Summer Vacation Week Two

I can't believe our second week of summer vacation is already over and done.  It was a great week!  We started off with the addition of a new baby to the Schwalm family - my brother and sister in law welcomed their third child on Saturday.  We're so excited to welcome little Henry to the family.  Poor guy has no idea what he is in for!!

This week was a breeze because my wonderful Mother in Law took the three oldest kids to her church every morning for Vacation Bible School.  Not only did she take them to VBS, but she took them and their cousins out for an adventure every afternoon this week.  They did more in this week than we'll probably do all summer.  And that's good because one day they'll look back and say, "Remember when Mimi took us to VBS and then would take us to a movie or swimming at Joyce's?  We had so much fun!"

I know they will say this because I remember the "adventures" I took with my Grammie (although our adventures usually revolved more around driving to Monroeville Mall and shopping) and I thought those adventures were so much fun.

Their adventure week was great for me too because with only Whit around the house, I had so much time to get stuff done that I don't normally do around here.  Like go to the attic and organize all of the winter stuff I just threw up there in plastic bags two months ago because I just wanted it out of Maggie's bedroom.  The logical day to sort through stuff in the attic was Tuesday because Erik was taking Whit with him to work and the rest of the kids were gone all day too.  With no one to stand at the bottom of the trap door ladder stairs yelling, "Momma!?  What are you doing up there?!  Can I come up?!"  then proceed to come up the ladder for me to say to them, "I did not tell you you could climb this ladder and come into the attic.  GIT (1) DOWNSTAIRS BEFORE YOU KILL YOURSELF OR FALL THROUGH THE CEILING !"  (2)


Footnotes for the above conversation:  (Note, I have not had to use footnotes since my Senior year of High School in Mr. Decker's English Class for my Senior Paper.  No, Mr. Decker, I was not required to use footnotes EVER in any of the papers I had to write in any of the classes I took in my entire six year career of undergraduate and graduate school.  That knowledge was a complete waste of my education and since I haven't had to use the skill in 20 years, I clearly have no idea how to use them properly so I am doing the best I can.)

1)I have noticed that lately when I am shooing things, like children or dogs or livestock, I have adopted the Southern pronunciation of "get" using the "i" sound instead of the "e" sound.

2)  I don't really tell my kids they will fall through the ceiling.  This is just a little jab at my dear friend, Karen, who actually did step right through her bedroom ceiling this week while her husband was away on business.  She patched the hole with blue masking tape.  I told her to at least go get some white tape - or paint the ceiling blue.  Another friend advised her to put a reflective surface on the ceiling and  . . . well,  I won't get into that because this is a family friendly show.  (Although, I do think the other suggestion would go over MUCH better - at least from a husband standpoint.)

Anyway, the heat up in the attic messed me up!  As I was stuffing the bags into the plastic storage bins, I started getting this irrational fear that the ladder door to the attic was going to somehow snap shut and leave me trapped in the attic and I would die of heat exhaustion before anyone found me!  So I started stuffing faster and then it started getting hotter.  Then I discovered that I had BOXES and BOXES of shoes that were in Will and Whit's sizes so I needed to sort through those boxes and find the appropriate shoe sizes and since I was doing that, I might as well just sort all of the shoes into same size categories and organize and relabel the boxes.  The more I did, the more I found to do and soon I was bent over one of our storage bins digging through it looking for pillowcases (somehow we do not have enough pillowcases on our pillows).  As I was bent over, I noticed these drips of water splashing the particleboard floor of the attic.  The conversation in my mind went like this:

What is that?  
Is that water?
Is that water dripping from somewhere?
Did a squirrel just run over my head and pee?
No, it wasn't a squirrel!  I haven't seen a squirrel up here all morning.  It has to be a leak.
How would we have a leak?  It's not even raining!
Where is that water coming from?
Pause with me for a moment as I wipe the sweat from my face.  Realization hits . . .
HOLY COW!  THAT WATER DRIPPING IS COMING FROM MY FACE!  I AM SWEATING SO MUCH IT IS LITERALLY DRIPPING OFF MY FACE!
I've got to get out of this attic NOW!


So, we still don't have enough pillow cases on our pillows BUT, all the shoes are organized and I managed to put all of the winter stuff away and I found some of Maggie's older clothes that I had forgotten to give away or sell, so I posted them on a local classifieds page on Facebook and already sold $50 worth of stuff!

Which is a good thing because after the kids spent the entire day with Mimi again today, they ate an entire loaf of bread as French toast, the boys each ate a fried egg and Maggie had a bowl of cereal, on top of the grapes they were snacking on all evening as they played in the play house.

That was only dinner.

I put them to bed before they could realize they hadn't asked for dessert!