Author: Jackie

Where The Kid spent his weekend, and his two-person team took first place in their category.

We’ve been fortunate to have quite a lot of time together this holiday season. Kieran didn’t even have much in the way of homework for a change. He had to do a health class online for his PE course, and read about half of East of Eden, but not much else.

We are in the process of purchasing a new home, and that has kept us occupied dealing with the inspection and the resulting objections – of which there are several. We are currently waiting to see what the seller’s response is, but based on past experience with them, we don’t expect it to be favorable.

We’ve managed to do most of the fun things we had on our list: Star Wars VIII, Botanic Garden Lights, a little archery, and I even got an oil change 🙂 Bobby and Katie came for our traditional Christmas Eve Indian dinner (with the addition of some Vive time), and we had our usual game and nibbles fest on NYE. A visit to Idaho Springs is still pending, but the plan is to do that this weekend.

It’s been a busy week, between The Kid’s 12 hour school days and conferences at my school we haven’t seen a lot of each other. It’s Tech Week for The Kid’s current play, so they are there until 7 each night. They usually go out to dinner at the end of the week, but this time he didn’t join them because he had too much homework and a Halloween party on Friday. Responsible as usual.

It’s been a strange time for us with The Kid gone so much. We have always been a close family, spending as little time apart as possible, doing even the most mundane things together. So far, High School seems to be life’s way of easing us into the ’empty nest’ phase.

They must be doing well with play preparations. He doesn’t seem too stressed this time, and he doesn’t have rehearsal this weekend. It’s nice to have all three of us home without a list of things we have to do. I was lucky enough to have a three day weekend.  In exchange for the extra hours the teachers put in for conferences, we get a day off, but it’s due to more than luck that it falls on Halloween (or the nearest school day to it) every year.

The Kid made a good choice for his costume this year. He dressed as Doc Brown from Back to the Future. He wore his costume to school Friday, and texted us halfway through the day to tell us he was photographed for the yearbook. Cool. 🙂 He isn’t going Trick-or-Treating this year, but the kids who come to the door will enjoy getting their candy from The Doc.

It was also nice having a whole day to carve pumpkins. They don’t last, so we can’t do them too far ahead and usually end up scrambling to get them done Halloween day after work/school. It’s also going to be nice to have The Kid home tonight instead of roaming the streets ringing doorbells, and we’ll have time for a leasurely dinner – our usual chili, which we made last weekend and put in the freezer. It’s almost scary how organized we are this year! I hope that doesn’t mean the rest of the year will be a disorganized mess.