Monday, September 03, 2012

the labors of labor day

We returned home from the most spectacularly awesome vacation and tomorrow, it all starts back up again. Instead of feeling refreshed and ready to take on the world, I feel like curling up in to a ball and sleeping until Thursday (of next week).  Now I wonder if my resistance is because we just returned from a spectacularly awesome vacation and I require more time for recalibration to the "real" world, or because we're diving full-force in to a new school year?

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The biggest labor of Labor Day for me, is coming to grips with the fact that summer is over.  Alas, tomorrow IS the first day of school and what has been dubbed, "Terrible Traffic Tuesday." All the local papers are toting that drivers need to mentally prepare themselves for the gridlock that will overtake the roads of NoVA tomorrow.  These days, I'm trying my best to embrace traffic. Aside from parenting small children, I can't think of many opportunities that sufficiently require introspection, patience, and goodwill towards highly unpredictable and irrational people. 

As of tonight, all the school supplies have been purchased including the seventh, eighth and ninth pair of Fiskar scissors. (What's happened to the prior six pairs remains a mystery to me.) The children's hair have been cut ... and professionally this time, because I'll admit, we need to go to a pro at least once a year to clean up my hack lines.

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There are clothes laid out and a mental note of what kind of lunches to pack in the morning - when I wake up on time and don't oversleep and completely miss the bus - because the sustained act of packing lunches the night before is up there with the reality of me ever completing a marathon in under four hours.  Admirable yes ... but, quite unlikely.

Tomorrow, I'm hopeful that I'll feel better about jumping back in to the rat race. Because when you step away for awhile, you see that's what it really is.  And you question with every ounce of your being, why in the world I'm doing THAT when I could be doing THIS, that some people actually make a living doing every single day ...



Charlie and I - aficionados of researching real estate every where we travel - are currently evaluating buying a horse ranch in North Carolina. Of course I'm much more serious about it than Charlie. But then again, I was much more serious about getting married, having children and moving cross-country than my husband ever was and we see how those things turned out.  

He says, I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

I say, Giddiup baby. GIDDIUP! 

(Also, Cocoa Puffs? What a great name for a horse!!)