In which I try to make up for lost blogging time, and only wind up being sort of pitiful.

I need to do something like what Jamie's doing over at Light and Momentary:  blogging something, anything, every day.  

Today she's got 10 Reasons to Love Confession.  If you always thought of confession as weird, scary, or depressing, her post might be the antidote.  Check it out.

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So I think the main reason I'm having trouble blogging is the end-of-the-year fog.  I've got one foot planted in 2012-2013, trying to wrap up all the school subjects, and the other foot in 2013-2014, trying to sort out all the things I'll need for fall.  I just sent a hefty payment to Rainbow Resource now that I've made up my mind about the last couple of subjects, and I'm sure I'll be buying some other thing that I forgot in just a couple of months.

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Plus, just last weekend we had The Great Split-Family Camping Trip of Spring 2013.  That would be the one in which Mark, committed to help lead a Boy Scout climbing outing, went one way with half our camping gear and our two oldest boys; while I, committed to our 6-year-old daughter's AHG spring campout, went the other way with the other half of our camping gear and our two youngest.  

I was intimidated, but I managed tent camping with my 6- and 3-yo.  I had dibs on the smallest tent, thank goodness, because I am too short to put the other ones up by myself.   I also led 14 elementary-school girls in learning to strike matches -- both wooden stick matches and book matches -- safely so they could earn their Fire Safety badge.

How do you do this?  Cookie sheets on picnic tables, two girls to a cookie sheet, each with a package of matches and an adult and a can of water to drop their matches in after they successfully light them.  Also you give away a bunch of colorful ponytail holders so they can pull their hair back before they start striking matches.

Incidentally, this is the first elementary-school-girls demonstration I've ever performed in which I had to stop at a local smoke shop for supplies.   The boxes of kitchen matches were easy to find at the hardware store, but I could not find book matches anywhere else on short notice.  The tobacconist charged me fifty cents a book for the normally complementary matches, since I did not buy any of his wares.  I went home and pasted colorful stickers over the tobacco company logo on the matchbooks.

Anyway -- between planning safety demos and managing a 3-year-old safely around campfires in darkened wooded lots, I had kind of a stressful weekend!  I meant to drop an email to commenter Christy P. to see if she had any tips for being intrepidly out camping singly with small children, but I forgot.  The one thing I did remember was to bring lots of food that makes the little people happy; so the little ones lived mainly on banana nut granola bars, because by some fantastic quirk of random chance there are NO NUT ALLERGIES IN MY DAUGHTER'S TROOP.  Now when was the last time you heard of that happening?

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In an hour or two I expect Mark home from the Great Fortieth-Birthday Climbing Trip of 2013.  We all got home from our camping trips, turned everything around (mostly -- there's still a tarp in our backyard that keeps getting rained on just when we've been meaning to bring it back in), and then on Tuesday he flew off to Colorado to go climbing with a buddy from work, well, actually, a buddy who works at this other plant in a different state that might as well be "a buddy from work" considering how much time my husband has spent at said plant in said different state.

So they had a day of Skills Training in which they hired an instructor to teach them how to do things like stop themselves from hurtling off precipices -- yeah, this is different from the lessons where you hire an instructor to teach you how to hurtle yourself off precipices on purpose -- those are so passé in May.  And then a day of climbing Mt. Lady Washington with the same instructor acting as guide and lead climber, and then a nice relaxing day of only hiking in the woods, and then a day of hiking nearly to the summit of Flattop Mountain (I guess they got to a point where it was just sort of flat and they decided that was good enough, so they went back down again), and from what I hear it was a fun time.

Me, well, it was Tuesday through Saturday.   I did hire a babysitter on Friday night so I could go out and sit in a coffee shop and look at art supply catalogs with my hands wrapped around a warm drink, because it is only 45 degrees in this insane state.

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But all of that has kept me from blogging, because I hardly have time to think.  I'm sorry.  I'll try to do better.  Please don't drop me when you port over from Google Reader to whatever it is you're going to be reading now.  I'll be good.

Comments

[Jamie]

No apologies needed! For me, a traveling husband always means there's not enough space left in my head to blog. What a generous 40th birthday gift, to offer that much time away! I'll be interested to hear what you have planned for your own fortieth. Thanks for the link, too.

[Barbara C.]

I've been very spotty with my blogging the past year. I write posts in my mind, but they never make to the computer. I just run out of time, energy, and concentration.