Poor Will. On top of the whole moving thing and the whole work thing, he's had this lame-o sick wife for the past few weeks who has been pretty useless a lot of the time. And he's taken it like a champ. Making dinner, cleaning the house, packing, dealing with kids. Totally without complaint. He deserves a medal. He really does. I don't think I'd be that patient with me. And when I tapped him on the shoulder all achy and wimpy he told me to go back to sleep and did the whole dressed/breakfast/lunch packed/on the bus thing on his own. My hero. Seriously.Throughout the morning, while it rained (really, really loudly) outside and with the house all to myself, I had hoped to get a huge amount of packing done. But alas, I spent most of it laying on the bed or the couch or one of the kids beds staring at the boxes. Too freaking tired and feverish to do much else. And when Will brought Evie home from school at lunch and then had to go back to work, I was a little worried about what the afternoon would bring. Most of they toys are packed. All of the art supplies are boxed up and ready to go, as are the movies. Even if I had the energy to sit outside it was still raining crazy buckets. Our choices were looking pretty much like Netflix or Nextflix. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Netflix. But there is only so much Care Bears/ Strawberry Shortcake/ Rainbow Brite I can take.
Which is why I'd like to thank the recycling gods who came earlier than usual Monday morning, before I could take the huge pile of old Highlights magazines that I'd found while packing the living room over the weekend. Because boys howdy were they a life saver.
Remember Highlights? Well, it's still awesome. And it's are also not just Highlights anymore. We get an embarrassing array of Highlight magazines. It started when my grandmother gave the kids each a subscription for their birthdays a few years ago. Good old Highlights for Briton and High Five, the preschooler version, for Evie. The LOVED them. And then the "special offers" started coming. I'm not usually a sucker for special offers, especially when it comes to magazines. I have only had one magazine subscription in my life that wasn't a gift (Domino. Oh how I miss you. How I hate that my five year subscription got transferred to Glamour for some horrible reason. Do I look like someone who would subscribe to Glamour? NO, no I don't - no offense to Glamour subscribers, I wish I was fashionable like you, I'm just, not) But since my kids loved the originals, well, I decided to try one. And they loved that. So we got another (few). Currently we get Highlights, High Five, Mathmania, Hidden Playground and Puzzle Buzz with a few Puzzlemanias thrown in now and then.
We read them and do the puzzles and stick the stickers every month. But sometimes they all seem to arrive on the same day and I pile them up in a basket in our coffee table on slip them into one of the magazine file boxes in the mudroom. When I started clearing them out I realized we had A LOT of them.
Yesterday afternoon, Evie and I sat on the couch and found missed games and stickers, cut out a mini city and taped them onto moving boxes, made snowflakes and had a remarkably fun time given the fact that I kept dozing off. And we watched Care Bears too.Needless to say, mama is back on gigantibiodics (Yay! Not!) And the pile o Highlights is staying put until the moving truck pulls away. And even then, they may go with us on the train. Because they are awesome. Just sayin.
How did you keep busy during this rainy, nasty week? Anything fun?