Weekends are Never Long Enough

The weekend is the glorious two days a week when daddy is home and no one has to go to work. It's also the really tough two days a week when we try to get things accomplished because, well, it's the weekend, but the kids are all like, "It's the weekend!" And we always get about 4% of our to-do list tackled and manage to eat even easier and less stellar meals than what I find myself making after working eight hours.

Some weekends we get so much accomplished and I lay in bed Sunday night feeling a sense of pride and completion. But then I also feel like we wasted a perfectly good weekend working the entire time and didn't have a chance to relax and have fun with the kids. Other weekends we try to just relax, do "nothing" and enjoy being a family. But then I end the weekend with a sense of failure and impending doom for wasting so much time when I should have been checking off that never ending to-do list.

This weekend was the latter. And here it is, 10:00 and I haven't begun to get my things ready for work tomorrow. Or plan meals for the week. Or or or or.

But, fun was had. Family was enjoyed. And that's the most important "to-do" anyway, right?

We started off the weekend with a bike ride to the playground in absolutely perfect weather Friday night. Then Saturday morning we woke up early to watch a friend run a triathlon. From the top of Ted's shoulders Hannah kept shouting, "This be fun (nun)!" while cheering and clapping for the swimmers/bikers/runners. We also discovered that Hannah has got the moves. She danced to the unedited rap songs blaring from the speakers like she's been doing it her whole life. Or maybe she's just watched her mama long enough to know how to move to the beat. But I'm not in high school anymore, so only edited versions for me. And only in my kitchen.

After the race we checked out a Pumpkin Festival in the neighboring town. It was hot. And they charged two dollars for a three minute jaunt in the bounce house. Two whole dollars. So she bounced two whole times and then we cut out early because we were sweating through our clothes.

But not before checking out the pumpkins.

And sneaking out a different way so we wouldn't pass the bounce houses again.

We spent Saturday evening relaxing with some friends. Ted found some time to fish Sunday morning. And after Mass at a different parish, we enjoyed the Fall Festival and the free bounce house.

And the statue of Mary which Hannah might have loved as much as the bouncing.

I nursed Paul on the benches by the statue and he kept popping off to lean back and look at her. I think he was waiting for her to move or something because he just couldn't focus with Mary watching him.

Sunday ended with naps for all four of us, a swim in the kiddie pool (totally normal to swim in October. totally normal.), and a family movie night.

Thus ends the weekend. The work week will start all too soon. I'll be up with a cranky baby several times before my alarm ever goes off. And the coffee will be too weak tomorrow no matter how strong I brew it.

And we didn't get finished organizing all the kids' clothes, or start on the swing set we want to build, or clean anything, or enter receipts into the budget, or stain the bookshelf that we bought a year ago. But we had fun. And there's always next weekend, right?