Playing Catch-up!

Surprise, it's me and it's Tuesday!! Just switching up my usual habit of posting on weekends.............okay, so very coincidentally. The surgeon has released me back to my 'normal' life and that means my extended summer vacation has come to an end. Let's just say I do not have the self-discipline to juggle lifestyle changes smoothly. Like for instance,

 
zucchini on steroids? No, just the product of me not successfully juggling school, work, and gardens! The plus side of this monster is the fact that it yielded a  whopping 15 cups of shredded flesh to freeze for a mid-winter baking session.
 

Then there's the fact that I'm negligent in mentioning the news that Mairead is now banded, bracketed, and wired!! Mari has expressed some relief at no longer being the only 'metal mouth' in the family.


The homework load has really spiked this year and I'm finding myself spending more time at the kitchen table than I'd like which also means I'm spending less time at the sewing machine. Less time at the sewing machine means a growing pile of back orders which weigh very heavy on the mind. So it was veeeeeeeery hard for me to walk out on the salt mine this weekend to attend what I anticipated was going to be a pre-school field trip do-over.....

 I mean somewhere in my pre-digital photo records I have this same shot of a 3yo Julia!! When your child's  4th grade teacher's husband  is a fireman in a near-by fire department and she 'encourages' her class to take in the Open House the Mom is caught between a rock and a hard place!!!! At least we had some decent weather to revisit the...

Uniform room....

and the hose room.

  

I was gritting my teeth hard each time they posed for shots I had taken of them as toddlers thinking of all the sewing I could have been accomplishing! Especially when it was a near teen asking for a picture on a fire truck....

and insisting on staying behind the window!!!! I was sooooo trying to steer them out of there at the earliest possible moment until we went out back of the fire house......

and found a station where an average kid could wield a fire hose......

and practice safe evacuations with simulated smokey conditions!!! Have to admit they didn't do this on the pre-school field trip. Nor did they get to 'scratch and sniff' a card that teaches kids what natural gas smells like in pre-school.

So back to climbing on the fire trucks kind of rekindled my push to make our exit because surely she had done enough to give the teacher ample 'proof' of her attendance? Literally as I herd them back out through the giant front garage doors....BAM!!!!! The best darn show I've been to in years!

A complete training session on just how firemen use the Jaws of Life!!!

Where they showed how they 'safely' break car glass and cut off car doors....

and even car roofs if needed to get to an injured motorist!!!!!

I know, I know....take time to smell the roses...or gas chips!! I was wrong and Julia was right, the day was a 'blast'. A multitude of thanks to the powers that be for reminding me that time spent with my girls now is invaluable and that 'catching up' with my sewing would be far easier a task than trying 'catch up' on a missed childhood....