This is the Final Weekend!

We have this local furniture store, Haynes, where it is always The Final Weekend. Everything will be reduced! You will never see prices like this again! This is the Final Weekend!

Well, right now this is the final day of our holiday break. It doesn't mean absolutely everything in the grand scheme of our somewhat relaxed life, but it does feel like the end of the time that I had hoped to make the most of with our family--playing board games, making crafts, watching favorite movies, etc.

It's been mostly good. We did a lot of that, just not enough. And it really isn't as if Kerry will never have time in the evenings or we won't have some free time. But it is going to get hairy for a little bit here. It just hit me that this coming week is the hell week for Legend of the Poinsettia rehearsals. And it's also the week of prep for Frances's first mock gymnastics meet, which is unfortunate since she'll be missing a lot of gymnastics this week! I was planning to let her just show up late to these rehearsals up until the dress rehearsal, but now she has an opportunity to be in a photo shoot for either the local Richmond Parent magazine or the national Parents magazine (I was unsure which one was meant), and I know she'd get such a kick out of that. So we're back in high gear right away, then off into mock meet season for gymnastics, spelling bees, and field trips.

Last night was just the kind of night I dreamed this entire break would be. The boys and I taught Frances to play Uno (she won her second game, which was a huge boost!) and Blokus (which she taught to her friend Claire today), and then we played a round of Sight Word Bingo, a current favorite. My goal is to play a round or two of this Bingo every day, and hopefully those words will start to sink in. Then the boys and Kerry and I played a harsh game of Monopoly. In the interest of having the game end in a timely fashion, seeing as we started at 9 p.m., we all made some rather liberal trades, but Walter won, probably for the first time ever, and he won in a huge landslide. Ollie's heyday as the reigning champion is over, and it has been humbling for him. He thought he was invincible (or that we would never catch on to his cheating...).

And speaking of Ollie...poor Ollie in some ways. I've seen a lot of him over this break. This is the kid with no friends. I don't really know what to do about it other than to hope that he'll have more opportunities in the future to attempt to keep a new friendship or to learn constructively from his mistakes. He just does a lot of this, um, constructive learning, and it's kind of been the story of his life. One of these days, the body of knowledge he supposedly should have built by his so-called trials and definite errors will perhaps serve him well. Or maybe boys just don't have friends. It's hard to tell. And what's funny is that it's Walter who I always think of as the AS tending one, the one who has some deficits in social reading and functioning. He's off now with the Starks, after having spent the morning on Runescape with his cousins in Florida and his friends here (he supposedly has a Runescape friend list of over 100, whatever that means).

Right now I'm putting some audio CDs onto my computer to tranfer to the iPod, since the Henrico County ones are due tomorrow and today I have some free time on my hands to return them. We never did finish the last two CDs of Eragon, even though Ollie at one point described this as "his second favorite book ever." Hmmm...he loved it so much he didn't care what happened in the last 50 pages! We also have two CDs left of 11 with the Mysterious Benedict Society, a book I would best describe as "Not all that." I was mildly hooked on CD 1, and by the time we got to the middle of CD 2 I was struggling to pay attention to a story that was pretty flat. I don't think Ollie cares too much, either. Why do books have to be so freaking long? This is coming from someone whose PhD focus was very heavy on Charles Dickens and other novels of, well, Victorian length. But books, especially these variants-on-a-theme children's fantasy adventure novels with a "special" protagonist (the child who doesn't realize he's a secret agent/brilliant genius/mythological character/dragon rider-tamer-owner/genie/wizard), would do well to cut their length to about half of their current average. When I read them...IF I read them...I hear a commentary in my own head of blah, blah, blah as they go on and on with description or scenes that are just plain boring. This isn't my genre, but geez, I love books that are tight and full and keep you wanting more but also feeling a sense of accomplishment. Is it too much to ask? This Mysterious Benedict Society book might well have been a success with us if it had kept itself to, say, 5 or 6 CDs at most or 280 pages.

My resolutions for this year:

1. Lose my temper less. Live each day more as if I'm privileged to have been given the children that are here with e.

2. Find a better system for getting my library books back on time. Have I mentioned that I love Henrico, which emails me a few days before books are due to let me know that my time is just about up? In contrast to Chesterfield, which emails me a week or two later to let me know how naughty I was. My motto: "Fewer Fines in 2009!"

3. Find more time in my days for what I most want to do. I think regular people call this Prioritizing. I am finding myself thinking, "Well, now how in the hell do other people find the time to read 2100 pages of vampire books?" And the answer is probably something like: If I spent less time blogging or less time playing Yahtzee or less time on the phone or less time watching History Channel, then I'd suddenly find I had that time for 2100 page vampire trilogies. Or maybe that's no where I want to spend my time after all. But I want to feel a better sense of time usage and honesty with myself about what I'd rather be doing with the 24 hours I've been given in each day.

4. Find contentment where I am. I'm always looking at moving or revamping or whatever. I would like to be more goal-focused. What are my overall goals for my life now? And then hold these time-suck musings on moving across town or to a farm or to Roanoke or Boulder up to my touchstone and see how well they fare. If it's not in line with a clear mission statement, out it goes before whole days or weeks go by in fantasies, budget calculations, and market research.

5. Develop a higher sense of self esteem. I feel pretty useless lately, like I have no skills that anyone would really want. I know that isn't true, but I also can't seem to prove it, especially to myself. I feel qualified only to sit at home with my own children, being critical of how I'm even doing that. I want to feel like a competent person who has made life choices, and I want to feel that just because I don't have a good line on my resume from it right now that it's not a waste of my life or a waste of potential. I want to live my potential within the scheme I have currently chosen for myself.

6. More attention to the developing needs of Frances and Rutledge. It's so easy for me to think heavily about schoolwork for Walter and Ollie, but these two are so ready for higher interaction, if I could only find the time and energy. Today Rutledge was working in a maze book for the first time and he was awesome. He also used scissors for the first time, and he was enthralled for almost an hour cutting along lines in a Kumon book and assembling pictures he had cut out. Frances had a great reading session this morning and got all the way through The Foot Book on her own as well as nearing the end of Box 1 from Hooked on Phonics. I don't want to push her, but I dont' want to ignore her, either.

Finished today: _Shipwreck!_ by Gordon Korman. Great little read. We're eager for the second volume!

Finished the other day: _A Girl Called Eva_. Awesome WWII book. I hope to find more like it.