Three Things

When I saw that Dara at Not In Jersey wrote a "three things" post earlier this week, I knew I had the idea for my next blog post! See Dara's post here. Read on to discover three things about each of us right now, with accompanying silly pictures :) (I got the kids' input on this post so this is all posted with permission. Just wanted to clarify.)

Rachel

1) Rachel's life is all about dance right now! She has six and a half hours of classes, she has 45 minutes of assistant teaching, and on the weekends, she has been preparing for three different shows (which adds approximately another four hours of dance every week). She is currently on a weekend road trip with her dance bestie and her mom to perform in a city about three hours away from here. Did I mention it's all about dance?!?!?!

2) When she's not at dance, Rachel loves baking, specifically chocolate chip cookies. As those are some of my favourite cookies, I am fully on board with this!

3) Rachel has had a couple of orthodontist appointments this month so, unfortunately, she's been dealing with braces pain. Sam was rarely bothered by his appointments but Rachel lives on smoothies and sorbet for a few days after each appointment. I had braces forty years ago and I still remember the ache in my mouth after a tightening appointment so I can sympathize.

Sam

1) Well, it took a bit of extra time, but I feel like Sam has turned into a typical teenager. He's got an active social life this fall. Specifically, he and his friends meet up at the neighbourhood park and ride around on their bikes at night. Today after school, they're all biking "somewhere to get Hallowe'en costumes, so can I have some money, Mom?" I love it!

2) If he's not riding around on his bike with his friends, he's playing soccer in our backyard. The other night we had about half an hour before dance and I went out and kicked the ball around with him. It was really fun! Sam has just started a fall league so I'll be watching him on the soccer fields for the next few weeks too!

3) Sam has also been doing a lot of dishes recently. This is a part of his life he's not as thrilled with! (And lest you think Sam is carrying the bulk of the household chores, Rachel has folded more than a few baskets of laundry and helped out with cooking supper a lot recently.)

Dave

1) Dave has taken someone to a teeth related appointment four times in the past two weeks. Between the kids' orthodontist appointments and his own dentist appointment, Dave is just thankful I'm toothily independent! Hahaha!

2) Dave has been reading more these days. He's read three or four books since the end of September which is unusual for him. He almost always has a book on the go, but except for being in Saskatchewan, rarely devours a bunch of books at once!

3) Dave has been spending a lot of time figuring out phones. He's our family tech person and he had to reset his work phone (which is his only phone) earlier this month so that was frustrating. Thankfully, it's all back to normal now. He'll be in phone purgatory for a bit longer as we just discovered that my and Sam's phone company is going out of business in a month. So he'll be figuring that out over the next few weeks.

Me

1) I am working on reading some very overdue library books. I mostly read on my Kobo but once in awhile, I get library books. And then I don't read them in a timely fashion. My most overdue book should have been returned to the library 46 days ago. Our library got rid of fines during Covid, which is clearly not great for me :) Thankfully, it's a readathon this weekend so I'll have lots of time to get my library books read, and returned to the library.

2) Sam provided this thing about me: "Mom has high expectations for her family which we don’t live up to due to inherent laziness." I laughed so hard because this sums up my family frustrations in a nutshell! Hahaha! By the way, my "high expectations" are things like putting their laundry away, getting to school on time, helping around the house, cleaning up after themselves, taking a shower in a timely manner -- you know, "high expectations" like that!

3) Lest you think Sam and Rachel are the only people in our family with active extracurricular activities, I am joining a staff-student volleyball intramural team!!! We have a new Phys Ed teacher this year and she is trying to encourage some staff-student mingling so a bunch of staff are going to play on volleyball teams with students at lunch breaks. Since my lunch break is during one of the student lunch breaks, I agreed to play. This could be a lot of fun or a complete disaster. Stay tuned to hear the results/find out if I get injured :)

So that's three things currently going on with each of us. This was a fun post to write and I'm going to try to do them more often. I think my last "three things" post was in January 2021 and you can read it here.

Happy Friday, and happy weekend, everyone!!!