Weekly Wrap-Up: In Which It is Very Hot and I Cease to Be Forty-Four

Only a two-week WrapUp this time? I seem to be getting somewhat less slothful.

So here's my last two weeks...

It was hot. I was lazy. I hung laundry and watered my veggies. I drove somebody somewhere. I read Tolkien. I carried on an email conversation. I made something resembling supper.

Repeat. Repeat again, and again, and again. Repeat several more times.

The end.

Okay, not quite. There may have been a few other things. Such as...

*I turned 45. I celebrated by unintentionally waking up early, intentionally reading The Fellowship of the Ring in bed while eating chocolate, falling back to sleep, waking up to the phone and realizing I should be leaving to take the kids to my mom's, taking the kids to my mom's, having a nice chat with my mom before leaving kidless, and having a late lunch at Logan's with Hubz. Then I planted my 3rd or 4th batch of carrots, read some more and maybe did some puzzles, felt too blah for much dinner, and read some more until the Return of the Kids. It was not a very exciting birthday, but it was a relaxing one.

*I took Fuzz and my niece (my brother's daughter) to Michigan's Adventure amusement park as a reward for learning all their memory verses in Kids' Club this past year. (Church paid for our tickets.) Since my sister lives five minutes from the park --which is an hour's drive for us-- we invited her and her two girls to meet us. It was a mostly-fun day peppered with a few "moments," which I suppose is inevitable when there are several stubborn female children who want to do different things at the same time. The waterpark portion of the day ended with the four tired girls splashing in one of the wave pools while the newly unencumbered moms made one trip after another down the nearby Snake Pit slides in defiance of our old age.

*Fuzz gave up on The Fellowship of the Ring (which, to my dismay and amusement, she had swiped from me almost as soon as I'd checked it out of the library) after only one-and-a-half chapters and decided to look for something else in the same genre. She settled on Eragon and its sequels and has been reading happily ever since, with short breaks for chores, meals, and sleep.

*We left the kidlets home to fend for themselves one night (it is so nice to be able to do that) and had dinner at the home of some friends.

*We went to fireworks with my parents on July 3 and then had nothing to do on the fourth or fifth. (Hubz hates crowded beaches, we deemed it too hot to watch a parade, our ill-shaded yard gets too hot in July to throw parties, and no one invited us over. Boo-hoo.) I felt down in the dumps about this.

*Hubz redeemed Independence Day for me by deciding to (finally) have my family birthday celebration. When this was announced, I promptly declared it to be my Second Birthday (not the day I turn two, but you know, like Second Breakfast) and dragged a chair out to the shade underneath the willow tree where I spent several hours reading The Two Towers while waiting for the "party" to begin. We were tired of trying to work around the older kids' work schedules and their lack of communication, so we invited my parents over to replace them. Since it was my Second Birthday, I made everyone play Five Crowns, a game which no one except me ever wants to play because it takes too long. I won by two points. 

*I went for my re-certification as an election worker, which basically consists of listening for two hours to an Important Person of the County go through all the how-to's and wherefores of working the election. Now I am all set to work both the primary and general elections this year. It is less interesting than jury duty, but it pays better and it beats settin' home.

*I took Fuzz to the library for her first volunteer stint at the Reading Club help desk. She was so excited she could hardly stand it.

*We picked out a new dishwasher to replace the one we haven't used for eight months because it just kinda quit getting the dishes clean. Although it may well be (as I'm sure Hubz supposes) that Real Women wash dishes by hand anyway, I finally decided I was just plain fed up with being a Real Woman. So was Spaz (and what teenage boy wouldn't be?). Unfortunately, we'll have to be Real Women for a few weeks longer until our friend has time to install the new dishwasher for us. I am so excited I can hardly stand it.

*I managed to finagle an invitation from some Friends With Pool (which are definitely the Best Sorts of friends to have during a scorcher). Of course, the day we went was the day the heat wave broke and it rained. No, it poured. The sun did come out again in the nick of time, but the kids --my kids, anyway-- would have been in the pool regardless.

*Hubz and his sister went three hours north to be with their mom and stepdad since their mom was undergoing surgery. She came through it fine. 

*Spaz went to yet another party for his "Friday School" classmates. We had dawdling issues with chores during the hours prior, so I was a mean mom and made him finish them and go 45 minutes late. (It helped that Hubz wasn't around; he generally chooses mercy over meanness.) For the entire half-hour drive, I resisted my normal tendency to attempt to verbally pound into his head the fact that his lateness was a consequence of his earlier dawdling. He knew it anyway. Yay, me. 

*I picked Spaz up from a post-party sleepover and stood out in the heat at his friend's house watching, not for the first time, three teenagers having an absolute riot horsing around in one of those little pop-up pools that we'd both contemplated and resisted buying for years. Then we said phooey on our well-water worries and went and bought one. Yes, it is a 2-1/2-foot deep pool, and yes, my kids are 11 and 14. They still think it beats the sprinkler-under-trampoline thing with which we've tried to appease them for years. They were and are ecstatic and jumped in shortly after it was filled. (Yes, it was cold. Ask them whether they cared.) I am less than ecstatic, but not the least bit surprised, about the orange-ish water, which turned greeny-orange-ish after we threw in chlorine granules. Oh well. Aesthetics aside, I doubt it'll kill them.

*I finished reading The Return of the King, twelve days after I began the series. That's an average of about a hundred small-print pages per day. Toldja I've been lazy. Waiting for kids at activities and appointments helped a lot, as did First and Second Birthdays. I rarely read for pleasure during the school year, so this was a real treat.

By the way, did you notice? I have managed to write my WrapUp using a unique and beautifully monotonous writing style consisting almost entirely of sentences with Subject Openers. We must be on summer break. Mr. Pudewa would not be proud. If you prefer to read WrapUps with more varied sentence openers, you can probably find some here.


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