Chaos, Crankiness, & Confusion at Our House

Phew!

We’re coming off a whirlwind five days with Grandma & Grandpa, who were visiting from Kansas City. Prior to their visit, I fretted that we had “nothing special” planned, except that we had Cupid’s Cabaret on Sunday, where Cute W and M were performing. I hadn’t realized that our regular routine, when you throw enthusiastic grandparent spectators into the mix, is surprisingly full and exhausting.

On Thursday, they went along to J’s piano lesson, transforming it into a makeshift recital.

On Friday, our whole entourage visited school to volunteer at the library during M’s class in the morning, ran some errands during the day, went to watch J doing gymnastics, and went out for dinner (mmm, Van’s Vietnamese).

On Saturday, we had M’s early-morning soccer game followed by cabaret rehearsals, that cupcake project,  a movie, and another dinner out (mmm, Bangkok Bistro).

On Sunday, it was the cabaret (little J was “better enough” to attend, although we skipped out on church and skating for her) followed by M’s ice-skating lessons, then card games and order-in Mexican (mmm, that Mexicana Grocery place).

On Monday, the kids went to school, but it was library day for J, plus an in-school assembly, so we still had plenty of quality time. Plus, we swung by the district offices to see M’s artwork on display before they headed to the airport.

Predictably, today’s late-afternoon homeworking got a teensy bit ugly, but we got through it.

Now it’s time to get ready for the parties and put the house back together. Part of this cabaret thing that Cute W did involved numerous costume changes. So along with the accumulation that occurs when you’re busy and have house guests, we have things like this just lying around the house:

If you are too young to recognize The Bill, I don’t even want to know. Go watch the Schoolhouse Rock video.  We’ve explained to the girls that when we were kids, you couldn’t just watch anything you wanted whenever you wanted. You had to wait for a specific time, like Saturday morning, for something special, like cartoons. Man, I feel old. Anyway, The Bill was Cute W’s most successful Halloween costume ever (the first time he wore it, I swear it almost killed two young women in Brooklyn, who ran shrieking across Atlantic Avenue to get to him without looking out for cars at all). So he trots it out whenever he possibly can. He even wore it to Capitol Hill once. We were with friends who were completely making fun of him, and then tourists started approaching to ask to take photos with him, so suddenly our friends thought he was cool. And then he was told to leave by security guards because if you’re showing words, then it’s considered a formal protest, and you have to get a special permit. You can imagine what he said to them, can’t you? . . .(wait for it. . . .) “I’m just a bill! I’m only a bill!” They were not amused, and he was escorted off the steps.

But I digress. It was one of the costumes. Another was Elvis, which has led to quite a bit of confusion in our house for the last week. Because here’s the wig lying on the seat next to Cute W’s computer:

We kept thinking that it was Isis, our cat. You can see the resemblance here, with a sample photo of our actual cat, trying to prevent me from folding laundry:

In her defense, it’s very cozy on those freshly-dried clothes. I’d like to curl up with her. In fact, I’m going to go curl up. The weekend’s left me with a pharmaceutical-resistant, splitting headache. Possibly due to exhaustion and excessive eating. Whatever it is, I’m going to lie down.