Break Time

I am so ready for a break. A school break.

Yvie is done with school on Friday. Can you believe she's still in school? And it's not even year-round school. I'm happy about summer finally arriving for us, and happy that I won't have to scramble around every morning with the daily routine.

Of course, I will only get a tiny reprieve. School starts again on Aug. 11, so we'll have six weeks of summer.

Sometimes it's tough being a work-at-home parent. I'm lucky that I have a job that I can basically do on my time. I don't have to sit at a computer for any set times or anything. I just write stories and get paid for them, so whenever I get to them is fine. I can write at 5 p.m., 5 a.m., 3:30 p.m., noon... whenever. There are times when I'm out and reporting from the field as it were but that's usually on Saturday nights.

But sometimes it feels like a chore to make time for work... for anything. I write about soccer, the beautiful game, so with the World Cup going on I am constantly swamped with work. The games are still going on but will slow down some next week. I'm not complaining about it, this happens just once every four years after all, but still, it's a chore to fit things around. There's something to be said about routines, and that's what this tournament has done, completely thrown off my routine. That's a negative. A positive is the tournament itself is like Christmas, birthdays, Thanksgiving, New Year's, etc., all rolled into one, and even better than that. I'm a nut for the sport, what can I say?

Anyway, I'm overloaded right now. Wednesday was such a busy day. I meant to get up at 4 and go for a run. Instead, I got up at 1:20 a.m., mistakenly thought it was 4, staggered to my computer and tried to wake up. I wondered what the heck was going on, why I felt so tired and why I couldn't shake it, when I saw that my laptop said 1:20. I immediately crawled back into bed and slept until it was really 4. But instead of running, I wrote because I had a deadline to meet, an early deadline. So my window of running on Wednesday had slammed shut well before 6 a.m.

I'm hoping to get to the gym on Thursday morning, preferably around 9 a.m. I'd like to run the next four days, with a 13-miler capping off the fourth day. I'm hoping to get in some quality runs, at least one interval run, and at least two outdoor runs.

But work might rear its ugly head and I might be stuck with scrapping another run or maybe another early-morning wake-up call.

I'm totally rambling right now, and if you're still here I apologize. My mind is about 60 percent here. I think 20 percent of it is in bed already and the other 20 percent is AWOL and cannot be accounted for (by the way, I'm writing this on Wednesday evening as Yvie does her karate class).

Anyway, since I'm rambling, I will say one more thing. I am super excited for Kennedy to go to school. Poor girl. Sometimes I think she would stick needles in her eyes out of boredom if she could. World Cup or not, it's tough to entertain her when I'm working from home. I definitely need to streamline my work and settle into a routine once school starts. It's not fair to her to have to sit there bored when I'm busy. I only let her watch so much TV, you know. And it's in the high 80s, low 90s, so playing outside ain't a great option. She can't read yet though she does "read" books. She loses interest in coloring books easily. Wii and computer time is limited by me. She is an active child and needs - demands - stimulation, and Daddy sitting on his laptop working doesn't provide it.

So school will be fun. A three-week stretch in late July/early August will be fun. I got my marathon on July 25; the Lopers season starts on Aug. 1; we're taking a family vacation for a few days afterward; and then school starts on Aug. 11. The LB Clan has some awesome stuff coming up.

I just have to make it in one piece.