The days are always greener on the other side of the weekend

Before Christmas break, we couldn't wait to crash on our couches and drool until the new year. Of course, visiting my family was a huge high light for me and, after the drive from CA, 12 hours in the car didn't seem like that bad of a deal. After getting home we were looking forward to a week of vegging again until the new year. Then Man's grandfather passed away. Man flew out for the funeral and is remaining there for the last of his "relaxation" time (it can't be helped, I know, and I don't resent it, but there you have it).

Isn't it funny how when Mom leaves, the family eats junk food. My mom didn't leave us to fend for ourselves very often and we always managed to eat Subway or pizzas or some other sort of fantastically delicious junk food that we didn't seem to eat very often as younger kids. At my house, something similar happens, except we eat junk food no matter which parent is gone. Man makes a mean tray of nuggets and fries. When Man is gone, my drive to put a whole, Man-filling dinner on the table is much diminished.

The first day he was gone, I think we grazed until bedtime. We sort of ate leftovers, apples, and whatever we could rustle up from the couch cushions. When I announced that it was bedtime, the kids rebelled and claimed that since a real dinner hadn't been presented to them, it wasn't fair that they didn't have a chance to eat.

Contention 1: they don't really eat my cooking much anyway, unless it's one of 3 things they've decided they like, which is always changing anyway.

Contention 2: they had, in fact, been eating all night. Apparently it doesn't count if it doesn't happen all at once.

So I gave them glasses of milk and sent them to bed. I promised pancakes in the morning.

The next day we headed up to the store to grab the dried beans and cans of diced tomatoes I needed for Marcie's chili (which I've been eating ever since -- it's even better the next day) and each of them decided that they wanted to spend their allowance buying a totino's pizza and a donut. Blech. They claimed that they would eat them for dinner rather than eat my chili because they knew, in the precognitive sort of way only kids and gamblers can believe in, that it was going to taste terrible. Joke's on them.

They ended up eating their pizzas for lunch. Tag had the foresight to buy two, just in case, which his sister later begged him into sharing when she realized she had run out of junk food options come dinner time.

Today, we ate pancakes and granola bars. We've run out of apples because my kids eat them like a swarm of locusts. Which I love. I always keep apples handy because who am I to discourage their appetite for fresh fruit? On the way to a friend's house we gabbed the epitome of evil food from the kingdom of the tyrannical R. McDonald, who rules the land of golden arches with a greasy, fat fist that looks like a fist but it's really just his hand that's so fat you can't tell the difference and neither can he.

-sigh-

So, anyway, I was catching up with my friend who I havn't seen in over 24 hours and noticed that there are a lot of things I'm waiting on until school's back in. We were keeping Pebbles out of diapers and running about commando to help her potty train, but stopped that for our road trip (which I'm sure my grandparents appreciated). We also put Freida back on bottles all day instead of her usual one bottle in the morning with a sippy cup the rest of the day. And bedtime has slowly crept back to 9 instead of 7:30, dinner's a joke, laundry is optional when you don't have any place to be, and the chore charts havn't been printed out in quite some time.

What does all this tell me? That I'm bad at managing this home without some external force dictating a couple of scheduling elements each day. In the mean time, we're having a blast just playing around despite a bit of grumpiness from kids whose nap times are not where they are used to having them.

It was 80° today. Who can time manage with something like that going on outside?