I love my weekends off. I am required by my job to work every other weekend, so I'm fiercely protective of my weekends with my family. For much of the year we are running the kids to their sports so we don't get much time with all of us at home with time to find fun stuff to do. This weekend I was off work, the kids had no activities, and the weather was pretty nice. I wanted to do something fun as a family, but my request to go ice fishing got shot down since we didn't put our house out this year, and neither the husband or I could come up with anything else to do. For some dumb reason I decided the kids needed to have clean rooms. Ha ha ha!!!! Wishful thinking. I helped Lauren clean her room for hours and after filling a garbage bag full of things to get rid of and another full of garbage it was starting to look a little better. We could see a few spots of bare carpet anyway. Then....I laid eyes on her massive backpack. She swears she doesn't have time to go to her locker, and she NEEDS all those textbooks at home every day. I drug her backpack downstairs and put it on the scale. 20 pounds. That is just crazy to me. After a brief rant about back injuries, we sat down to go through it. The main pocket was jammed full of the usual suspects. Textbooks, folders, loose papers, a hairbrush. The side bottle holder areas were full of candy and granola bar wrappers. Nothing unusual so far, so it never occurred to me to put on gloves and a mask. In side pocket number one I discovered one of my The North Face gloves. It was so covered in mold/mildew that it was grey instead of black. Nasty. Side pocket number two produced a zip lock bag of what looked like chocolate pudding. Or poop. Oh man. The child had no clue how long it had been in there. She thinks it may have been "cumquats and chocolate", in which case it would have been in there since we got home from Florida in January. sigh. Post cleaning backpack weight was 18 pounds, not much of an improvement.
Meanwhile, Pey found a ring in her room that we bought her in the keys last March. We had to buy it for her because she got it stuck on her finger in the store. We got it off when we got back to the house with the help of some dish soap. That was exactly a year ago so of course she forced it on again when she found it. Yes, it got very stuck. She tried all day Saturday to get it off with no luck. Her knuckle was getting sore and starting to swell which wasn't helping any. We soaked her hand in ice water for awhile and turned to our friend dish soap again and I eventually got it off. Pretty much sums up Saturday.
Sunday the kids switched bedrooms so all the cleaning we did on Saturday was for absolutely nothing. The end.
