Buy one, get four free...

Yep, it's Wednesday. Wednesdays are notoriously crazy around this house. It is the first night that the older 3 come back here from their dad's house, and they are always fired up.

It started out as a fairly easy day. I got to sleep in a little bit, and I didn't have any extra kids for the day. I also didn't have to go take care of Connie today, so there was no place that I had to be. After I got the 5 year old on the bus to preschool, I decided to take the youngest and go for a walk - after all, if I am going to do this half-marathon in May, I need to really start working for it. The weather was perfect, so we loaded up the stroller and took off.

I had mapped out my route before we left and was aiming for 6.5-7 miles - I wanted to do at least half of a half-marathon. We stopped at the library to drop off some books, stopped at the post office to check the box, and kept going. 6.63 miles later, I turned off the tracker on the phone because I was getting tired and screwing up my pace, and we stopped to get lunch (I got a salad). We came home and I got a shower and cleaned all of the mud off of me (stupid melting snow) and then started getting supper ready while I cleaned up the house.

In the meantime, I got a call from Social Security about my youngest son's benefits that he'll be receiving from his father - luckily that phone call went very smoothly, thanks to my ex-husband's first wife getting the ball rolling for both of us. The same worker is handling both of the boys' cases so she already had a lot of the information that she needed. I am so very thankful to her for giving me the name of the lady that she had spoken with as it made things so much easier.

The older 3 got home around 5:30 and we had about an hour to eat before they had to leave again to go to church with their father and stepmother. They ate (well, 2 out of the 3 did - the third refused because "it was gross") and played out in the front yard with the football until it was time for them to leave. There was some I Can't Find My Shoes and I'm Still Hungry drama, but no more than usual. After they left, I made the 2 younger ones clean up the toys in the living room under the Don't Make Me Get A Trash Bag And Clean Up The Toys Myself threat.

The younger 2 will be going to bed very shortly - early for them - so that I can finish cleaning up the dinner dishes and do some more laundry in addition to the load that I already had to do because the 5 year old's version of playing football was actually more like throwing himself into a mud puddle and rolling around...*sigh*. Then the older 3 will get home, get ready for bed, and go to bed while I continue to clean and do dishes and do laundry and try to do the reading that I have to do to get my daycare license back.

And of course, my body is feeling every inch of the 6.63 miles that I walked today. I've said it before and I'll say it again - ibuprofen is my friend. Hopefully I can walk in the morning, since I have to be up and running at 5:15am to get everyone up and ready so that I can get the older 3 to school on time. Please let me remember to set both of my alarms AND the timer on the coffee pot - I'm going to need all of the help that I can get in the morning.