Scheduling

I'm short on time today so I'm going to write about scheduling here and how it's gotten crazy with the start of the school year.   Thankfully we have friends, grandparents, and sitters that can help us.   And we only have two children.   My best friend has four.   I don't have a clue about how she manages their household.

My son had school today.  Drop-off by one parent, check.  Meeting after drop-off that I attended, check.   After school my son had a three-day field trip preparatory meeting my husband attended with him, check.   While he was doing that, I was driving to the next town to pick up my daughter to get her back to our area in time for a five o'clock therapy appointment.   Long drive, wait in the pick-up line, check.

My daughter needed food so I ran through a drive-through because I didn't have anything at the house I thought she'd go for.   French fries and orange juice, check.   She and I ran home for forty-five minutes to get her homework done.   She typed up silly sentences for each of her vocabulary words ("I have only one limb because my other three fell off" was one of her sentences.).

While she did that I got books she needed to return to school repackaged into her backpack, responded to her VI teacher's daily note in the communication book she and I pass back and forth, added a snack in for tomorrow and pulled out completed work that had been sent home.

Homework done, she and I got into the car to head to Dhruti.   She spent the time reading to me to meet the fifteen minutes of reading aloud to a parent she must do every night in order to qualify for, "Fun Friday" which she does not want to miss.   The book her teacher had sent home, The Catawampus Cat, was simple but was written in fully contracted braille.   All the library books are, only the specially prepared books for my daughter come with mid-level contracted braille.  

So reading was frustrating to her, but she tried.   When we got to Dhruti's office I read to her what the book actually said.   She was close in a lot of cases but enough of it was hard to read that she was ready to give up.

I gave my daughter her two braille typed up pages of things she wants to do with Morgan tonight.   Morgan is picking her up from Dhruti and they have two hours to eat dinner and do whatever my daughter wants to do.   She had to hurry with the homework because she's staying out with Morgan until. eight o'clock, her bedtime.

The other half of our family, my husband and son, had finished the field trip meeting and my husband had walked him two doors over to Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Margaret's house (so convenient how close they live).   They were having a special evening with him.

He brought his Nintendo Switch so he could play video games with Uncle Jonathan.   Aunt Margaret had taken orders for Pei Wei and they were going out to dinner together.   My son, a car seat, his switch and also his iPad so he could text message us (a new feature I'll have to write about soon) were all dropped off and my husband headed home.

I got home after leaving my daughter at Dhruti's.   He and I caught up on the events of the day and then I rushed in here to write this.   We're leaving in five minutes to go back to my son's school, one of the reasons we needed both children elsewhere tonight because we have a classroom orientation meeting for parents.

I'm not sure when we're getting dinner.   We have to come back to the house to meet both children who will be arriving at bedtime, 8:00pm, to get them ready for bed and hopefully calmed down enough so they can go to sleep.  

That's today.   Tomorrow is complicated but somewhat less so.  I'm counting this as the children's updates for the day on account of I'm out of time and have to leave for the school meeting now.   My husband and I have flexible schedules with our work.   How do parents do this with inflexible work hours?  How does a single parent do anything at all?   We're fortunate we have all the support and help we do.   I don't know how we'd do it otherwise.