At 1pm on Friday, Lindsay pulled away with her friends for a weekend Mountain getaway, leaving me with the children. In Jack Bauer fashion, this events happened in real time.
1pm–She left!
1:22pm–I put the boys to bed for their nap.
1:23pm–I sat on the back porch enjoying the beautiful sunny day, an iced coffee and finishing a great book Born to Run (little did I know that would be the rest of the weekend).
3:00pm–I heard a school bus going by our house…ooops. By the time I got out to the bus stop it was long gone, and no sign of Ellie. Starting to worry, I took stock of my options. Do I call Lindsay? The school? God?
3:03pm–Ellie’s bus came to the stop.
For the next half hour, I unpacked Ellie’s school bag, did her dishes, organized her homework, and prepped for dinner. Not quiet sure what she did.
3:30pm–the boys awoke.
4:15pm–we all went outside to play in the yard. Ellie and James came up with a great game of tackle football right after I mowed the grass.
4:55pm–I did a load of laundry to get the grass stains out of their clothes.
5:30pm–Resorted to Cars 2
6:00pm–Pizza infront of Cars 2
7:00pm–Bedtime!
7:30pm–Paradise* *see Wed. Worship sermon.
Saturday
6:45am–Woke up to cook cinnamon rolls
7:15am–reluctantly woke up the children
7:45am–fed them
8:09am–Got Ellie to her 8:15am soccer game. I am proud to report that Ellie’s team has 9 girls on it. We were the fifth player there, but by 8:30am the rest showed up.
9:30am–Made the classic mistake of going out to breakfast at WholeFoods. As their fingers were in every dish on the hot bar, and I scrambled to find pancakes, I was approached twice by strangers to say, “You are a good dad.”
10:45am–Returned home to play in the yard. Ellie wanted to play hide-and-go-seek, but none of us were interested, and by this time the third cup of coffee was wearing off. So she scoured the neighborhood, and found a friend down the street to come over and play…that’s right, 4 kids were not enough…I needed a 5th.
12:10am–her friend left, we ate something.
1:00pm–Nap time
3:00pm–I woke up from my nap to discover that thomas had snuck out his peapod and into Ellie’s room to play.
4:00pm–We went to Jason’s Deli for dinner. I figured if we did an early bird dinner, that means i Could put them bed. It is here that a father slapped me on the back saying, “Keep it up, your doing great dad.”
7:00pm–after the third round of icecream and cholocate milk and running around the fountain area, I finally wrangled them all home and in bed.
7:30pm–Paradise*
Sunday
7:15am–Woke up
8:30am–I think I gave them breakfast, but loaded them all in the van to go to church. Who has church at 9am, seriously? By the time Ellie and I got into the pew it was already time for her to go to Children in Worship. And the sermon was about how much Jesus loved children–I told Pen, after this weekend, that wasn’t the message I needed to hear, I needed to hear about the Elijah calling the bears down to devour the rude teenagers.
10:30am–we return home to bake a welcome home cake, make the beds, clean up the toys, cook lunch, do the third load of laundry, sweep. Well techinically Ellie and I did that. The boys were just tackling each other.
1:00pm–Sweet relief, the garage door opened and She returned.
1:01pm–I went for a run.
The Barry Patch 