To the Weekend!

We are enjoying our first weekend at home as a family with the cold fall weather, lots of college football and visits from the grandparents.  Parker and Henry will even get to meet their aunt and uncle, Ryan and Whitney, for the first time!  With all the helping hands at the house, I’m hoping to run some errands while others stay with the boys.  We still have some girl stuff to return and some other items to grab for P and H.  Like a second swing.  That thing is worth its weight in gold around here!

Enjoy your weekend!  I can’t believe Thanksgiving is next week.  So much to celebrate!

Day Three of My Captivity

That's right.  I've been locked away for the past three days.  Quarantined to the bedroom, hardly getting out of bed, all thanks to the FLU.  Ahh.  I got the flu.  If ever there was an initiation into the first year of teaching, the flu must be it.  I even took all the preventative steps to avoid this mishap.  I got my flu shot months ago.  Wash my hands all the time.  Stay away from the coughing kids.  Clorox wipe everything.  But I could not escape it.  Teachers at school were dropping like flies with the flu this week, so when I started to feel like crap on Thursday, I was fearful.  But I obsessively took my temperature all day and never had so much as a tenth of a degree over a glowing 98.6 degrees.  So I figured it was a cold or allergies, which I pretty much have everyday anyways.  But as more and more people went home sick each day, I scheduled a quick appointment at the doctor Friday morning.  The results: The Flu.  So I was banished away from school and told to rest up and take some Tamiflu over the weekend.  Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong.  I actually felt 95% fine, even as the doc looked me in the eyes and told me it was the flu.  I had the aches and pains for 24 hours the day before, but by then, I was feeling a-ok.  So I figured it would be a nice long weekend at home.  I filled my prescription and went home to bed, ready to watch the entire contents of my DVR.  Well, turns out, those Tamiflu pills that everyone is scrambling around trying to find, well they actually make me THROW UP LIKE CRAZY.  So all day Saturday, I actually did feel lousy.  I thought maybe it really was the flu, showing it's face a day later, but everything on the news and on the official Department of Health websites swear that you don't throw up with the flu.  So I checked the paperwork in the Tamiflu box and there it was.  The one and only side effect: nauseous and vomiting.  Well, call me crazy, but this stuff is supposed to make me feel better, not worse.  So I quit taking it.  And now I'm back to being 95%.  And if anyone wants to buy some Tamiflu on the black market, I am your girl.

so long sweet summer

Time did that thing it always does: fly. And here I am staring fall in the face, while still sweating in the 100 degree temps.  This weekend was a good chance to stop and put things on hold for a bit and I really tried not to worry about all the work I need to do for my classroom (we have parent night on Thursday, eek), all the reading I need to do for grad school (yeah, that started back up this week) and all the ‘stuff’ I always feel like I need to be doing (keeping the house clean, laundry, eating a halfway decent meal).  Mark and I went separate ways for the long weekend - he went to visit college friends at the lake, while I stayed home and hosted college friends who were visiting Dallas.  Two of my best girlfriends stayed with me for a night, and we got to all get ready for the night together {just like in the DG house}, catching up while we curled our hair and did our makeup, wondering aloud who would get married next, have kids next, or just stay the same.  On Saturday, we got to meet baby Hadley, and then watch the Texas game together on a {hot} patio.  But the best part was when we all stayed up until one in the morning, sipping wine, eating bon bons (literally) and just being together.  Times with friends like that are harder to come by these days, when we all live in different cities and have to, you know, go to work every day.

Now I have the Sunday Blues on a Monday night, anxious about a paper I need to write for grad school and a presentation I need to put together for parent night, and it reminds me of the same anxieties I would have at UT, when I was juggling classes and jobs and the social calendar of a college student.  It’s not that I’m worried I won’t get it all accomplished - I know it will all get done - but I still have that little nagging feeling that I should be reading or studying right now, not watching a game on TV or going out to dinner with Mark.  If I’m awake, I should be being productive, right?  At least folding some laundry or unloading the dishwasher?  But I tell myself it can wait until tomorrow.  For now, it’s all on hold.

Craft Time

When my mom and sisters came over for a Girl's Weekend last week, I put them all to work.  We wanted to have a weekend of "crafting, sleeping, eating and hanging out at the pool."  We managed all except the very last!

Mom brought her sewing machine and gave us an early morning lesson [while still in our PJ's]:

We [re]learned how to thread the machine.  It had been... oh probably about 15 years since I'd used a sewing machine.

It wasn't long before this [leftover wedding prop]

 Became this:

Shout out to Kelly, who was the model for all the photos, and did quite a bit of the stitching and sewing herself.  Photos of the pillows in action... coming soon!

Celebrate

We had a great Memorial Day weekend!  One of my cousins got married on Sunday and they had a photo booth at their reception.  We love a good photo booth!

My sister and I took a turn as well.

These are just some of my many cousins, and all our "plus ones" (husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.)  My cousin David had just gotten married the week before (in Hawaii!) and came to the wedding reception straight from the airport with his new wife.  He is the super tan one on the left!

I'm so lucky to have such a great, big, wonderful extended family.  We figured out that after this weeding this weekend, Mark has officially met all of my cousins.  All 28 [i think] of them.  But now that we're all getting married and having kiddos, the family gatherings are quickly expanding!

Tick, tock, tick, tock

Happy Weekend!  I'm counting down the hours of this work day and looking forward to dinner with friends tonight.  It's my first weekend with no school work, so I plan to do it up right!