Plugging Along

I thought I was going to have gobs and gobs of time to do an endless array of things when I finally had all three kids in school.  The reality is completely different.  They are all three at three different schools which all start and end at three different times.  What this means is that I now have a million different alarms set on my phone reminding me when to go and pick which one up and when to get one ready to go and when to go out and meet the bus and in all honesty, I don't have any more time that I had when they were all home!  Add to that that I am STILL dealing with with the demonic dizziness known as vertigo and well- you can understand why I'm a bit on the cranky side!

When I had Noah, I was sick continuously for 8 1/2 months.  During that time, my body got really good at expelling whatever it didn't want in dramatic fashion.  After that, my body's "go to" reflex is to puke whenever I get even the slightest bit "off".  So this continuous dizziness has me hugging the toilet every time I bend over to pick up toys or roll over too fast in bed.  For the record, I've taken about a billion pregnancy tests since anything that stays this sick for this long, in my opinion, has to be pregnant. They are all negative- including the one that my doctor made me take in her office before she would give me any meds since she didn't believe me that the 4 billion sticks I'd peed on were all negative. 

So I'm plugging along, trying to live our normal life while we get used to this new phase where all the kids have somewhere to be all the time.  We are trying to squeeze the most out of the last few days of summer by playing with the water hose whenever possible.

Wielding the water hose gives Noah a power trip!

The great part about all the different schedules is that I am getting more one on one time with each of the boys, which is really fun.  It also makes me realize that I never appreciated how easy it was to just have one child!  Noah and I spend our mornings reading books about dinosaurs and playing board games.  Miles always wants to go to Target on his "special time".  Miles is cracking us up with his synopsis of school.  He gets off the bus every single day and says, "I have good day skoo.  I eat ceweo and meok (cereal and milk)."  And that is all that we know about his days at school.  That cereal must make a major impact because it is the only part of his day that he remembers.  We can ask if he played with friends and did games in his classroom and he just looks at me like I have four heads.  But the minute I bring up cereal and milk at school he can't stop talking about how much cereal he eats there.  He must be going for the world record for Cheerios consumption.

And speaking of food at school... I'm about to defriend all the people I know on facebook who have posted pictures of their kids' lunches that include things like homemade hummus that they got up at 4am to make and cottage cheese with garden tomatoes that they picked out of their garden in the dark of the morning while the rest of the world is still asleep.  Seriously.  I puke a little in my mouth just thinking about it.  My philosophy on school lunches is this:  you get whatever is leftover from dinner the night before or a sandwich on bread that I bought on sale at the grocery store that probably has enriched flour in it.  I have come up with this philosophy that if you give a kid enough preservatives that they will be preserved forever and I will get to keep them around till they are 640 years old.  Not really, but I just know I'm never going to be that mom that has it together enough to send those kinds of lunches to school or have hours and hours of time to volunteer in the school library or other such good mom tasks. 

For now, I think I'll just stick with spraying my kids in the butt with the water hose and playing another 40 rounds of Candy Land.  In my book, that's way more fun that making homemade hummus any day!