:: normalcy ::

Normalcy. Something I'd been craving for weeks and came to a head last week during the fourth business trip Seth took during the month of January. I had overcommitted myself. Grad school homework, 27 handmade hockey team posters to make, being present on the hockey jamboree committee, attending Owen and Alden's conferences, starting my field experience Laura MacArthur elementary in a first grade class that is chocked full of behavioral issues....oh, and then there's going to work, making dinner, playing with the boys making sure the boys were still alive, doing laundry, making lunches. It was literally too much and I lost my damn mind on Wednesday. By Thursday, I was extremely exhausted, Alden had been sent to the principal's office for disrupting naptime at school 3 days in a row, Owen had been sent in the hallway for not listening in class, our house was a flippin' train wreck and all we wanted was for things to be normal.

The living room became the poster cutting zone.

The dining room became a multipurpose poster design, homework, hockey gear and laundry area.

The sitting room held a permanent fixture of Lego pieces allllll week.

And the kitchen....welll...I have no words.

If you know me at all, you know I cannot live like this.

I decided Thursday evening that the posters needed to wait, despite their looming deadline, and we needed to get back to our normal lives. The boys and I cleaned the house, put in some laundry in, made a real dinner, made school lunches ahead of time, sat down together and ate, gave them a bubble bath, read stories, organized what was left to finish on the posters, and went to bed at a normal hour.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh......deep breath.

Friday morning, I felt so much better! We started a school behavior chart in which after earning five days of good school behavior, they can choose a treat for our family. Seth flew in, picked them up from school, and reported that they had excellent behavior at school. All they really needed was for both Seth and I to be present and active. What goes on at home has such a definite effect on kids' behavior at school.

This is all they really needed; wrestle time:

And I finally finished those damn hockey posters!