Spring, and recuperating

Oahu is six hours behind Philadelphia. Couple the time change with the overnight flight (during which I didn’t sleep) and it’s been a rough transition back to normal life. The older kids were mostly fine except for some napping on Sunday (expected) and then being up too late on the other nights, but they don’t need active management if they’re up too late. They just read.

The 5-year-old, on the other hand…He slept about 3.5 hours on the plane, and was going fine until about 6 p.m. Sunday, at which point I realized I hadn’t seen him in a little bit. After some panicked hunting, he was found, sleeping on a sofa (not one of his normal hang-outs, he must have just instantly crashed).

I decided to let him sleep, thinking maybe he’d sleep for a while. I mean, maybe at least until 4 a.m. or something? But no, at midnight, he popped up and announced that he was done sleeping. Thank goodness for YouTube. I put him on (I am pretty sure he watched those Ryan’s toys videos) and then I was able to sleep, at least in and out, for the next few hours. I checked on him a few times, and went back to bed, but he denied being tired. Finally, when I popped up for good around 5 a.m., he decided he was tired, and I got him into his bed.

Of course that meant he didn’t want to get up at anything approaching a normal time. I finally made him get up at 10 a.m. (he didn’t have school on Monday) and there was a lot of unhappiness about it. Then he didn’t go to bed until close to midnight that night…But finally last night was better — he went down at 10:30 p.m. and got up at 8:10 a.m. when I had to haul him with me to go bring the older boys to a drop-off so they could take the bus to a tech competition.

Yep, it’s that time of year. There is just so much going on. My 17-year-old has been miffed that he has not been getting the promised easy senior spring. The first week of April was full of rehearsals and then the NYC trip and performance. Then this week he is missing 3 days of school for this state tech competition (as is kid #2). He leaves that early in a car with some other seniors to make it back for prom on Saturday night. This will no doubt be fun but involved a lot of logistics too (tux rental, getting flowers, and then since his date doesn’t go to his school he had to get a form signed by a parent, etc.). Then Sunday he has a voice recital, where he’s singing in a quartet, which has involved extra rehearsals at random times when 4 kids can get together. Then Monday starts finals for him, and the next week is AP tests, which he is nervous about because he’s missed so much school in April with all the other events. Then there’s been the college decision (more on that later). Anyway…

Meanwhile, I have a book deadline May 1st. The book won’t be out for another year and will go through multiple rounds of editing, but I still want to make it as good as I can. So that’s been filling my time lately.

The good news is it is spring, glorious spring. When we got home from Hawaii all the Kwanzan cherry trees were blooming. This was such a gorgeous discovery with this home. We toured it in June, finalized the sale in August, and closed in November, and the full impact of flowering trees is hard to imagine when they aren’t actually flowering. But since Sunday I have just been going outside to gawk. So much pink! Plus the world is all so green and gorgeous now. The crabapples with their tufts of white flowers are making any random roadside spot festive.