My First Day of Vacay

Ah, the bliss of the first day of summer vacation! I don't know how y'all non-teachers can handle your lives without the prospect of a 3.5 month break every year.

Wanna get jealous? Here's what I did on my first day of summer vacation:

I get up, Matt makes me some coffee, I drink it while reading Margo Rising, my newest web obsession--it's a snarky review, in order, of all the Sweet Valley High books. I did not realize during my young teen years, when I was reading those books for real, that Jessica Wakefield is a sociopath. She is, though. Cold, dead blue-green eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean and all.

After Matt goes off to work (poor dear), the girls and I spend HOURS making my Papa's biscuits. Seriously, hours. The dough was well-kneeded, I assure you:
They turned out pretty well, I think, considering that I used olive oil instead of Crisco and whole wheat flour instead of self-rising white and regular milk + vinegar instead of buttermilk. Oh, and I burned them.

So we eat ourselves some biscuits and then we go outside, where I do a RIDICULOUS amount of heavy yardwork. Seriously, I was literally gasping for breath after struggling with our reel-powered motor back and forth across the random, uneven hill in our side yard. I didn't even get anything planted or weed-whacked, which were my other goals for the morning, although the sunflower babies are up and so we can plant the cranberry beans now, and we have the potting soil that Willow's bachelor's buttons need, finally.

Back inside, I make the girls a lunch that they do not eat and bully Willow through dressing for school, tooth-brushing, hair-combing, shoe-tying, etc. Sydney plays until Matt gets back from taking Willow to school, and he puts her down for a nap while I eat cheese and bread and barbecue Baked Lay's leftover from the previous night's drive-in date.

I spend a while making some text changes and futzing over the book proposal, which I have GOT to stop futzing over and just mail, for Christ's sake.

The laminator is still out from when I was making craft fair signs (I looooove my laminator), and so I experiment with laminating some comic book panels I'd cut out. I am very pleased with how they turned out:It's a way to use them but keep them archivally safe, and unlike the comic panels backed with acid-free cardstock that I put in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, you can see both sides of the comic book page on these. After I experiment some more, I might add these to my shop, too.

While I cut out the laminated comic book panels, I catch up on Dollhouse and The Office on Hulu.

When Syd wakes up from her nap, I get her dressed and we go get Will from school. I want to go buy another printer ink cartridge after that (I swear, everytime I print something I feel like I am bleeding money), but Will has to pee and Syd is thirsty, so we just go home. The girls run in and out of the house and play for a couple of hours while I do some laundry and some dishes and look under couch cushions and behind the bed to try to find all the library books that are overdue.

When Matt gets home, I enlist him into FINALLY moving my compost bin to where I want it to be while Willow and I mend my jeans:
She's getting pretty handy with the seam ripper.

While I go inside to finish mending my jeans I let Willow borrow my camera to take some photos outside, and later I find some nice photos on the camera--
--and also all these photos that imply that she'd been running around the yard sticking my VERY expensive camera into holes and garbage cans and underneath the back porch, etc. Shudder.

We need to cook some ears of corn so Matt makes burgers while I straighten the living room and the girls play a "math game" on the computer:
Don't tell them that their "game" is just flash card drills, because they LOVE it. I set it to just give them arithmetic problems in the ones and twos because I'm encouraging Willow not to necessarily work the problem each time, but to see if she can remember the answer from the last time she worked it. Oh, and she accidentally wrote The Devil's Number:

Matt and I laughed and laughed, but don't even bother explaining to a kid why it's funny.

During dinner it turns out that Matt forgot to actually cook the corn, so we'll likely have burgers again tonight.

After dinner I wrote up a Crafting a Green World blog post about mending my jeans while the girls laid down with Matt and fell asleep while he played video games. I went in there like an hour later, only to find Matt sound asleep, as well. So I read some Neil Gaiman comics in the other bed.

Matt did wake up from his nap later, but that's another story...