snack wrappers. I should have also been a little more insistent when I told Andy I didn't want him keeping his snack wrappers in his trash pocket. He had about 20-25 wrappers in the trash pocket, and many others strewn about the floor. There's nothing more I hate about a car than people who just let it go and don't clean up their kids' mess and I did just that. In order to scare Andy straight so he learned from this little invasion, I told him that if Charlie hadn't cleaned out the car he would have sat in his seat, minding his own business, and the ants would have come and bit him while we were driving and there was nothing he could do about it. He has been bitten by red ants before, and was visibly sorry and ashamed that there were ants all over the car. Red ants suck.
I may also have to suspend snacks in the car, which I have threatened time and again, but somehow they always make their way back in. Usually because the kids wait to grab a snack until we are on our way out the door. They could be home for two hours and eat nothing and as soon as you tell them we are leaving to go somewhere they ask for a snack. Also, it doesn't matter how long we are going to be in the car, 30 minutes or three, they need to bring a snack because they just can't make it to or through the next activity without one.
Most of all, I need to get my mojo back and start enforcing the rules and keeping my car clean. Just one more step to getting things back on track.
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