TSME Day 4: Recap

Monday:

• Rain.  Pain.  (They usually go together for me.)
• Second-grade math homework: brutal (for both me AND Large Fry).
• Small Fry willingly took a nap after school.  Unusual.
• Lots of tears and missing of Daddy/Hubby.  Most of them were mine.

Tuesday:

• More rain.
• Lots of whining about not being able to play outside in the cool, damp, and wet.
• I slip on the kitchen floor (which is out to get me...really), fall, and am in such pain that I really hope I haven't broken anything.  "Mommy, are you okay?" I hear, times 3.  No.  I'm hurting and nearly crying.  Breaking bones while Hubby is at Summit is not something I wanted to become a tradition (I broke my right pinky toe last year).  And last year, my misadventure was on the day Hubby returned...not three days before.  Tuesday, you should be better to me!  (Nothing broken.  Still a bit sore in places, though.)
• Medium's rather shattering revelation about why she thinks XSIL joined the Army.
• Bro calls and I don't even hear him leave a message on the machine.  (We suspect the sudden increase in his calls—usually, he gets the machine because we're nowhere near our house phone—has to do with the decided lack of child support in the last six weeks, despite employment since February.  He's not paying, so clearly, the next best thing is phone calls.  He must not have yet received the same paperwork from Domestic Relations that I received last Saturday.)
• We have the very exciting chicken cacciatore in the crockpot recipe that I finally decided to cook.  Two-thirds of a hit among the kids.
• I keep giggling to myself and wanting to rename the chicken cacciatore as Revolutionary Chicken, but I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't get the joke.
• Dad texts to see if he can come out on Wednesday.

Wednesday:

• I make a fast run to Walmart on the first uncloudy day of the week (I'm in desperate need of a wrist brace), between dropping the kids off at school and having to be back at the school an hour later for a Child Support Team meeting.  (Large Fry is continuing to struggle in school, and we're trying to see if we can show cause for learning disability testing, which is coming up iffy because Large is showing improvement...just inconsistently.  Innyhoo, the CST was formed to explore our options.)  This is a follow-up meeting, and we determine we're going to do a full reevaluation on her speech issues.  We all strongly suspect there's more going on there, and her last full eval was four and a half years ago.
• Still achy, still have a headache, so it's home to nap after the meeting, and a quick series of texts around noon with Dad.  Gramma got jealous when she heard he'd be coming out here and I'd invited him to stay for dinner, so his departure got delayed until Gramma got home from Wednesday stamping and could come too.
• What to do for dinner...erm...hey, I have chicken tenderloins.  I have taco seasoning.  I have lots of pepper strips in the freezer.  Chicken fajitas, in the crockpot!  I get that started and make a list of the things I'll need from the store in order to complete dinner: sour cream, tortillas, that sort of thing.
• Off to the church office—Hubby's paycheck is in, and we can usually get away with depositing it on Wednesday even though it won't really hit the account until the check goes live on Thursday.  Gabbed with Wanda, the ministerial assistant, for far too long (but it was so much fun), which put me behind schedule.
• Walmart again.  Dinner supplies.  Lady in line in front of me writes a check and has old home week with the cashier.  Argh.  I get home right at 3:30 and hobble to the corner to wave at the kids and tell 'em to come on down (we started this after my surgery, so that I wouldn't have to walk so far—I tired so easily—and we've kept it up).
• Homework.
• Mom and Dad arrive.  Mom has brought more stuff for the Flat Stanley scrapbook she made, and we discuss the CST meeting from this morning.  As a retired 1st-grade teacher, and one who was very good at diagnosing learning disabilities in children,  Mom wants to know all about this stuff.  And not just because it's her granddaughter.
• Dinner.  Medium and Large both have two fajitas before I can get through one myself.
• Much begging for ice cream.  We trundle off to Rita's, which had gotten ixnayed after Large Fry's spring school concert, since it was so cold.  However, there are many tears when the Fries discover that Doc McStuffins is over by the time we get home, and they have to go right to bed.  Tears abound.
• At quarter to ten, Large comes downstairs to tell me that the stinkbug crawling out in the hallway upstairs is keeping her awake...in her bedroom.  I go up and dispatch said stinkbug to Davy Jones' locker, tuck Large back in, and go back downstairs.

Today:

• Quash hopes and smiles and happiness at breakfast by announcing that, no, Daddy does not come back today.
• Decide that eating ice cream for breakfast is not a bad idea at all when I'm feeling like this, and so I do just that after the Fries get to school.
• Pick up kids from school.  Homework.  Medium apparently had a run-in with her nemesis, He-Man Woman-Hater King (who has since been moved to a different table away from Medium,

  

  Large's map.

  and told to stay away from her), and she misses Daddy, and this caused issues with homework.
• We went Scottish for dinner tonight, and I took the kids to McDonald's.  Large was supposed to have ribbon dance tonight, so I figured I would take her there, see if the twins could stay, and scoot out to the grocery store yet again (out of milk this time).  Get to the church...no ribbon dance.  Okay, everybody to the store.
• Get home in time to once again miss Doc McStuffins and I allow them to watch Little Einsteins before bed.
• Large tells me that she's drawn me a map so that I know how to get to the airport tomorrow to pick up Daddy.  She proudly shows me the map she drew, complete with parking lot, on the Etch-a-Sketch.
• Large suddenly wants to do bedtime prayers with the twins.  Oooookay.  So we do.
• And now she won't sleep in her own bed.  Because there's a house centipede under part of her bed frame.  It scooted under there to hide this morning when she went to get something out of her dresser.  Naturally, it's still there now.  I'm sure it's not, but I go downstairs to get the dustbuster (handy for catching house centipedes, which move faster than I can squish) and a flashlight.  I do not find the house centipede.  However, I do find two empty bags of semi-sweet chocolate chips, one empty carton that held a dozen Cadbury Creme mini-eggs, a wrapper from a small Hershey's chocolate bunny (leftover from what went in the kids' baskets for Easter, and hidden up in the

  

  Stash remnants.

  pantry for Hubby and I to have) and a whole bunch of Dove strawberry-chocolate candy wrappers.  We have a rule about candy in our house: you don't get to have any without Mommy and/or Daddy's permission.  And sneaking candy gets you in trouble.  (In fact, all three Fries had snuck candy right before Easter and lost the ability to have any Easter candy for a whole week.  They had to sit there and look at their full baskets and not be able to have any goodies.)  I collect all of the evidence, tuck Large in, and warn her that I'm going to have to talk with Daddy about this, because she's in a LOT of trouble. Thank goodness he comes home tomorrow...  Why, yes, I am counting hours.  T-minus 20 hours right about now.