dance camp + weight watchers

[same_sky]

Summer! It's so busy!

Especially this week. Evelyn is in dance camp in Lexington this week from 1-4. It takes an hour to get there from here, so we've spent a lot of time on the roads. It's really just about 40-45 minutes to most of Lexington so when I saw this deal pop up on Groupon, it didn't feel like too much of a stretch to be heading there for four days in a row. Naturally, the studio is in the worst possible location for me to drive to from my house, though, which just figures. Still! Since I have three hours of time alone in Lexington--super rare--I am not going to complain about the hassle of getting there. I will add, though, that I was a little sad when I found out later that her real dance studio in town has a dance camp the same week, same price. Oh well. Three hours! In a city with lots of fun shopping opportunities! If it were actually here in town, I would drop her off and go home. Since that's not really an option (Well, I guess it is. I guess I could be in the car for an hour, drop her off, drive another hour to come home, spend an hour playing Zynga games and pretending to get stuff done, and then spend another two hours in the car going to fetch her and back home. Chances of this happening are somewhere in the vicinity of 0.) I have to go places and do things. I've had two days of it so far and it's lovely. I've been to Kohl's both days using some lovely coupons and have hit a couple of drugstores and grocery stores and Walmart and returned a bra to Dillard's at the mall. I wanted to do some real grocery shopping one day but the deals are nowhere to be found now that I am actually trying to shop*. I had M fetch the cooler from the basement and then I sat down to make a Kroger shopping list and realized that I am not going to waste my free time tomorrow on a shopping trip for the sole purpose of trashy cereal, hot dogs and potato chips. Because I would never eat those things. Really.

This seems to be a good time to transition into my next topic, which is about how it's a good thing that I didn't have any close drug addict friends in high school because I am apparently susceptible to peer pressure. I joined Weight Watchers because grain_damaged just made it sound so darned appealing. I signed up mid-week with the intention of starting the following week, which was last Monday, so I've now been on it for a little over a week. I am down four or six pounds, depending on how you count it. (Do I count the day I signed up? Or four days later, when I had been at my mom's house for the weekend, knowing I was about to start a diet as soon as I got home and therefore ate everything that sat still long enough for me to attack it with a fork?) But, eh, I'm not getting attached to those numbers. The first week is one thing--it's whether it continues to drop that concerns me. So far it's been pretty livable, most days. The hardest part is trying to figure out how many points something is. Well, that and lunch. I am really bad at lunch on a regular day because of my weird queasy issues, so trying to figure out a low-point lunch is challenging.

If I had any more time I would go from here into a discussion of why children behave like hooligans when you are attempting to do something nice for them, such as drive two hours a day to dance camp for example, not that I am talking about my own precious angel at all, but it's past my bedtime and let's face it, I have no freaking clue why they do it anyway. I think that they might secretly be aliens or something.

*Coupon shopping has been on hiatus. The deals are not there in the same way and what deals there are... usually out of stock by the time I get there. I got fed up with spending ten hours a week on the stupid thing just to come home empty-handed. I am considering picking it back up after Evie starts school. In a month and a half. School starts here on August 8. People on the internets are still talking about their school's last day. It's freaky. Schools here have been out for well over a month.Anyway! Stupid Extreme Couponing show. Those bitches ruined everything.

Comments

[annietopia.livejournal.com]

I think that having three hours a day to spend in Lexington is totally worth driving Evelyn to dance camp this week. I am not sure what I would do with each of those three hours, but I am glad that you are finding some great stores and good deals! I am taking the boys to the inlaws tomorrow for a few hours so MIL stops calling here. I have nothing to do while they are there, though. Nothing. So I am not sure what I would do with three hours every day on my own! LOL

WTG on the Weight Watchers. I have heard some great things about the program.

My children wisely act like fools immediately AFTER I do something nice for them. I then act like a fool a few hours later when I forget their behaviors and do something nice for them again...and then they act like fools. A vicious cycle that I cannot seem to stop because I am not bright.

[same-sky.livejournal.com]

It is so worth the trouble! I am trying not to think about the cost of gas in this project, though. :)

I swear, every time we come up with something special to do with Evie, she breaks out with the cranky pants attitude. It drives me crazy. I guess no one is better at pushing your buttons than your child, right?

[e11en.livejournal.com]

August 8th is insanely early. What's the rationale behind starting that early and getting out in mid-May? I could understand there being a climate factor, like the schools are all old and don't have air conditioning and by mid-May it's already too hot for the kids to be there, but then there's no way you'd convince me that it isn't even hotter on August 8th, so clearly that's not it.

Our schools typically start mid-week just before Labor Day. This drives me nuts as it makes zero sense to have the kids go to school for what ends up being something like 2 1/2 days or less, then have a three day weekend. Zero sense. Wouldn't it be smarter and easier for everyone to just start up on the Tuesday after Labor Day? Of course. Naturally I'm also biased because that's when school always started when I was a kid in NY and so I believe that's the best way.

Anyway, it's called summer vacation. It should fall during the summer months, June, July, and August.

[same-sky.livejournal.com]

I knew I'd get you on the school schedule. *lol*

It started closer to September when I was in school, but it's always ended at the end of May or beginning of June. I think they changed it for two reasons. One: they have added a lot of days off during the school year. We had Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break and a handful of planning days/nonevent holidays. I have looked at the schedule for E's school and was surprised to find that there is at least one day off every single month, and most months had multiple days off, and they've added a fall break and other cushy days that we didn't have. I'm sure this drives working parents insane. I think that's part of the reason they start so early--more days off during the year.

Second thing is that we're geographically located so that snow makes people crazy. Schools are canceled for snow, or even snow forecasts. There is widespread panic about snow and school. Having had to endure teasing from M over the years, I've come to some realizations about this that makes it somewhat more sensible. First, it does snow here but not enough that people do anything to their tires. Second, we're in a largely rural, hilly area--lots of narrow, winding roads that salt trucks and school buses cannot navigate.

But you have to have a certain number of days that school is open, so if you miss too many days of school for snow, you have to start making them up. That's why we would never know what the end day of school would be until the end of the year, but if it creeped too far into June, people got really pissy. Soo... I think they took those two things, put them together and just added a bunch of days to the beginning of the school year with the understanding that snow days can be made up at the end of the year without pissing people off too much. THIS year, there was almost no snow that amounted to anything so they didn't need to use up the snow day makeups. When I was in high school, there were multiple times that we were off for an entire week at a time... more than once a year--we had two or three bad winters in a row.

(I actually don't know when E's school ended. Ending school date is from my hometown and starting school date is from E's school. This could be clashing but school here did end at approximately the same time--I just don't know when exactly that was. And of course I am mostly making this up but I think I'm right at least in part.)

[e11en.livejournal.com]

Yes, the snow days. I came to the realization that my childhood experience with snow days was irrelevant to where we live. In New York there was rarely enough snow to cancel school more than one or two days a winter. There were no school buses, everyone walked, little to worry about.

In Maine it snowed a lot, often. But the plows and the buses were equipped for the task and, consequently, school was rarely canceled because of snow.

In CT, they get snow regularly, but they have buses (and drivers) who seem unused to it and the plows don't get out early and often so they cancel school pretty often. Boo. They plan about four snow days into the schedule but if gets too close to that they all freak out and GOD FORBID you move the date of high school graduation. In Maine they had a plan for that. The seniors would graduate and the rest of us would still show up to school and take our exams. Very weird.