Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

From a nutritional standpoint, you see, this weekend was probably an abject failure.  Friday night’s dinner was very kindly provided by Little Caesar’s…my seven year old got a coupon for free crazy bread from school and so we reveled in a hot ‘n’ ready Hawaiian, which they almost never have ACTUALLY READY but miraculously did yesterday.  (I know it’s over $3 more than cheese or pepperoni, but we all so love Hawaiian!)  We also learned an important lesson:  even with unlimited red grapes (and we ate plenty!), one pizza (of that size, anyway) and one order of crazy bread is no longer enough for all of us to have all we want of both.  No one went hungry, you understand, but there were no leftovers, and several of us could have eaten a tad more.  Tonight Daddy grilled hot dogs, and while green beans also figured prominently on the menu (all of my kids enjoy green beans, weirdly enough), well, we still had pizza and hot dogs for dinner this weekend.  But, on the OTHER hand…

Yesterday the girls and I deep cleaned the living room…as in, the “look under all of the couch cushions and sort through the toy buckets” level of clean.  (I can neither confirm nor deny the possibility of certain McDonald’s toys finding their way to the bottom of the recycling bin on the sly.)  This morning we dragged everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, out from under the bunk beds in the kids’ room, finding the two lost socks that have been irritating me for days in the process.  I even convinced my seven year old to get rid of the empty box her American girl pet (a gift from a great-uncle) came in, and believe me, this is front page progress.  The poor girl inherited the Heron pack rat genes in full (I’m so sorry, Love.)  I also gave Daddy and Carter haircuts today, we got more propane (which is why grilling was an option for dinner!), I packed the Christmas boxes neatly back in the basement closet (and therefore out of the way), AND I did two loads of wash.  Wahoo!  The best part about this was I also got some time to kick back and chill, which doesn’t always happen on a Saturday.  I used a small part of this time to cut away the crinkly plastic library cover from a book my best friend got me for something like $.10 at her library sale (yes, that’s ten cents, and while we go to different libraries, they’re both part of the Salt Lake County system).  Which led to me re-reading said book, or most of it (I may have skipped a bit of the beginning so I’d have time for the rest of it!).  While I can’t read a first-time book while the kids are awake, I can re-read/skim like a champion if I’m motivated enough, and I was motivated, because really, the book was Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now.

I really, really love Gary D. Schmidt.  I love The Wednesday Wars, which was a Newbery Honor book a few years ago, and I really love Okay for Now, which is its sequel (of sorts), and I really, REALLY love The Sin Eater, which doesn’t even come up on his current website because it’s an older title and published by NOT the same people who published any of his other titles.  The man is brilliant.  He makes me cry.  He makes me laugh.  He makes me love my family more, and think about the world more, and–seriously, if you have not read any of these books, go read them now. Don’t wait.  Just do it.

Incidentally, he also wrote Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, which was ALSO a Newbery Honor book a few years ago.  A few years before The Wednesday Wars, to be precise.  That one is really, really good as well, AND incredibly beautiful, but the specific sort of tragedy it deals with was painful for me to read.  (It was based, in part, on true events, and I was inspired enough while reading it that I visited the spot where it took place on my next trip to Maine; it’s totally worth the read, but the tragedy will break your heart.)

And that, friends, is why it depends on how you look at it.  You could call my weekend a nutritional failure, an organizing achievement, or a rather relaxing experience, and you’d be at least partially right every time.

There’s a lot to be said for this sort of weekend.