As I’ve mentioned a few (hundred) times, we’re a bit over-booked at present. As a result, there’s not a lot of free time in our household. Most days feel like a sprint. Pick up Simon from school, race home, race to get dinner or half dinner down his gullet, race to soccer, race to finish homework, race to review weekly vocabulary words, race to squeeze in a drum practice, race to do nightly reading, race to get in pajamas, get teeth brushed, and get into bed by 8:45.
Wake up. Repeat next day, and the one after that, and the one after that.
This past weekend was turbo-charged as well. Simon got to participate in the Derby Cup, a two-day soccer tournament in neighboring Oldham County. The weather was terrific, the soccer fields in Buckner were beautiful, and the boys played hard in all three of their games. It was a great weekend, but with three round-trip drives of 40 miles each, a regular drum practice, and a visit to my dad who is recovering from knee replacement surgery, our weekend was even more compressed than normal.
Monday, the whole cycle should have started once more. Except storms were in area, our Coach was no doubt exhausted from supervising a total of 12 games (4 Louisville Soccer Alliance teams had 3 games each), and the boys themselves needed a rest after playing 150 minutes of fast-paced soccer in two days. So Coach Brett canceled Monday night’s practice.
This is a short week at school, too, as Kentucky suspends education on the Friday before Derby to allow teachers to attend the Oaks and/or start pre-gaming* their Derby parties. Short weeks mean no vocabulary lists to work on. And because Simon had a sub on Monday, we didn’t have other homework assigned, either.
In other words, from 4:20, when we got home from school, until 8:30, when it was bedtime, we had complete freedom. And none of us knew what to do with it! Simon ran around in circles. I read Mad Men reviews on the web. (Don should NOT have taken that offer!) We ate dinner. We played a ton of Uno. We watched videos of amazing soccer goals. And after what seemed like an endless evening, we checked the time and were horrified to see it was only 7:30.
That’s right; our family was left confused and generally unmoored by four hours of horrible, horrible freedom.
The school year and soccer season both end five weeks hence. What on earth are we going to do with ourselves?
*pre-game: vb. To drink at home or a friend’s home in advance of going out to drink at a party elsewhere. I learned this word from a book about sorority life and now use it whenever possible.
Now you know how it was when Bubbie died and on Saturday afternoons I would stand around and try to think of what I was supposed to be doing. It took a while before Saturdays were not just weird.