Dunkin Donuts, Brown Bear, St. Joseph & Sawyer the Destroyer

Trying to do a catch up blog is hard and even more difficult at the moment since I am blogging on the back porch with the kids hurling giant bouncey balls back and forth.  But it is too beautiful to stay cooped up inside despite piles of laundry and taxes waiting for my attention.  And there is the little fact that I spent most of the afternoon hunting for a large ziplock of receipts from art supplies for my classes last year to no avail.  Ugh!  So I am doing what I find much less stressful, avoiding!

The last few days were smooshed between two very cute “Catholic school girl” bookends.  Friday was Josie’s kindergarten Noah’s ark program- a cute little play about Noah arranged alphabetically.  Then today is the feast of St. Joseph and Josie got to take up the gifts at the school mass.  The in-between of these bookends was a gorgeous weather weekend spent mostly outside with the kids or working on Josie’s Brown Bear project with her. Think along the lines of a Flat Stanley project, just substitute the class’s stuffed teddy bear.  Brown Bear spends a weekend with each student in the class and then Monday he/she brings in a poster and story about his/her weekend with Brown Bear.  Super cute and lots of fun for the kid, but a bit of work for the parents.  My weekend equation was this: beautiful Spring weather + Brown Bear project assigned to us on Friday= happy kids + happy parents + messy house(oh well!).  But in the grand scheme of things messy house<happiness.  So I think I have my math all down and my priorities in order.

Josie hopped into the car with Brown Bear Friday afternoon and a couple minutes later says she REALLY has to go to the bathroom, poop and she can’t hold it for the 15 minute ride home.  She also refuses to let me just pull back around to the school building so she could go back in to use that bathroom.  Thanks to the early bits of rush hour popping up and us hitting every single light in the first mile away from the school, Josie began freaking out.  Which of course leads me to freak out and try to rack my brains thinking of the easiest place to stop that wouldn’t require me to take all 3 boys out of the car with us.  In the past I have actually stopped by A.J.’s office for this very reason with Jimmy.  However, we were already heading further away from his office and Friday afternoons he is usually stuck in some meeting.  Now if she just had to pee, I might have actually tried to rig up some sort of container for her to pee in in the car and just pulled into a parking lot- yes, that is how painful it is to me to have to unload all boys from their carseats.   Well as luck would have it, we pass right by a Dunkin Donuts.  Alright, race to unload all the kids in the rain now and hustle them into the Dunkin Donuts’ restroom.  And once you become a parent, all modesty goes out the window.  Seeing as we were the only ones in the place and I was shoving the kids straight to the bathroom and because the Dunkin Donuts is a fairly quiet place on a Friday afternoon, I am sure the guy working there knew exactly why I had sprinted the kids into the place.  And because all potty- trained boys or recently potty-trained boys have to mark their territory much like boy dogs, Jimmy decides he needs to go as well. Twenty minutes and two dozen donuts later, we were loading into the car.  Perfect opportunity for Josie’s first picture with Brown Bear- in the car eating a donut.  I am used to our little rugrats being a spectacle in most public places, but now I am actually adding to the public’s curiosity by standing next to the open door of the Gray Goose snapping pictures of my kids eating donuts. 

To be fair to the teacher, I actually did like this “little” weekend project.  Mostly because it gave me some bonding time with my Joser.  Okay Bart was often along for the ride too.  Saturday while A.J. did yardwork, I snapped several photos of Josie and the boys and Brown Bear.  Sunday, Josie, Brown Bear, Bart, and I headed to mass together then Staples to get a posterboard for her project.  Between Josie’s breaks to go revel in the beautiful weather, we put together her project and poster.  I can’t wait til she is fully spelling on her own or at least gets the hang of spellcheck- ha ha!  I was really practicing my patience helping her spell out her paragraph.  Might have gotten her to bed a little late, but it was so great to see how proud Josie was of her project.  Wild boys one and two had a day of fun with daddy in the yard.  This came back to haunt us and you will soon see why.

The weekend weather caused our little house to get quite toasty so we put the a.c. on.  Yesterday while I was printing Josie’s pictures out, I noticed it felt like our normally powerful a.c. was not quite keeping it cool.  Three hours later, A.J. came running in the house yelling “who stuck the flag in the air conditioner?!”  The flag he was referring to was one from our little neon safety people.  It is a bright orange flag on a thin metal stick that is about three feet long.  We immediately knew who the culprit was: Sawyer the Destroyer.  A.J. was running in a panic back and forth to the a.c. unit.  Yelling for me to turn the a.c. off then waiting, praying for the fan to go back on.  No luck.  Well, Sawyer’s damage control angels were working overtime.   A brief ten minute break and the a.c. worked when we tried it again.  One crisis averted and at least eight thousand dollars saved from our credit cards. 

Today was a mad dash of getting Jimmy to preschool and then making it to Josie’s school mass with the other babes in tow.  St. Joseph was watching over us because we made it to Jimmy’s preschool at 9:01.  The director just about had a heart attack when she saw us coming in at the “normal time”.  Smooth coasting as we drove to the church.  In the pew with a few minutes to spare and Bart cooperated and fell asleep in the car.  Just to entertain Sawyer for at least the first half of mass.  A.J. and my mother-in-law were there to help as well.  And you know what? Sawyer behaved.  Well at least long enough for me to watch Josie take the gifts up and get some photos of her.  Sawyer did try to run up the aisle after Josie and the other kids who were taking the gifts to the priest, but I kept a death grip on him and then took him out to the lobby when it was least noticeable.  He danced around the lobby and dipped his entire hand in the holy water and then slicked his hair back with it.  A friend from high school who teaches at Josie’s school commented that Sawyer was definitely “going to be your party boy”.  No doubt!