Spring Break

And it's raining cats and dogs.
That's OK, I like rain.
However, I do not like wet, muddy kids traipsing through my house.

Spring break officially begins on Monday, but today is a teacher work day.

Caroline and Bailey went out for a couple of minutes and as soon as they did, the heavens opened and the rain came a pourin'.
Upon their drenched and dirty return, Caroline, ever the weird child, actually protested at having to change her clothes.
"I like being wet."
Uh, whatever.

Truthfully, she still hasn't changed her clothes. They drank some hot chocolate and went out to retrieve Bailey's fly away umbrella, stuck underneath someone's SUV. They haven't returned, so I'm assuming that they're at Bailey's right now.

Locating Caroline is often a game. She's usually in one of four places; I just use deductive reasoning to reach my conclusion. She always tells me where she'll be when she first leaves, but once the location changes, the odds of her remembering to tell me aren't that great.

Oh, never mind. She just came in to get her roller skates.
Roller skating in the rain?
Sure, why not?

Can you tell I'm not a hover mother?
Sure, you can roller skate on the rain slicked side walks.
Just wear a helmet.

Our spring break plans are, not surprisingly, quite tame.
Today Craig is "graduating" from the class he has been attending in Maryland. While I know he's happy to shove the 3am wake up call and the daily commute, he's not looking forward to returning to his old job.
He'll be back to working the swing shift, so he'll get better sleep, but he much prefers the work he was doing in the class he was attending.
I also have to get back in the habit of working dinner around the schedule of a dinner participant that isn't home at dinner time.
I got into a good groove before, making Tuesday's dinner on Monday night, etc.
It just requires some extra thought.

Extra thoughts are a hot commodity around here and are treated as such.

Since Craig has been away from his office for three months, his services are greatly needed at his place o business, so he gets tomorrow off and will rejoin the rat race on Sunday.
No rest for the wicked.

Tomorrow night we're hosting a slumber party.
This is our maiden voyage into slumber party territory.
Caroline is stoked. I'm not.
But that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

I haven't planned much, as they'll be happy doing what they always do.
I am making pizza dough so they can make their own mini pizzas. I'm sure popcorn and a movie will make an appearance as well.

Even as a kid, I wasn't a fan of the slumber party.
Sure I liked spending time with my friends, eating crap, gossiping (gasp!). But, sleeping in a strange house has never been one of my favorite things.
I'm always the last to go to sleep and the first to wake up.
Waiting for others to wake up in a strange house is no fun.

It's (not so) hard to believe that I was as uptight then as I am now.

Other than the slumber party, our only other set-in-stone plan is to hop on over to DC to see the cherry blossoms.
They're in full bloom the first week in April, and this so happens to be the first week in April.
How apropos.

And that's it.

We've yet to go on a spring break trip. I never thought that was customary; evidently
I was wrong. Tons of people from the gym and Caroline's school are going away.

When we lived in Augusta, GA, spring break always happened the first week in April, coinciding with the Master's Golf Tournament. This is Augusta's life blood.
The natives leave during Master's week, often renting out their houses to golfers and tournament attendees.
Traffic is a nightmare. Everything is packed.
Good for the economy. Bad for those that stay put.

Aw, I still miss Augusta.
I hated it at first, but grew to love living there.
Our neighborhood was wonderful (although most of our neighbors have moved on), there were tons of activities for kids and I still miss my gym. Especially my Monday morning step class.
It's been nine months since we moved and I still miss that class.
Sniff.

I like Virginia, but I truly miss living in Georgia.
I'm sure by the time we leave here, I'll say the same thing about our new home.

The grass is always greener.