hell week

I"ve long had last week circled in my calendar.  Hell week.  Every fall activity beginning, plus a birthday and a handful of other activities means we're all exhausted today.  But it was fun.

So here's our fall schedule, along with the extras from last week:

Monday- Elizabeth soccer practice
Tuesday - School Of Religion for Elizabeth, and the first week was a family mass followed by potluck.  But not potluck dinner.  As exhausting as that would have been, at least we'd have gotten fed.  No, it was potluck snacks at 5 pm.  This week it's the opening ceremony for SOR.  For the love of god (literally), can we just get this thing going?
Wednesday - morning, Andrew's music class, afternoon, Andrew's soccer class

Then, last week Thursday was parent association meeting in the morning at Elizabeth's school, and of course Elizabeth's birthday (post to come!).  Friday was the co-op sale that my friend TSM runs (post to come on AwwwClutter!).  Saturday is usually Elizabeth's soccer game, but it was mercifully cancelled because of wet fields, so we had more time to prep for our supposedly easy neighborhood happy hour / birthday party.  Saturday night Elizabeth hosted her first ever sleepover, as a special birthday treat, with a her friend who lives down the street.  The girls stayed up til midnight and woke up at 7 am.

Sunday the neighborhood was shut down because of the Latino festival that takes place one block from our house, and brings something insane like 30,000 people to our little neighborhood, shutting down all streets around us.

Oh, and let's not forget another parent snagged Rich one morning at school and asked if we could bring snacks for the week, then sent us a page-long rules of snacks (no artificial colors! no Nuts! no dairy!) that sent us off to two different stores and boiling 24 eggs and lugging three giant bags of snacks into school last week.

And then let's talk about our plague.  Of fleas.  Which meant a previously unscheduled, 2-hour, expensive trip to the vet during the week, and a full day Sunday of flea control measures.  Frontline, you ineffectual crap product, I hate you and your expensive price tag with a passion!  There was simply no time to go 100% on flea control before Sunday - when Rich did 7 loads of laundry (none of them clothes!) and bathed both pets and I read up on fleas and combed both pets and swept and swept and swept.  The only good news is we have a new product for Skipper and an entirely different new product for Harrison so maybe, just maybe, after an entire summer of battling fleas (I cannot believe I am admitting our flea problem, but let me just make it clear we have been AGGRESSIVELY battling fleas since mid-July, and none of measures worked because our main line of defense - Frontline - only managed to DO NOTHING, but we have been combing and bathing and washing and flea bombing and doing everything we are supposed to do to no avail) maybe we will finally turn the corner and gain mastery over them.  Or, it will finally get cold and no longer so humid and the cycle will end for the year.  One or the other.

So that's why we all struggled out of bed this morning bleary-eyed.  To start it all over again this week with the soccer and the religion and the soccer and so on.  But we made it through, a more regular schedule starts this week, and the humidity is finally scheduled to break, so maybe fall has really begun now.