Worth It

Being a mom makes me tired. Today and yesterday felt like mess after mess after mess. Now, instead of collapsing (or doing the dinner dishes) I'm heading out the door to my last knitting class. Thought I'd post these real quick first. They're leftovers from Arts Fest.

Swamped

We're still here, just feeling a little swamped. The end of school means working a full week for me (I know, shocking, how could I even survive?) and alternate arrangements for the kids. We've also had lots of social occasions, spending time with neighbors and Sharon and the girls returning. We moved Clara to a big-girl bed and that's made bedtime more challenging and drawn-out. We went to IC for the weekend for Arts Fest and stayed in Amber and Jeff's basement suite. Now Pete's been out of town for a few nights for work. So everything is great, but by the time I get the kids down and have a seat on the couch I hardly want to look at my computer- and that's also when I'm trying to catch up on the five-or-so knitting projects I have to finish soon! Here are some photos of some of the aforementioned things. And now I have to run off and tidy up the 3rd bedroom for Will to sleep in tonight. Oh and something about dinner....

I Heart Arts Fest

Here's some more from our nice weekend. Clara was feeling much better. We all went out to Dad and Kathie's for some breakfast and play time. Clara and Eleanor are still very much in the parallel-play age. They kind of watch each other, and Clara kind of pokes Eleanor every once in a while, but they don't interact too much.
They did both, however, enjoy inspecting Grandpa's new deck. I know they're already scheming about how this will be the "house" and they will be the "moms". Or...maybe I'm just thinking what Sarah and I would have been doing...
Henry and Grandpa had a few belly laughs watching their favorite Pixar Shorts dvd (shortly before Dad's blu-ray player exploded...sorry Dad).
Then we headed downtown for some last chance family day activities. We saw my friend Liz and got to meet the newest addition to her family. Hello Kathrine! I now know you're a blog reader!!
And we ran into Darcie, Pope and Kirin as well. Kirin wasn't unhappy about seeing me...he was unhappy about having to leave the bubble-pool activity.
Henry got his face painted as Spiderman, but didn't seem to know how he felt about it. Any time anyone would say "Hey Spidey!!" he'd say, very defiantly "I'm not Spiderman! I'm Henry! I just got my face painted!"
My favorite part of any Iowa City summer festival is always the food vendors. Today I had my second helping from the Masala tent. Clara and Henry shared my mango lassi. Pete, shockingly, did not have a funnel cake the whole weekend! You will also see Adelaide hanging out in this picture...
The drive home was long, with a detour around the cracked i-80 bridge. Clara didn't nap the entire time. She did crack herself up quite a bit, however. Here she is playing "Look at me with this wipe on my head!!"
And here's Henry about 32 seconds before he conked out and then drooled half of his facepaint onto his shirt.
Crossing the Big Muddy...
Now we're home. Had a late dinner, late bedtimes for the kids...
It was so nice to be in Iowa City and just run into dear friends. Of course we have dear friends here, but we have to schedule time to see them. And we run into people that we're friendly with, but it's not the same as bumping into a true friend on the street. I know we're not so far away, but I just hate all of that time on the interstate.
So, this week is my last week of school. Kind of hard to believe, since the weather still feels like March. My summer weekends are filling up, but I'm looking forward to some unstructured summer days!

Lame

I fear that the posting-every-day is creating a few lame posts, such as the one for today. We're having a nice time in Iowa City, though Clara is dealing with a little bug, which is cramping our style a bit. We had a nice dinner last night with Rob and Carrie and Amber and Jeff, and then enjoyed a little Arts Fest music...a very little, since there were some power-outage issues.
When we got home Clara was sleeping, but she awoke around 2:30 with an awful diaper and then a couple hours later with some throwing up. Pete and I stripped the bed, I changed my shirt, we cleaned Clara up a bit and spent the next couple hours in the living room, sitting upright with Clara and trying to snooze a bit. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep.
Here is Clara this morning (before throwing up her breakfast on the kitchen floor) learning about flags of the world from Eleanor.
And here are all the kids enjoying some story time with Grammie.
We did take Henry downtown for a little bit of Arts Fest food and music (and perhaps some wedding gift shopping) before coming back to Rob and Carrie's to find Joyce had come up for an impromptu visit.
Tomorrow we'll see Dad and Kathie for a bit and hopefully get some more time downtown for the kid's day activities before we had back to the other side of the Mississippi.