Full Court Press

You should know that most days, there is nothing I'd like better than to sit at my computer and blog away. That is because on most days, I have no time to spare. And we always want what we can't have, right? Today is one of those days. The reason I have very little spare time today is actually due to yesterday. That's right, I'm still paying the piper for the events that happened over 24 hours ago!

Yesterday I got up at 6:00, hopped in the shower and was ready to leave before the first foot hit the floor upstairs. The reason? Peyton had a "Biblical Character" presentation at school--she played Queen Esther--and I wanted to watch her give her speech. So Randy took Tyler and Darcy to school at 8:00, and I got Sawyer ready and drove him to school with Peyton at 8:30. I was a little disappointed that neither Peyton nor I clued into the fact that it was supposed to be a first-person report: "Hi, I'm Moses"; "God told me to build an ark"; you know, that sort of thing. But I'll tell you what Peyton DID do: She spoke easily for ten minutes (it was supposed to be 4-6 minutes--oops!) while looking straight at her teacher, no notes, no nothing, and told the entire story found in the book of Esther. Not bad for an eight-year-old.

Sawyer and I left the school around 9:30 (sorry to the kids whose reports we didn't stick around to hear but #1 at least we waited until the bathroom break to leave, and #2 there was no way I was going to be able to talk Sawyer into staying for another hour of talks with Hannah, Daniel, Peter or the Good Samaritan unless Jesus Christ himself had agreed to put in an appearance. So we headed to the church building where I picked up Randy and we ran around the corner to the bank where we closed out a savings account we had opened by mistake. How do you open a savings account by mistake, you ask? Very easily, if your name happens to be Randy or Andrea Todd.

When I dropped Randy back off at the building, our youth minister happened to be there, and just happened to have "a few minutes" to talk to me. 2-1/2 fruitful hours later, I collected a disgruntled Sawyer ("Dad's office is boring") and we headed home to grab some lunch. Bless Emily's (our children's minister) heart, she had taken pity on Sawyer a few minutes before I came to get him and had set him up with a DVD in her office, and when I saw the arrangement, I was tempted to sit down and join him! She had turned off the overhead lights and lit some candles, and he was stretched out all comfy-like on the floor. Inviting!

I spent a grand total of about one hour at the house yesterday afternoon before having to turn around and go pick up the kids from school, and by that time I was in overdrive. I had volunteered to drive some of the boys to the basketball game that started at 7:00; little did I know that the place we were playing (Watauga Harvest) was in a part of Fort Worth that we had to take 820 to get to. Loop 820 is like the seventh circle of hell all day, every day. That meant we had to leave at 5:15, and did I mention that I don't usually get home until 4:00, and did I further mention that I had to feed my whole family before we left?!

My friend called me right before I left for school and I was detailing the rush that was about to take place and was trying hard to just breathe, and she had one word for me: Sandwiches. Trouble is, my very easy-to-please husband is sick of one thing and one thing only . . . you guessed it, sandwiches. Seeing as there are six of us in the family, we don't typically have a whole lot of leftovers that Randy can scavenge for at lunchtime, so sandwiches are a staple in this household. Heaven forbid we should EVER run out of lunchmeat!

I decided on a very speedy Taco Salad, and yesterday afternoon reminded me so much of our homeschooling days when the kids would all gather around the kitchen table to do their seatwork. These days, it's plain old homework they have to do and each of the kids had some last night. So while I browned ground beef and boiled Taco Rice I rotated between quizzing Darcy for her history test, exclaiming over the French, British and American flags that Tyler was drawing for his term cards and overseeing Peyton copying her spelling words three times each. (Sometimes that seems like mindless work to me but it's rare for Peyton not to get 100% on her spelling pre-test, and there's nothing she loves more in the world than getting 100% because the kids who get a perfect score on their pre-test get to spend the next day's testing period reading to the Pre-K kids. And Peyton l-o-v-e-s reading to the little kids!)

We were out the door by 5:15 and, traffic or no traffic, made it to the game with about an hour to spare. Tyler's games are relatively short--four six-minute periods with a ten- or fifteen-minute halftime break, so we were done by 8:00. We hopped in the car and I fired up my TomTom, which predictably had me in the wrong lane to hit one of the legs on 820, but as luck would have it, there was a McDonald's at the next exit which was what we were hoping for all along. (I should probably mention here that when I volunteered to drive the basketball boys, I failed to include the rest of my family in my count. So I ended up having Randy drive Tyler and the other boys from school, and I took Sawyer and the girls with me in a separate vehicle. This is important to note because Randy was not with me on the drive home, and he would have you think that I missed my turn on purpose, just to manufacture an excuse to go to McDonalds for an ice cream cone. Do not believe him.)

Anyway, we rolled in around 8:30 and had to rush the kids straight into the whole showering routine, and still didn't get everyone into bed until after 10:00. Tyler likes for me to lay down in his bed at night when we pray, and I'm here to tell you if Randy hadn't come upstairs in search of me at some point, I guarantee I would have been out like a light. Welcome to basketball season!