My day off

Yesterday I had a rare opportunity. Keith took Bryce, Owen, and Lisa skiing for the day and I was homeschool-free. It was just me and Gabe. Troy and Shane would be in school and at basketball practice. I had visions of extreme productivity. It was going to be like a day off!

I had two goals. One, catch up a little on cleaning around the house--just a little. Second, make some headway on a scrapbooking project.

Maybe I shouldn't have thrown "crack down on toilet training with Gabe" into the mix, but I did. It didn't take much time, but it was on my mind all day--do you have to go? do you have to go now? how about now?

I decided I better take our weekly trip to library story time with Mr. Tom. It also doubles as my time to check out the books for the next school week and I didn't know when I'd get that done with two birthdays and a kid party to orchestrate in the next 5 days. I got the books and Gabe enjoyed his time. When asked by his brothers last night who he saw at the library he answered, "Mr. Tom"! I don't think Gabe has ever accurately answered a "who" question in that context (meaning something other than "who is that") correctly.

At lunch time Troy came home for a quick 20 minutes to try to consume 2,000 nutritious calories. In between bites I got updates on his day and plans for the evening.

I got thrown a bit of a curve ball in the form of a doctor appointment to have Shane's sprained ankle worked on. Ninety minutes gone. But not wasted, it's part of loving and caring for my boy. We drove together, talked together, laughed, and made medical progress with his ankle.

While I was out, and after dropping Shane back at school, it only made sense to stop at the store for just a couple items on my list and, oh yes, Keith's birthday cake for Saturday had to be made Friday so I had to get those ingredients, too. No potty training during the out and about, I'm not that crazy.

Home again, a simple early supper for the four of us, cleaned up the dishes, put away groceries, finished cleaning off and organizing the counter to get the scrapbooking going.

Got a text, surprise, the skiers are almost home and boy are they HUNGRY! Somehow they forgot to tell me that "all day" meant 3/4 of the day. Back to the kitchen...

I had such high hopes. Neither one of my goals was met, not even touched in fact. I'm not sure if they were unrealistic to begin with or just got rolled over by family life. I think it was the latter.

I wanted to be frustrated, but I really couldn't. And I knew it wouldn't change anything. The day was just what it needed to be. As a mom, it doesn't matter if you have 4 kids or 6 kids or just 1 kid at home. It really is a full time job.