Lately

We had a fantastic long weekend, I felt refreshed and ready to hit the ground running early this morning. We drove down to visit my sister, and while the drive down was...eventful (poor B gets very car sick), the weekend was tons of fun. We took advantage of the 70+ degree weather and spent Saturday at a playground and Sunday at a winery having a picnic lunch and a lovely bottle of red.

Got back yesterday afternoon and sped through our chores, prepped for the week, and made dinner before I collapsed into bed at 8:30 (I slept really poorly on my sister's awful guest room double bed). We are doing our last planned week of meal kit delivery for a while, so I'll post my reviews and comparisons on that next week.

Things on the agenda for the next few weeks/months

 1) meal planning & trying (yet again) for family dinner (i.e. everyone eating the same thing at the same time). We've been slacking on that a LOT and the whole meal-for-2-delivery has thrown us  completely out of the habit of all eating together. I've been cooking almost nightly---for G & I. And then the kids get some leftovers or pasta or breakfast-for-dinner whenever they are hungry for it. What I want to try is to cook one big meal on Sundays that will last about 3 days and is a family favorite (something the kids will willingly eat), try something more adventurous for 1 night, and then another one-off meal that is the kid's choice. Friday/Saturday we either do prepared meals, take-out, or pizza. Things I am hoping will help: involve kids in menu planning, discuss ahead of the time the expectations to eat together and stay at the table, plan fun conversations or some sort of ritual we can look forward to. If all else fails, bribery for the kids, wine for the adults.
2) delegating chores to kids. Believe it or not, this is an assignment for my faculty development course---to choose something to delegate and experiment with it & report back. We did time tracking to figure out the tasks that were taking our time that we could consider delegating, and I realized I spend 30 minutes each Sunday sorting & putting away the kids laundry. So I ordered separate small canvas laundry bags for each kid, and we will do "laundry lessons" this weekend. Again, we will discuss expectations, try to make it fun, or bribery.
3)We are still working with the therapist. She met with B last week and they came up with a "anger plan" involving a kitchen timer and a "mad bag"---we got the timer but haven't assembled any items into a bag yet. He is supposed to go to his room, set the timer for 7 minutes, and play with items in his bag that are carefully chosen to be distracting & calming. Today G & I are going and I asked her if we could spend some time on resolving some...differences...we have on parenting. G has a tendency to make EVERYTHING into a big deal and I really think we need to pick our battles. He is really really uptight about issues of cleanliness (hand washing, getting toothpaste all over the bathroom---and I mean ALL OVER, atrocious table manners) which are, yes, annoying & gross, but I don't think should be a priority. Mostly I think he is wrong and I want her to tell him so (if I'm being brutally honest), but if she's able to make me see where he ISN'T wrong, I'm willing to listen.
4)Gearing up for spring and summer. We signed the kids both up for swimming. L will do t-ball and B is doing soccer, both at the local park. We need to register for summer camp. I ordered a batch of summer clothes for B. I also ordered seeds and think I may need to plant them soon because this weather is whack!

Anyway, as you can probably tell from my post, I am finally NOT SICK anymore, and loving having a normal amount of energy to use for planning. I hope to be back this week!