Monday Night

iPad in hand in the hours of darkness.  Clearly I did not learn anything from last night--here we go again.  Fool that I am.

Spent the evening assembling school supplies and sorting them into backpacks.  School starts Wednesday and I wanted to get things organized in case I needed to make a last-minute trip for a missing item or two tomorrow.  Fortunately, we seem to be in pretty good shape.

I love those commercials for back-to-school supplies with "It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" as the theme song.  That is exactly how I feel right now.

The kids are ready to go back to school. They have been for a while now.  They need the structure and the direction and the release from each other's constant companionship.  Three really is a crowd and somebody is always left out of the playing pairs.  And don't tell me to have a fourth child, since I already have one more kid than hands and further down that path lies lunacy!  At least for me.

Part of me feels guilty that I am not one of the many moms on Facebook currently lamenting the end of summer vacation.  Maybe that's just the good moms.  Or at least the moms of lower-maintenance kids.  At this stage of the parenting game, I am "on" from the minute I get up to the minute they go to bed, and that is a LOT of driving and cooking and cleaning and playing and reasoning and working on speech therapy activities and refereeing (so much refereeing!!!) and I am just tired, bless it all.  If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy, and that is the truth.  Mama is ready for a break.

Mama still has a crazy schedule during the school year--three kids' worth of activities means that we have one or more things every day after school plus homework--but I can sit and read a book for an hour or walk the dog or get my nails done or heaven forbid go to the doctor without three kids tagging along and those things will be manna for my soul.  And because I do sincerely and deeply love my kids I will be a homeroom mom and class reader and party organizer and computer lab helper and school board member and all that at their school for them.  But I will finally have a few minutes' peace every so often and that will be good too.

Two days and counting.