Since purchasing the Travelers Rest Here website I have been writing more frequently and editing more regularly and attending meetings more often and Doing Stuff.

(See how professional sounding business ownership has made me?)

I love what I get to do and it’s been in so many ways an easy transition as I have been naturally promoting TR (for free) since we moved here a decade ago.  Now I just get to try to make it profitable.

The hard part is the balancing act, of course.

The merging of my homeschool with my job with my relationships with my blogging here with my preparing dinner with my sleeping.

You know, the real life details that we all struggle through.

Because of this new dynamic, sometimes my brain has no more space for analogies or recording funny things the kids say or do or for crafting posts with beginnings, middles and ends.  (You know this.  You’ve kindly read (or skipped) many of my rambling stream of consciousness posts before this one.)

Well, here’s another one for you.

With a few bits and bobbles from the week …..

One thing that can get tricky with being the lone parent in the house is logistics.  How do you get all the kids to all the places all the time?  For a while, this has been basically a non-issue.  They were younger.  They did less things.  And the things they did, they did together.

But currently we are entering a new phase of life.  (I guess.  And by “entering” I probably mean, I am being dragged along against my will by the dominant and unrelenting force of time.)

 

 

One night last weekend, for example, I dropped off my three big kids and one of their friends at a youth event and I took just the two younger kids to dinner.  We played Uno and corn hole and ate our sandwiches and our soup in a bizarre other-world quietness.  We politely conversed with one another and calmly walked to the car.  I didn’t even recognize us.  Upon arriving at home I allowed them to watch a show and bedtime quickly followed on the heels of that and then – there I was.  Alone.  In the quiet of my living room.  Just sitting there.  I read a book.  Sort of.  And I waited in the quiet for my three big kids to arrive home later via a ride from a friend.

Who was I right then?  What was happening?

And when they came home they were flushed with excitement and stories.  And they were hungry.  So they ate cereal and apples and told me all the stories about their night out.  They had a night out.  I wasn’t there or with them or chaperoning.  They just had a night out.

 

 

(Is anyone besides me finding these changes unacceptable, for the love?)

This week Piper is at theatre camp all week, preparing for a reprisal of her role as the goose in The Little Red Hen.  She’s got daily rehearsals and that means driving back and forth to the theatre every day.  Which is pretty fine, I guess.  Par for this parenting course.  But today Bergen also had to be somewhere at 9 a.m.  In a different state.  What’s one mom supposed to do?  Two kids at two different places in two opposite directions at the exact same time.  Come on, world.

Thank goodness for generous friends and an agreeable grown up daughter who volunteered their time to help me circumnavigate my morning and afternoon pick up schedules on the opposite sides of my town.

For real, what would I do without these people?  (No one needs to answer that.)

Also, somehow in the shuffle of life last week we missed our weekly routine trip to the grocery store and although that sounds like it should be a priority, sometimes if we miss our window to get to the store we sort of just make do that week with whatever we find in the freezer and can buy at our local roadside stand and so that’s what we did last week, but this week we actually kept to our routine and it has been downright comical how grateful the kids have been to have apples in the bowl and bananas on the counter and oranges available again.  You’d think they won the lottery, but all I did was just go to the grocery store like a regular human.  (Lesson to learn here – maybe if you spend a week without fresh fruit, your kids will be more grateful when it shows back up.)

Now I think I am spent with nonsensical stories and tidbits.

 

____________________________________