Today I get to Knit…

I’m so tired of running errands…

I don’t care if it’s grocery shopping one day or dog food the next or soccer/dance/karate/gymnastics oh God! or visiting people on the off hours…

And let’s take a look at that visiting thing, shall we? I have been very blessed to have had three sets of grandparents–my mother’s parents, my father’s, and my stepmother’s, and I’ve loved them all. But when my older children first came into the world, they were related, through one way or another, to eight women who could, ostensibly, be called ‘grandma’. (My oldest daughter gave a classic example of how confusing this is to a child–when we first moved in here, Chicken was was 3 1/2 and the elderly neighbor came visiting from next door. The nice woman bent down a little and said, “Now I bet you don’t know who I am, do you?” To which Chicken replied, with a voice that was weighing the odds and finding them in favor of her answer, “Grandma?”)

The time-bitch has reduced this number to seven–they now have three great-grandmothers and four grandmothers, and one of the other unfortunate things that bitch is responsible for is the fact that as the great-grandmothers have gotten older and more housebound, the onus of visiting falls on us, the grandchildren. (Of course with my own, biological mother, I’ve been dealing with this in one way or another since I was eight years old–I do know the drill by now, I just have to throw between three and five other people into the tool case these days.) And it’s not a terrible thing–I love these people, I love visiting them, and making them happy by visiting makes me feel really good.

But if I were to visit every grandma once a week, that would leave me with a three day weekend in which to do all of my housecleaning, shopping, and, during the school year, my full time job. If I were to visit them once a month, that’s every weekend occupied with throwing the kids into the battered crapmobile and trekking everywhere from Ophir (one hour) to Fair Oaks (twenty minutes) to Stockton Blv. (45 minutes to the crappy part of town) to ten blocks away to see either my mother or Mate’s mother and the grandparents.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

I try to catch up during the summer–which is one of the things (besides the 12 units online, this year) that is making my 8 weeks off unendurably short.

So this week I’m done with my online course for a couple of days, and we’ve already done dance & karate…I’ve got gymnastics w/the Cave Troll tomorrow, we’ve done grocery shopping and the two filler runs to the store for milk, and I’ve done the cycle of grandparents and the house is sort of clean and the smaller children are annoying their older sister and the teenaged boy is locked in his room playing with his action figures… (Does anybody remember that part w/the old couple arguing on the train in Young Frankenstein–there’s a reason I’m very careful to mention that he’s playing with his action figures.) And today, I get to knit. Me, the master of the remote control, and my knitting. I’m going to watch Monk (last week’s episode) and Burn Notice again, and some Law and Order CI and maybe a disaster movie or two (Twister and Armageddon are two of my favorites, followed by The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day.) I’m going to put the heating pack on my tweaked neck, and I’m going to by-god knit. And tonight, when the kids have gone to bed, I’m going to add another 5-10 pages to BITTERMOON (583 pages–not as far as I wanted to be, but I’ll be at 650 by the time school rolls around…)

But first, I’m going to activate the guilt-waiting function on my psyche that says the clean pile of laundry is up level with the bed and that I haven’t visited my mom in four weeks, and I’m going to knit.