Celebratory meals, care packages, hodge podge

Today’s blog post is just a hodge podge…Over the weekend my husband and I took our two older boys out for their celebratory dinners (for good grades in the spring semester). Originally the plan had been for my husband to take the two of them out (and I’d stay with the younger kids) but then we realized that their top choice meals were different. So we split them into two dinners.

The upside of that is that the other boy could babysit on his “off” night and thus I got to go out too. We took the 14-year-old out on Friday and the 17-year-old on Saturday. This was a lot of fun and I know the food was great except I’m feeling very blah even thinking about food at the moment because, Sunday night, I started feeling queasy and sure enough, was up at 2 a.m. very sick.

No idea if it was food poisoning (though given the timing I’d blame food eaten at home on Sunday then) or norovirus or what. Mercifully, no one else has gotten sick! But Monday was painful. I stayed in bed, mostly, until noon, and then did a bit of work off and on.

Tuesday was slightly better but still my stomach was not happy. Sigh. So the first part of the week has been a bit of a wash…

Anyway, I’ve been sending a lot of mail to the 9-year-old at camp though I imagine today should be the last letter as after that they’ll get there after he leaves. It has been strange not having him home! I’m looking forward to hearing about how things went. As of yesterday, I had received only one letter from him, which was a request to send gum in a care package. Incidentally, gum is on the forbidden list at the camp, so I can’t send that but…

Speaking of care packages — I have sent a few, mostly with stickers, acceptable snacks, little games/toys/etc. I was thinking about what I would like to get in a care package…and then one of our Best of Both Worlds advertisers sent a little package with mascara and lipstick and an eye brightener pencil and I thought hey, that was a pretty good care package! I also took myself to Target last week and bought some notebooks and pens. That would probably wind up in a care package I’d hope to receive too.

(What would you like to get in a care package?)

I’ve been getting results from the Evening Hours Challenge I ran recently and those have been fun to see. In September/October I’ll be running what I’m calling my Better Workday Challenge. This will be a 3-week project where people will learn strategies for, well, making any workday better. I’ll start sign-ups for that at the end of August so watch for that!

In the meantime, I’ve been watching when the passport appointment schedule dates open to make one at our local post office in September on a convenient date to renew the 4-year-old’s passport. Family travel is great, but the logistics of passports and passport renewals with five kids is…something. Kid passports are only valid for 5 years, and a lot of places require you to have six months of eligibility so you really need to renew them every 4.5 years (or a little less). Unfortunately the kids are not all on the same cycle. So my husband and I wind up at our local post offices a lot.

This isn’t urgent as we don’t have any immediate international travel plans involving him but just a PSA here — we always expedite. I’ve seen some folks wait 4 months for passports in the regular line. The expediting fee is a small $ amount compared to the overall cost of international travel, so this is not the place to be frugal.

Now on to see whether a swim lesson happens given all the rain this week…