“You don’t have to do something special with them every day.” – Oma

“If they keep whining, just make them clean the house and then send them to their rooms.” – Matty

“Can we reschedule? I’ll make you sublime nachos and so much extra rosé you may have to stay over…” – Lesley

We were planning on spending the day with my wonderful friend Lesley and her delightful girls, Nora & Eliza. You may remember the time we fed a tortoise and didn’t pick peaches with them. But unfortunately, something came up (tortoise attack – Slowpoke was framed!), so we had to reschedule. Once I’m promised nachos and rosé, you don’t have to tell me twice.

So we went back to basics: toy pit cleaning, fighting, time outs, grocery shopping, library and “arts and crafts.”

But first, breakfast. This photo is actually from the day before (shandong noodles), but on this particular day, Hazy had spaghetti with marinara sauce for breakfast. She asked for it, and who am I to deny young Kate Moss some carbs?

After breakfast, I had them clean the toy pit, which consists of 20% actual cleaning, 50% arguing over cleaning, and 30% dance party. We got down to Pharrell’s Happy, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and New Edition’s Candy Girl.

After the fighting and subsequent time outs,  we hit the library, where we got good news and bad news. The good news is Hazy got a new library card so now both kids can spend an hour playing PBS Kids games on the computers, plus Hazy got two prizes for checking off ten boxes on her summer reading library list.

The bad news is we owe over $14 in library fines, mostly due to just recently finding The Runaway Wok, which we took out for Chinese New Year.

Late fines, $14.

Having your kids know the Skippity Hoppity Ho song the magic wok sings when it Peter Pans the rich family, priceless.

After the party/library, it’s the hotel lobby/grocery store. Because I shun convenience of any kind (too easy!) and also because I read the Omnivore’s Dilemma (don’t!), we went toWhole Foods (for meat) and Wegman’s (for everything else, plus, car carts).

Then it was arts & crafts time. If you know me at all, you know I’m neither artsy nor crafty (except in the Beastie Boys sense of the word), but I found these cool giant oval frames at Boomerangs, and I thought it would be cool if I let each kid draw their own self-portrait.

Hazy kept drawing hers, deciding it wasn’t good enough, and erasing it. George drew his in about a minute and a half, and declared himself finished. Then, on an impulse, he decided to color it in with red marker. This pretty much sums up their personality differences.

I’ll share a photo of the final pieces after Hazy does a self-portrait she’s satisfied with and I’ve spray painted the frames.

Sorry we did pretty much the opposite of cleaning up the house, Matty.