2022 Time Tracking Challenge: Day 7

I am back at the dining room table post-dinner for a Day 7 post! There are still approximately 11 hours to go in the way I count 168 hours (to 4:59 a.m. Monday morning) but I don’t blame anyone for feeling like the week is close to “done.”

After posting here last night I hung out with my husband, big boys and friend for a while. After the friend’s ride came, my husband and I spent some time enjoying the new fire in our fireplace before I read and then crashed for the night.

I set my alarm for 7:20 but I was up at about 7:15. I got myself ready, fed the toddler (while reading my Shakespeare for the day on my phone), drank some coffee, and was all ready to bring the toddler to a babysitter’s for a few hours (we get care for him occasionally on a weekend day to do stuff with the big kids) when…the van wouldn’t start. Not again! The overnight low of 9 degrees appears to have done a number on the battery. I switched to my car, and managed to drop the toddler off and make it to church by 9:00.

The choir rehearsed for about 30 minutes — learning two anthems for the service. In between rehearsal and the service, I took a quick tour of the newly renovated ministries center, and spent some time studying two wintry Impressionist pieces by Walter Baum. I then read Shakespeare for another 10 minutes on my phone. In other circumstances that time might have been spent taking kids to Sunday School, but the church has gone virtual for that for the time being and I am choosing not to spend my capital with my kids to make them do Zoom Sunday School. So they were all home (with my husband).

Anyway, I was home around 11:15. I had a cup of coffee, played the piano for a bit (Moonlight Sonata, among other things), got kids lunches, and then we hunted for snow pants — which were not easy to find in our half-unpacked state. There was a lot of running around and yelling, but I got in the car with the 12-year-old, 10-year-old, and 7-year-old at 12:35, and made it downtown right in time for our 1:00 ice skating reservation.

We were only there for an hour, but I quite enjoyed it (outdoor ice skating is on my Winter Fun List). The weather had warmed up to about 28 degrees by that point, so it was just about perfect. The 7-year-old zoomed around quite fast. The 10-year-old was a bit more cautious. The 12-year-old wasn’t really feeling it and, after half an hour, retired to sit by the heat lamp. At least they had gone with me, though. The 14-year-old had begged off, and my husband really doesn’t like ice skating. He spent the day doing various projects that are harder to do with a toddler underfoot, such as jumping the car battery, clearing out and burning weeds, installing a new lock in the garage, etc. I do believe he alphabetized the spice drawer as he put those away out of the boxes at some point…

Those of us who went ice skating were in the car by 2:15 and home by 2:45. I relaxed for a few minutes, then went for a 20 minute walk outside. I did some unpacking, helped my husband with the car situation, then read a magazine by the fire on and off while getting my husband and 14-year-old off on the road to get Starbucks and pick up the toddler.

At 5:00 I looked at the time and realized we had a narrow window to pull off family dinner. The 14-year-old is in a 6:00 tennis lesson on Sundays, which is pretty suboptimal for timing, but is the right lesson for his level, so we are working around it. (Fun fact: He is also in a 3:00 tennis lesson on Saturdays but we totally forgot about it yesterday…) I made one of our “back pocket dinners” — something that is quick and that we basically always have on hand. I pan cooked chicken, made some boil-in-a-bag rice, heated frozen corn in the microwave, and some naan as well. I cut up fruit, dished up chicken to the kids’ plates, then mixed in Rogan Josh sauce from a jar with the adults’ chicken. Everything was on the table by 5:25 p.m., which allowed for 15 minutes of family dinner before my husband and the 14-year-old took off for tennis.

This was definitely not a Normal Rockwell painting. The 7-year-old and 2-year-old kept hopping up, and I ran after them. I’d floated the idea of taking the three older kids out for lunch tomorrow but they then proceeded to fight for the entire dinner about the restaurant choice. There were tears. Sometimes I feel like I can’t win, but hopefully they do remember that we sat down to dinner together and there was a period of at least 20 seconds when we were all sitting at the table simultaneously.

And now here I am writing this while the toddler gets a turn on You Tube Kids and the 10-year-old and 7-year-old are playing Super Mario Kart together, and my husband and I are texting from his vantage spot at the tennis lesson about logistics for the week. I assume nothing terribly exciting will happen in the next few hours. It is shower/bath night for the kids. I might unpack a box. We shall see! If anything unusual happens, I’ll write about it in my wrap up thread tomorrow. Hopefully not. My daughter and I had a conversation about this the other day where she noted that in movies something bad always has to happen to the protagonist. I said this is why it’s good to have a life that isn’t like the movies. I mean, there is plenty of not-fun stuff, like the van with the dead battery, the wall paper peeling off and so forth, but those plot points would make a crappy movie.

In any case, my playing the piano today meant I played three times this week, and as we know, three times a week is a habit. Ice skating was a fun way to spend time outdoors on what was otherwise a fairly cold and dreary day. Perhaps we could even call it the week’s big adventure! (Or at least a little one.) I love to sing and I got to do that, and got to enjoy some time reading a magazine in front of the fire.

I hope your weekend has gone well! Just a few more hours until the end of the time tracking challenge. Congrats for making it (almost) to the end.