Last Day of Kindergarten

So the 23rd of May was the LAST DAY of kindergarten (which also happened to be Pajama Day).

It's been a good school year, and Micah has learned so much.  He can sound out words and write his own sentences (the phonetic spelling is always hilarious and adorable). He's happy to have chapter books read to him at night before bed, and right now we're making our way through The Saturdays. He loves math and drawing, and his skills have taken off in both.  He makes clever paper projects, my favorite of which was a little 3D playground for bugs, complete with swing set.

The one complaint Micah had all year was how little play time he got.  He was jealous of his best friend, who stayed behind in Pre-K, because "they get to play ALL DAY," while the kindergarten class had to work.  The end of daily nap time was also a hard adjustment.  But for all that, Micah was happy (if exhausted) most every day.

After talking with his teacher, we've decided to continue on to private first grade, rather than have him repeat kindergarten at the public school.  Next year, he'll be back in the same classroom, with the same teacher, but this time he'll be one of the big kids.  Some of his friends will move on to other schools, some will stay, and there will be a while new crop of kindergarteners.

Micah was very sad to leave his teacher and friends, until I pointed out that most of his friends were enrolled in the same Summer Camp, and his teacher was the one running his camp group.  After that, he was just excited to be done with work. Yay, summer!

The Working Mother's Decorating Guide

You know how it starts.  You walk through the door after a bad day and deposit your purse, your jacket, the kids' jackets, a handful of papers from kindergarten, a couple art projects from preschool, some mail, and four of the fifteen sippy cups from your car on the dining room table.  Three hours later, the kids are finally in bed and at last you have the chance to  rest for the first time since everyone woke up at 5:30 AM.  You look over at the pile of crap on the table, and you think, "yeah, no."

A couple days later, you do laundry.  By the time you get the 10 millionth tiny sock folded and all 180 pairs of toddler underwear tucked away in the kids' drawers, you look at the pile of adult-sized clean clothes on your bed, and you think, "yeah, no."

On the weekend, while sitting at a swim class, maybe you look at Pinterest or a Pottery Barn catalog, and you have all these IDEAS of how you'll finally print off all those family photos and arrange them in an elegant gallery wall, or create that baby book you've been meaning to put together for the last three years, or paint this room that gorgeous color and hang some beautiful drapes and...yeah, no.

And so it goes.  Until one day you blearily look around your house and realize...it's a total fucking nightmare.

Then you have two choices:

1)  You can start cleaning.

2)  You can start laughing.

I love design blogs as much as the next person, but come on.  Those people are either lying or living a completely different life from me. And since I still didn't feel like cleaning, I set out to document our mess in this helpful style guide for working parents:

Sure, I could have used the time I spent taking pictures to, I dunno, START CLEANING MY HOUSE. But this was much more fun.

(You'll notice there are no pictures of our dining room or bedroom here.  That's because there is a limit to how much of my shame I'll put on the internet and those rooms were way WAY over it.)