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.
These days most of our weekends slip by with us just doing things we have to do but never have time to do during the week. This weekend, however, we actually managed to fit in a want-tos along with the have-tos – and it was great!
Saturday was the have-to. The Kid, of course, had a pile of homework to do, but no theatre for a change, so we suggested that he get it done Saturday while we did some of our stuff (well, my stuff as it turns out) so that we could have Sunday clear for something fun. We cleared out for my work where we battled printers, among other things, while he attacked his homework. We ended the day with chili, raspberries and meringues and Back to the Future III.
We juggled as many of our have-tos as we could, but there were a couple that couldn’t wait until Monday. First of all, The Kid had to have new jeans. When we finally abandoned shorts a couple of weeks ago, he had two pair. Since then he ripped the knees out of one pair and got paint on the other building sets at school. We accomplished that fairly quickly on our way to my haircut appointment. I hadn’t had a haircut since the first week of August, and it’s been difficult to fit one in, especially since my hairdresser keeps moving farther and farther away, so I didn’t want to miss this one.
But we fit it in, had some lunch and finally moved on to the ‘fun’ part of the day – Anderson Farms. We haven’t been to a corn maze in 8 or 9 years, or a pumpkin patch for at least 4 or 5 and Anderson Farms was definitely a good choice. It’s more like a seasonal amusement park than a simple pumpkin patch. Besides the corn mazes, they have zombie paintball, food, face painting, a petting zoo, gourd launching, duck races, and loads of other activities and of course, acres of pumpkins (apparently 72 varieties). Everywhere there are nice settings for photos. The weather was perfect – in the seventies and the rain earlier in the week kept the dust down and the ground soft, which was nice on the feet since we walked for miles looking for checkpoints in the mazes. We were so late getting home, we ordered Indian, and then watched Downton while The Kid caught up with his friends on Skype.
Next week promises to be a busy one – especially with all the have-tos that we’ve shuffled onto it, but at least we have this lovely weekend to look back on. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we can fit in another one.
