The Slippery Slope:

Slacking at It's Best

So, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what the future may hold for me.  Eventually I'll have to go back to work.  Bleh.  I've got a sweet gig going with this stay-at-home mom role, and I know it.   It probably won't happen until Jill is in full time kindergarten and that's still a couple of years off.  But, I can't stop thinking about what life will be like when I'm working again.

My biggest worry is summertime.  What do you do with four children all summer long when both parents have to work?  I realize that millions and millions of people currently experience this, but it's not something I've had to deal with.  My anxiety level is already high and we're talking about day care that's at least 3 years away!  My husband thinks I'm rather crazy for worrying about this now, but I guess that's what I do best. 

I have little knowledge about daycare options in my town, but what I've seen,  I don't like.  What I do experience on nearly a daily basis, are the hordes of day camping children who descend upon our community pool with little, almost non-existent, supervision.  I've counted the counselors--one day there were only three for at least 75 kids.  Kids who were jumping and diving and splashing and generally wreaking havoc in the shallow end.  I had to take my toddler and flee to the baby pool!  This is not the care I ever want my children to have to experience.  I'm sure there are better camps and day cares out there, but I don't know where they are yet.

After the whole summertime dilemma, my next concern is when does everything get done?  When will I grocery shop?  When will I do the laundry?  When will I clean the house?  My husband, who loves me dearly, and had just spent an entire Saturday catching up on the laundry, answered with, "Well, you don't do these things now and you're home all day."  I told you, this stay-at-home deal is sweet!  I'm so glad we can laugh together about these things.

TV ANGST

What to do??  Ghost Hunters International and the season premier of Project Runway are on tonight at the same times.  Have these TV execs any compassion.  Maybe it's time to invest in one of those new fangled TIVO thingy's.

Wednesday nights are good again!

Another Busy Weekend

So much to blog about, but so little time!  We had another busy weekend and then an extra day of some good ol' family time.  It's late so I'm just gonna give a quick pictorial recap.  Plus, typepad has developed an unsavory habit of swallowing up my posts and sending them off into no man's land and that is highly annoying.

The big ticket item this weekend was the combined birthday party we held for Sam & Katherine.  We wanted to try something a little different this year so we held an old fashioned picnic at a local state park.  We had scouted out several parks and thought we found the perfect area to hold the party--plenty of shade, clean bathrooms, a baseball field, and an open area for fun and games.  I think it went pretty well but it did involve a great amount cooler borrowing and  crap hauling to the park.  I'm not sure if we'll do it again next year, but it was fun to give it a try.

I love this picture but I have no idea what they're looking at.

Some of the girls playing the hula hoop challenge game. 

The little ones needed a game to play, too.

 I don't have many pictures of the boys to post, but they also enjoyed playing some games too.  The favorite by far was the egg toss.  Next year, they want all the eggs to be raw instead of just the one I didn't hard boil.  Not so sure that my sister-in-laws would be pleased with that, though :-)

Chris scheduled himself to have off yesterday, Monday, so we could have some time to re-cooperate and have a little fun after working all weekend with party planning.  We were thinking about hitting the Jersey Shore for the day but the day started off rainy and the bad weather was heading to the beach.  So, we did a little research and decided to try out another state park that has a huge pool.  We were a little apprehensive about the quality of people who frequent such pools (because we're so classy, you know,) but we went anyway.  As we pulled into the parking lot, we noticed it was rather empty.  When we went through the gates the park rangers greeted us with a smile and told us how lucky we were to be there today because it was so empty.  There were only 18 people there, including us!  They usually have somewhere around 700 people a day on the weekend, so this was really unusual.  We walked in and found this:

It was beautiful!  And empty!  We basically had this incredible pool to ourselves for several hours.  There were two water slides (only one was open) and the kids had a blast on them.  I even went down a couple of time myself, it was fun until I got a nose full of water.  Katherine spent the entire time on the slide, she couldn't get enough.  The baby section was very nice, too.  Jill didn't appreciated the fountain sprays, but she loved everything else.

 We couldn't hide from people too long though.  After a couple of hours, a family of about 5 adults and 18 screaming, splashing kids arrived.  Look at the picture above, see all the space??? There were open grassy areas surrounding this 1/2 acre pool.  Plenty of seating for anyone.  Spread out, enjoy some elbow room.  Go ahead, there's no need to crowd.  Guess where this lovely bunch decided to set up camp.  If you guessed three feet from our blanket, you're right.  Some of their kids were really out of control and I was worried one of them was going to break his neck with all of the diving he was doing in shallow end.  They managed to take over the baby area, so Jill branched out and hit the deeper side with us.  She absolutely loved it.

So that's about it, but I'll leave you with two pictures of my boys.