May Days!

In case you didn't believe me when I said that this was my busiest time of year, read on and you will become a believer.

In addition to the everyday and the mundane, in the next ten days I have all of these things on my calendar [seriously]:

6 haircuts [and one color]
3 school events
3 basketball games
3 ccd/church related items
2 baseball games [with snack duty]
2 field trips [just a notation for me, Tony is going to San Francisco with Wyatt for one of them]
2 girl scout meetings
1 family reunion [with 500 expected to attend]
1 annual garden party and auction to set up [I'm just the help]
1 wedding [Tony and I are in the wedding party]
1 1st communion [my sweet Sarah]

Sort of in that order, is your head spinning yet? Mine is! To punctuate the timeline I just described, the day after all of that is Mother's Day!

So much is happening this time of year and it seems to be that way every year. Tony has a ton of his own things going on and revolving around it all I am also having issues with dresses and clothing, selling tickets for two different things, helping to plan a baby shower, regular PTA duties and school stuff, carpools, practices, finances, and oh yeah, dinner! I have had mental dinner blocks all week. I just feel stumped every night and we end up with a mish-mash of something that resembles dinner. I guess there is a limit to what can fit into my brain and dinner just puts me over the top. Tony just laughs at me. Thank God for his sense of humor.

We may finally be finished with all the rain, hurray for that! We have had so much of it this year, everything is so green and beautiful. Oh Spring, you have done a marvelous job and you are stunning!

God give me strength to remain calm, to keep the stress away as much as possible, to remember to breathe and enjoy the moment before it all slips away, and to relax and have fun. And, if I don't achieve all that, at least let me have a good laugh about it when it's over, amen!

what's in my head.

I love wordle. Wordle is cool. Did I tell you how awesome wordle is? I could pick 15-20 words to describe each one of my kids and then put their name in the middle of all that. Then I could print them up and frame them. I could do that! That is a good plan.

Wednesday...you are a beast! That said, I will do my best to purposefully appreciate the sweet and simple moments with my family tonight that I would have taken for granted otherwise.

Ciao ciao, hasta pronto!

No Fooling!

At baseball practice yesterday, Eva busied herself picking these nice weeds. She calls them centipedes. Last year she called them rosemary. She clutched this bunch of centipedes for the hour that we watched Sarah and Wyatt practice and after we dropped the other kids off at CCD she fell asleep in the car on the way home.

I usually try to get her inside to finish her nap on the couch when she does that. Sometimes I just let her sleep in the car with the door to the house propped open, like I did yesterday. Each time I would go into the garage to check on her, she napped sweetly in her booster seat continuing to clutch her centipedes tightly. Finally, I heard her moan and I went out to retrieve her. As I carried her into the kitchen she said to me. "Mommy it's time for you to make my centipede soup."

And to that I replied, "OK, let's put them down on the counter and I'll work on that in just a little bit."

So this morning when I saw the wilted centipedes on the counter where we left them, I felt a little sad for not making her soup. I didn't have to make any excuses because she had forgotten about it, but still it was hard to throw them in the trashcan. I find it so funny that I actually have guilt for not making weed soup for my four year old daughter.

I don't, however, feel any guilt this morning for the information that I passed along to my three older kids as they ate their breakfast. When they got to school, I hope they remembered that I told them that there would be a total eclipse of the sun at 8:30 a.m. and that it was supposed to hail at 9:00 a.m. I couldn't think of anything else, and they totally fell for it. They looked at each other in astonishment and talked about how exciting it was going to be! I hope they told their friends! I can't wait until they get home from school today!

Happy happy April!