You know that feeling after you've had a big party and the guests have left? You're spent. You're faced with an incomprehensible mess and decide to leave it 'til the morning.
Well, that's how I feel, except every day is a new "party" with kids playthings, snacks, laundry. outdoors/indoors and meals. No sooner have I cleared away a space and run the vaccuum there, (ahhh... now I can tackle the next area") No I can't. Look! There's a new activity starting. And that's the way it's been going the last few weeks. Stuff is piling up and I seem like a tread-mill hampster, tidying the same few things over and over again.
Our school starts later than any other, I think: September 4. I hate to admit it, but I welcome the routine. The break. The quiet. The time to organize and purge. I'll miss them though. We only have so few summers with them before they want to spend all their time with friends. Mine aren't there yet, thankfully. Also, the hours after school don't catch their best moods. Everyone is fatigued from the full day and we need to fill it with meals and homework. So in my own contrary mind, there is a sense of pending loss that I'm feeling right now as well.
We took a little picnic to the "Walrus rock" playground today and the kids were really sweet with each other. Marty enjoyed the freedom to just go anywhere he wanted (but for the bridge back to the road). I'm going to try to do some little thing like this each day next week and just breathe them in, the look of them and the total sense of them right now before they go off to become a "third grader" and "kindergartener."
Gotta go. Time to go bake some oatmeal raisin cookies.