Another Friday night

Just another Friday night on the home front here... Our second day of school went much better than the first. No more doggie mishaps in the car (they didn't go along for the morning ride this time, but I did take them along to pick Emily up). The kids here at home were a tad more patient and were able to share me a little better today, so that certainly helped the stress levels in that arena!

I had to run to the youth center this afternoon to get Halle and Noah registered and paid up for music lessons. Halle is getting ready to start piano lessons back up with a new teacher there. She hasn't had a lesson since a little while before we moved. Her former teacher used to come to our house, but since she isn't military, that makes that set-up a bit problematic. I was able to get her into a time slot with a guy who also teaches piano to a couple of the neighbor kids. Noah is going to begin guitar lessons with him next week as well.

After that, Emily and I headed to Staples to get more of the required school supplies. Oh. My. Holy. Heck. I have never seen so much stuff! It won't even all go into a backpack. She's got 3 or 4 one-inch 3-ring binders, plus one two-inch binder. These were all *required* by different teachers.... does each one think he/she is the only one asking for this stuff?? Then there's all the textbooks. How did I manage 4 years of high school without a backpack? And let's not even talk about the tally. We still have to find loose-leaf graph paper one day this weekend, because they were sold out and I didn't feel like entering another store after we finished.

Brian has spent the evening at a meeting at church and the kids and I have been hanging here. Well, Halle hasn't... she is next door at a sleepover. I visited with another neighbor for a half hour or so and helped her work on a jigsaw puzzle before coming back home and sending her 3 kids (who were all over here) back home to get ready for bed.

This is Brian's moonlighting weekend, so he'll leave in the morning before anyone gets up and will be in Sacramento until Monday morning. Meanwhile, PG&E is doing some kind of work on the power supply to the base tomorrow and we will be without electricity from 7am to 1pm. I imagine Emily will sleep through most of the outage. I've told the kids to plug in their handheld video games so they'll be charged, and I have a stack of books I can read. The kids' main playmates will be gone for most of that time, hiking with the Boy Scouts, so if things get really rough, I may look for a movie or something to go to. I guess the bright side to it all is that I'll have a good excuse for not getting the vacuuming done!