Productive Weekend and Life Lessons Learned

I'm so glad my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad afternoon was able to provide amusement to so many of you. Glad you can all laugh at my misery.

For those of you that don't know me well and might read the above statement as a coming from a bitter, depressed woman, please know that while that might be true, I'm also more sarcastic than anything else.

Anyway. Yesterday, after teaching Religious School (Life Lesson: When making challahs with a kindergarten class of kids using refrigerator breadsticks, do NOT have them ROLL out the breadsticks to make them long and skinny. You get some very long, weird looking challahs that way. Instead, have them fold the bread sticks in half. They turn out much better. Live and learn.), DH stayed in charge of the kids while they played at his parents' house and then at the library so I could clean our bedroom. It SOOOOO needed it. I managed to get everything, every single thing, off the floor, and any other surface that should not have something on it. It looks wonderful and makes me feel so relaxed to be in it! Now to keep it that way.

Thursday (okay, it wasn't the weekend, but I didn't blog about this yet!) I packed up all of their toys from the playroom except for legos, cars, train tracks, one puzzle, and three baskets of books. Everything else went into two large Rubbermaid containers. Aaaahhh. I told them that if they managed to put these toys away for a few days in a row, they could pick another toy back out of the boxes. If not, whatever gets left out gets packed up. Yes, I'm in mean mommy mode and the playroom looks great!!! I don't care if they take it all out if they're playing with it, but it seems like they have no respect for what they have. They'll empty a basket of books on the ground (by dumping it out, not by reading it) and then just walk away! It has been driving me crazy. So we'll see how this works. I have no problem with them ending up with nothing on the shelves, if it will teach them to put away their toys when they're finished playing!

On Saturday (don't you just love the oh so chronological approach I am taking with this post) I took the kids to my friend's church's Harvest Fair, a FREE fair that they give for the community to enjoy.
Lessons learned:
1) When you have a son with Asperger's who craves routine and needs to know what to expect before we get somewhere, do NOT name the various activies that took place at said fair the year before unless you have verified that they will DEFINITELY be repeated this year. When you arrive and discover that the straw maze they had last year (that the kids did NOT even go in!) is not set up this year, said child will have a total melt-down in the parking lot.
2) When your two-year-old daughter begins acting tired around her normal naptime, do not tell yourself that if home she would probably skip it anyway, as she's been doing for the past week or so. Take all the kids home. If you don't she will end up falling asleep while sitting on the concrete, waiting for her brothers to come out of the moon bounce.
3) If you told the kids that after the Harvest Fair you will be going to the library, make sure you go to the library even if they have all fallen asleep in the car, and, once awake, you move them on to the couch to just relax for a little. If there is one thing they will want to do when they fully wake up is go to the libary, and they will all freak out like you've never heard if the library actually closes before they are all alert enough to get back in the car.

As for today, I will be taking A to OT today in an hour to find out what programs I can do with him at home. Can't wait for this (no sarcasm there at all - I'm really excited!) - I really have not found the time to sufficiently research this so I'm glad I will have a professional be able to tell me what to try.