First day, an interesting find, and more chaos...

So today was Alex and Daniel's first day of school. We managed to get up early enough for us to walk there, and they had a ball.

After I got them to school, I took The Dude to work and then went out to pick more sand plums. As soon as I got out of the van, I made an interesting discovery. I wasn't quite sure what it was at first, but it didn't take me long to figure it out.

It was a nest of turtle eggs. I don't know if something got into them and tore it apart, or if they hatched and couldn't handle the extreme heat and dryness or what. Either way, it's something that I have never seen before - and of course, I had to poke around in it and examine everything. Because I'm weird like that.

Thankfully (and I can laugh about this now) the dream that I had last night didn't come true while I was out there. The dream involved a rattlesnake, my arm, and an ambulance. But I survived. Needless to say, I was a little jumpier than usual out there, and kept making sure that I still had my phone in my pocket.

I could only pick for about an hour, and then I had to fly back to town to change my clothes and go pick Daniel up from school. I hadn't intended on jogging today, but I cut the time just a wee bit too close and had to do some to get to school on time. He only goes half days for the first few weeks, and then will eventually transition to full day kindergarten.

After Daniel and I got home, Emily and Jared arrived. Sarah stayed with her stepmother in order to go to volleyball practice. So I took the 3 kids and ran some errands, then we grabbed The Dude from work and took him home, and then we came home and then walked back up to the school to get Alex. We came back to the house for a little bit, and then I dropped all 3 boys off at The Dude's house so that he could keep an eye on them while Emily and I went to pick Sarah up from practice and attend the "parent meeting" that informed us just how incredibly chaotic our lives are going to be for the next few months until volleyball season ends. Then we came back to town, grabbed the boys from The Dude's house, came home, made supper, did baths....the boys are in bed and the girls are still up watching a movie - but they don't have school tomorrow so it's ok. I got the kitchen cleaned up a bit and then trashed it again to make yet another batch of strawberry jelly.....

And then grabbed a leftover piece of cold pizza around 10pm after I realized that I had forgotten to eat supper.

Just to make life interesting, Ex1 proposed a schedule change with the older 3 kids tonight. We've had the same arrangement for quite a while now - well over a year, and maybe even for a couple of years - and it's worked out for us. But, the change that he suggested really isn't bad and actually has some perks for both of us. I'm still rattling it around in my head to see if I think that it will work for us, but I think that it will. It'll involve a significant amount of white-out in my datebook though.

But for now, I'm going to go work on some more jelly in a desperate attempt to get the containers of strawberry juice out of my refrigerator - just in time to start working on more sandplum jelly.

That, however, will wait for a few days.