Almost over

Tomorrow is the last day of Spring Break -- and also Easter -- and I am feeling stressed about all the things I didn't get done. So I thought I'd do a quick post about some more things I did get done, to try to cheer myself up.

I did not make a lot of additional progress on the messes... no, that's the wrong way around. Start again. I made some additional progress on the messes. The living room used to look like this:

and now looks like this, all ready for the bunny to arrive:

We all worked on this mess together tonight, after dinner. I told the boos that no self-respecting bunny would ever visit a living room that looked like the one in the photo above. This concerned them, although I do not really think they believe in the bunny anymore. We were reading Easter books before bedtime and Kid B asked me, in a scornful tone, "There's not really an Easter Bunny, is there?" I just laughed.

The mess in my office by the file cabinet is still bad, but better, I think. Here's what it looked like before:

And here's what it looks like now:

Still bad, but in fact a lot of work went into making it look this bad, I mean this much better.

I also cleaned up another mess in the living room -- the place where we put the mail, which gets out of hand really quickly. It will get out of hand again very soon, but it is clean right now.


In terms of paperwork, I am nowhere near ready for classes to start again on Monday, in fact I'm very nervous about that. But I did make substantial progress on one task that was hanging over my head -- the taxes! We are almost ready to deliver them to our tax preparer. Just have to print out a couple of forms and look up one tutoring job Rocket Boy got paid for, and I think we're done. That's big for us to be ready to give Kathryn all our forms a whole THREE WEEKS before taxes are due. Of course, I'm sure we'll file our usual extension and finish it all up in August or whenever, but still. I feel pretty good.

The one thing we didn't do enough of during Spring Break was have fun. I took the kids to one movie (Zootopia -- we loved it), and we visited the Museum of Nature & Science on Friday, and Rocket Boy took the boos sledding this afternoon. That's about it. It is hard to do it all in one short week -- cleaning and paperwork and fun stuff -- especially when you have two huge snowfalls to deal with, power outages, and illness. I think, considering everything, it has been a good break. I slept late almost every day and also read a great deal: the Penderwicks (I started The Penderwicks in Spring today), and the book for the book group (Orphan Train, very good), and I finished my boring biography of Martin Van Buren (on to William Henry Harrison, as soon as I can get to the CU library and look for a book about him), and I also read several books to the twins. And we didn't spend too much money, although we ate out more than we planned to. While working on the taxes I came across the bills for last year's Spring Break vacation -- way too much money for just a couple of days away. It was better to stay home.

And tomorrow is Easter! I have a nice brunchy/lunchy/dinner-in-the-middle-of-the-day menu planned: a zucchini frittata, cheddar biscuits, asparagus, fruit salad, and a store-bought lemon meringue pie for later. The kids will lose their minds with the stuff the bunny brings, I'll try to do some grading, and all too soon it will be time for early bed and Spring Break will be over.