Today was my children’s first day of school. Like most mothers, I both love and hate this time of year. I am ready for the structure of the school year, but I am also dreading it. School days mean the kids go to bed at a set time, we eat dinner together with frequency and I always know where they are during the day. It also means I can’t take a day off work and go shoe shopping with my girls or have lunch with my son, and we can’t have lazy evenings eating greasy pizza and watching old reruns late at night.

I really wish I was independently wealthy, (two years of my current salary would work too) so I could take a year or more off from work and spend all my free time doing things with or for my kids. I would be a stay-at-home mom who would pack special notes in their amazing lunches, have time to listen to everything they wanted to tell me about their day (the patience too), make new quilts for their beds, sew homemade Halloween costumes and have dinners made before 7 pm. Of course, I would also make time for myself so I could finish and sell my book in order to make even more money to stay home.

Before I know it, my oldest will graduate from high school and my daughters will soon follow. Soon I will not have the time I want to spend with them. Until I inherit a fortune from some relative no one has heard of, or I actually enter the lottery and win, I will have to squeeze as many extra seconds out of my day as possible. 

Tomorrow I go back to work after a nice week and a half off. I didn't get anything truly productive done, and I am not ashamed. I spent time with my kids, read several books, slept in and cooked and baked for family and friends. I am a little disappointed my vacation is over. I don't think I am ready to get back to work. I'm not dreading it completely—I enjoy where I work and have great co-workers, but the kids still have the rest of the week off before going back to school, and I will miss having all day with them.

It does not quite feel like a new year to me yet. My husband has been gone the past five days, and this is the first new year in a very long time we have not spent together. I will feel better when he gets home tomorrow. So, I think I will start my new year tomorrow instead of today.

I am making a list (surprise, surprise) of all the things it would be nice to accomplish this year. I am not calling it a resolution—I hate that word—but a Things to Do list:

Things to Do (in continual revision and not to be confused with a resolution)

Okay, so I haven't started the list yet, but I will. Maybe the first thing on it should be:

Stop procrastinating!

I am not overly concerned with fashion. Ask anyone and they will tell you I am just as comfortable in my old college sweatpants as I am in a nice trouser. I have been known to drive my kids to school in my pajamas with a big oversize sweater to cover the fact that my too-large breasts are not held tightly to my chest with a bra. Okay, maybe that was a little too much information.

Anyway, I am going somewhere with this, I swear. Yesterday, Jon and I were at the food co-op trying to find some hippie, all-natural, weed-in-a-capsule to help my son's allergies. (Really, how does that work? I give my son some freeze-dried nettles and it makes him not sneeze?) I digress. As we were approaching the door we spied what looked like a mime on his cell phone. After close inspection, I would say he was NOT a mime. What tipped me off, you ask?

1. He's TALKING on a cell phone.

2. He is not wearing a beret, but a fedora-type hat.

3. The stripes on his shirt don't match up with the stripes on his pants. We all know that a mime, being from France and always conscious of his wardrobe choices, would not have put those on together unless he was experiencing an ocular migraine or a small blood clot that impaired his ability to tell whether something was horizontal or vertical.

4. He clearly was not respecting the boundaries of the glass wall in front of him as he paced.

5. It's obvious those shoes were meant for a clown, not a mime.

6. He was in Moscow, Idaho. At a food co-op that smells strongly of patchouli incense and pesto sauce. (Isn't that enough?)

I always get a little nostalgic this time of year. It's the last week of school for the kids. I am excited to have more time to spend with them, but it also means they will move up a grade next year and are getting older. It means I am getting older. It means they are less likely to allow me to hug them in public, clean the dirt from their faces with my spit, skip down the sidewalk with me when people are around and other getting older type of things.

I am going to have to make the most of what is left of the younger kid phase of their lives and do things that in a year or two will completely embarrass them. I vow to spend the summer: singing Lady Gaga at stoplights with the windows down when they are in the car, bowling gutter balls and still cheering for myself, pulling their pants up so their butt crack doesn't show, telling them I love them in front of their friends and making them show me their wet toothbrushes as proof they brushed their teeth.

This is going to be a fun summer.

Maggie: Tomorrow at school we get hamburgers.


Me: Yum.


Maggie: Not really. They give us kind of crappy burgers.


Me: What do you mean?


Maggie: They use ones made with lots of by-products like butt meat.

We were recently lured to Pullman to look at a four-bedroom apartment. What turned our sites to Pullman were Panda Express, Grad school, a pool and rec center at the apartment complex and the thought of the girls each having their own rooms (less fighting) - in that order.

So Jon and I made an appointment at this complex with a rental agent. The complex rhymes with Lampus Rommons. The woman who showed us around was really nice and even when she showed us the laundry faciliies (no hook-ups in the four-bedroom) I was undeterred.
We get to the apartment, which is a model so it was furnished with top-notch stuff, the living room is pretty small. The furniture made it look so inviting that we continued in.

Turning the corner to the "dining room" Jon and I had to stifle the giggles. The dining area was no bigger than a shower stall and the kitchen was miniature. When you opened the dishwasher it hit the cabinets on the other side.

It looks bigger in the photo, really.

The bedrooms barely fit a twin bed and dresser and all four were the same size. The agent explained to us that the four-bedrooms were the exact square footage of the two-bedrooms. What were they thinking?
If the living quarters weren't bad enough, the school buses don't even travel that far out so the kids would have to ride public transportation partway to and from school.

Suffice it to say, we will not be renting from them.
The search continues, but now we are strictly looking at houses and I think we are going to stay in Moscow.