4 weeks of summer "vacation"

Well, Zane will be home for four weeks starting next week. He's been at his school's summer session/camp thing up until now. They do music at the summer program, and it's quite fun.

The reason I am getting a little apprehensive about the weeks to come is based on how Spring Break went this year. Here's a true story about the third day of Spring Break.

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Tuesday morning my day started at 6:30AM. Damon mercifully lets me sleep to 6:30 most days, even though the kids are often up at 5:30 or earlier.

As soon as I get out into the living room, Zane informs me that he hasn't been fed breakfast yet. OK, what can I get you? At his request, I serve cinnamon french toast (I buy it frozen) with some syrup on top. Zane grumbles that he prefers to have a cup of syrup so that he can dip each bite. I tell him it's a done deal, and by the way it's getting cold, so he'd better start eating.

Naturally Wyatt hasn't been fed, either. He asks for a "good nana" (banana) and I peel the top for him (he likes to hold it on the unpeeled bottom half). Wyatt takes exactly one bite before he drops the half-peeled banana on the carpet.

I manage to get a quick shower before Zane's friend shows up for a full day playdate. Friend's Mom is a single parent, and school holidays are a challenge for her.

Anyhow, these extended days together are both good and bad. The big kids entertain one another pretty well, but the mess they leave behind is beyond description. Plus, Wyatt now wants to join them. They play with him for 3 minutes at a stretch, and then I get to listen to Wyatt shout for both of them (by name) for the next hour.

I fed all three kids some Cheese Nips for a snack, plus juice for the older ones. This involves getting out three small, identical snack bowls, filling them up with precisely the same number of crackers, then pouring juice for the older kids into different colored cups (but otherwise similar in size and shape, of course). I briefly consider whether I should go find a ruler to make sure the cups are filled evenly, but I decide to take a chance on eyeballing it.

Wyatt eats 2 or 3 of the cheese crackers, then dumps the rest onto the carpet. He promptly steps on them so that they become a lovely heap of orange crumbs.

Wyatt doesn't take his morning nap. Gee, I can't imagine why he can't sleep given the noise level in the house... I remind the older kids to try and keep their voices down, but it's futile.

For lunch, I had planned to make grilled cheese sandwiches. This is one of two foods that I know all three of these kids will actually eat. Friend immediately informs me that he had a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday. Grrrr.

"Would you guys prefer pizza?" This is the other food that I know all three of them will eat.

Pizza takes awhile. You have to preheat the oven, and then cook it. "Grilled cheese sandwiches are quicker." No, they want pizza.

Wyatt starts jumping up and down about the pizza idea the second the pizza box comes out of the freezer. "Eetsa! Eetsa!" Yes, sweetie, pizza, but it has to cook first. "NO!!!!! Easta!"

As the oven takes three days or so to preheat, I put out plates and drinks for the kids (two napkins each). Wyatt will have to sit in his high chair for this meal, because I need to remove his booster from the barstool where friend is going to sit. He is NOT pleased with this change in routine, and lets me know with several minutes of ear-splitting screaming.

Within two minutes of sitting down for pizza, Zane knocks over his water. At the moment it happens, I'm still wrestling with Wyatt trying to get him into the high chair without accidentally breaking any bones.

As usual, Wyatt eats his pizza, then asks for "moh" (more). After one bite of the fresh piece, it's "uh-duh" (all done).

Next is cleaning up the lunch dishes and finishing moping up the water that Zane spilled everywhere. I ask myself, did I eat? Oh, yes, I stood at the counter and had some cheese or something.

I tell the older kids that they can have M&Ms for desert in an hour or so. Five minutes later, Wyatt starts in with the "oc! oc!" (chocolate) requests. I give him his M&Ms, because he doesn't get the concept of "later" at this stage. Naturally, the other kids don't want to wait for theirs, either. Zane spills a few on the floor, and then gets upset because Wyatt picks one up and eats it. "Mom! He ate one of my M&Ms"

"Honey, you don't need to shout about it. There's no need to get upset. Just go over to where his M&Ms are, and take one to replace it."

The next problem is that some batteries fall out of a toy, and Zane can only find 3 of 4 of them. He insists, loudly and repeatedly, that the other one is "GONE! It's Gone! This is where I lost a battery that other time!" What, you think there's like a Bermuda Triangle for batteries right here? The battery is found approximately four seconds later.

For afternoon snack, I retrieve the identical snack bowls and serve them all some pretzels. The older kids are upstairs, so I take them small glasses of water and ask them to please drink them down some before spilling them.

When they come back downstairs, the newest game somehow involves the laundry room. The details on this next part are a bit fuzzy, but apparently Zane climbs up on the washer to get our "grabber" thingy down. He then tries to use the grabber on a box of powdered bleach which is also above the washer. (You can't make this stuff up.)

"Umm, Mom, I'm really sorry." These words always precede Bad News. I discover that a veritable avalanche of powdered bleach has come crashing down and is now covering the entire laundry room floor.

I occurs to me that it has not been a very good day for our floor.

Vacuum comes out, and as I'm vacuuming, I find Friend hiding behind the laundry room door. "I didn't do it! It wasn't my fault!"

"OK, it's OK, just get out of here so I can vacuum this mess up."

"He did it! It wasn't me!" Yea, OK, Mr. Tattletale, I get it.

At the end of the day, I informed the friend's mom that the kids were pretty good, but a bit louder and wilder than usual. Apparently when she mentioned it to her son in the car on the way home, he immediately said "I wasn't the one who spilled the Clorox!" Friend's mom calls me on the cell phone for clarification.

I spent about a half hour this morning trying to peel tape off the doorknob to the den. I think they used about a half of a roll on it playing some spy/detective game. At least it wasn't super glue.