You guys, this week has been Busy.

(I signified the amount of busy by using the capital B at the beginning of the word busy.  That’s how you know the week has been full.)

I should be doing a half dozen other things right now.  Like all that laundry.  Who has been wearing so many clothes this week, for the love?

This week a large portion of my children are participating in a week long theatre camp.  It’s great.  They’re loving it.  I’m finding it educational and fun and beneficial for them.  And every day we have to rise early to get a portion of school work finished at breakfast before they head to the theatre.  And each afternoon they come home exhausted and full of stories.  And every day somehow they expect to eat a lunch that has been packed.  And somehow in that short morning time between getting out of bed and getting in the car they are supposed to eat breakfast.  And every evening they are still hungry and somehow want to eat dinner too.  (If it sounds like to you that all the inhabitants at this home only just consider eating as their full time job, well – yeah – it sounds like that to me too.)  What?  Hey non-homeschool-mother-friends out there — food is exhausting.  How do you guys manage this?  Thinking about food and preparing food and packaging food and making sure food is portable and food is peanut free for the other classmates and that there is enough of it.  Ugh.  Food.

I’ve got the songs from Piper’s musical bouncing through my head ad nauseam.  “But a little hard work will never kill ya.”

 

 

Bergen gets to wear a beard – much to his delight.  And a dress – much to his chagrin.  It’s not technically a dress.  He’s a “Persian male” during Biblical times – that’s what he keeps telling us.  It’s a tunic, I keep reassuring him.  “Yeah, but it feels like a dress to me,” the boy says.

Bless their hearts, the costume managers of this mostly middle school students performance, encouraged/begged/demanded that all of these puberty-riddled students do one thing at home this week.  Well, actually two things.  Bathe regularly.  Daily even. (!)  And employ the proper use of deodorant.  Thanks theatre leaders – we needed your back up on this one.  And all the middle school parents everywhere said amen.

Instead of accomplishing more tasks at hand tonight, I stopped what I was doing and watched the latest episode of This Is Us with Hannah.  If I was a real grown up I would have at least brought in the scads of dirty laundry and folded them productively whilst I sat on my couch and followed along with the pretend lives of pretend people that I’ll never actually know.

Nah.  I was too busy eating my kettle cooked chips and weeping.  (Notice I used the lowercase b for this busy.  I know the difference.)  I posted a Facebook message about the TV show.  I received more comments about that show than about the last eighteen posts I’ve written combined.  Why do I even bother to write anything personal at all?  Let’s just talk about TV already, shall we?  About Jack and Rebecca and Randall and Kevin and Kate and why don’t any of those people on that show own a dog and why does Miguel’s face look so much like an unnatural human color and where does Kevin live anyway and what does Kate do for a living?  These are the questions people really are asking.  This is what we want to know.  Who cares about meal plans and parenting and getting kids to their theatre class on time with a lunch bag filled with marginally healthy food choices?   Who cares about bedtimes and routine and my real life job?  Just tell me what happens to Jack already, TV show writers.  Tell me what I really want to know.

That was an unnecessary rant.  And a ridiculous one, particularly if you have never seen nor heard of the TV show This Is Us.  My apologies.

Besides the missed phone messages (what are those weird calls from Iowa and Peru anyway?) and the daunting laundry pile and the teetering tower of to-do, another sign of Too Busy (See that?  Yeah, you do.) is the state of my fingernails.  I don’t paint my nails often and I don’t chew them.  I like to keep them relatively the same length and trimmed up.  If I break a nail or get a damaged nail I usually repair the damage pretty rapidly.  I use a fingernail file and smooth it over.  Today I looked at my nails.  Good grief – they were deranged looking.  Can fingernails look deranged?  Maybe I’m turning a corner though, on this busy.  Because instead of ignoring them, I took care of the situation. Now my fingernails look like those of any normal human.  The nails on hands capable of packing lunches and waking up kids early and driving back and forth to camp and typing stories that people won’t care about nearly as much as they care about a fake family on television. And who can blame them?  TV families, dysfunctional as they may be, are prettier to look at than our own.  Even in their brokenness, they’re kind of beautiful.  (Maybe we are too, brown bagged lunches and ragged fingernails and all.)  And TV families can put a pause on their problems.  Let’s insert a soundtrack here and we’ll settle this out next week.

I think that’s a decent idea.  Let’s put on a song or two and we’ll figure this week out later.

I should be done for now anyway.  Probably somewhere one of my children is hungry.  Or thinking about getting hungry.  Or sleeping in order to be hungry tomorrow morning.

Hungry from lying asleep all night long.

 

 

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