Crazy Heart Mama

I didn’t mean to take a break from my blog, but summer happened and before I knew it, school was starting. I was completely unprepared for the first day of school as evidenced by my mad dash this past weekend to find school supplies for Liam and get everything in order for Monday morning, but this happened anyway.

(Thank goodness for the ability to buy school supplies online at Colman’s school. Way to go, PTO.)

I had no less than a bazillion loads of laundry to get through after our family vacation to Branson, Missouri. As if the vacation wasn’t work enough. I think the only people who have fun on a family vacation are the kids, who are completely out of their minds with energy at being in a new place. Family vacations are exhausting for the parents as we do the best we can with the tools we have to keep them occupied and happy. A vacation with kids is way more work than just being at home. At one point, I would’ve paid big money for a roll of duct tape for just twenty minutes of peace and quiet, but I managed to survive–barely.

These guys had a fantastic time, though.

Thank goodness Liam and Colman caught the exact same amount of fish or there would have been hell to pay. I mean that literally. Although, Liam said that one of Colman’s fish was about half the size of all the rest of the fish they’d caught so he felt Colman should only be counted as having caught nine-and-a-half fish rather than a whole ten like Liam had caught.

Do you see why I felt the need for a roll of duct tape? It would have been better than drowning them all in a bucket of ice water (Shout out to the ALS challenge that’s gone viral!) which is what I really wanted to do.

Because we were out of town last week, I’d checked the school website for Colman’s teacher assignment. It showed he’d been assigned a teacher Liam had during the fifth grade, which would normally be fine, but was a little weird because of an encounter we had when Liam was in the fifth grade and Colman was in the third grade right smack dab in the midst of Colman’s health crisis. Liam was being disrespectful to me in his normal preteen thing he does about once every six months and I said something to the effect of, “You should be nice to me. I’m your mom. You have a pretty great life. You know some parents don’t put up with kids acting like this and they leave.”

Then he went to school and told his teacher that he was worried his mom was going to “do suicide.”

Well, the teacher saw me in the lunch room and brought up the conversation she’d had with Liam. Needless to say, I was stunned and couldn’t remember when I’d given Liam any indication whatsoever that I wanted to kill myself, but I assured her I had no intentions of harming myself. Maybe Liam at this point, but not myself. It was awkward to say the least because I don’t think she necessarily believed me.

After talking to Liam that afternoon that started out something like, “What the hell, Liam?” I realized he was referring to the statement I said above and I reassured him that I was talking about maybe getting on an airplane…not leaving earth.

Turns out, the website was screwed up and that wasn’t the correct teacher assignment anyway. Colman’s teacher is the same teacher he had in third grade, which is awesome because she knows him and I don’t have to go through the whole you-gotta-get-your-bluff-in-early-with-Colman-or-he-will-run-over-you-like-a-Mack-truck speech. As for the awkwardness with Liam’s former teacher, all I can do is say, “See? Still here,” when I see her in the hallways at school.

So everybody had a great first day of school yesterday. And I’m back at work relaxing and dreaming about a vacation–a real vacation–with Kevin or maybe with these girls again.

We had a blast in San Francisco when I attended a conference there in August. It was the first time my sister had ever been away from her kids and her oldest is six years old. She’s still telling everybody about the feral homeless man we encountered that spit on everybody in Starbucks.

It was awesome.