homemade time: day in the life

6:30 am Good morning! It is spring, the sun is shining, and the children and Mike are already bustling downstairs. I am groggy, replete with pollen-induced ickiness from the chest up, and distracted, still thinking about an excellent, late-night (for this mama), wine-soaked conversation with a friend and colleague the night before.

8 am After a last minute scramble for shoes and chase with a hair brush, we are off to drop Frances at school. Gabriel is devastated when I tell him he cannot take his new robotic bug in to show her teacher. Frances clings to me at the door, just for fun. Goodbye, have a good day!

9 am I oversee Gabriel's dutiful picture-drawing (there are many people who have lavished him with birthday treasures who are in need of proper thank yous) while I call his teacher to see if he can drop in on after-school enrichment this afternoon. Turns out there is no enrichment on Thursdays. I call a mama friend who sometimes babysits. Her son had a 103 degree fever last night. Hmm. I call his best friend's mama, who graciously agrees to take him on a play date. Hooray! I can make the Eastport Girls Club meeting I forgot to arrange child care for after all.

9:30 am I remember we're supposed to have a dishwasher installed today and I need to be home until 12:30, one hour after said meeting is set to begin. I cannot bear to go another day without a dishwasher. I call the meeting participants and ask if we can meet at my house. They agree. Whew.

9:45 am Dishwasher guys arrive.

10 am Gabriel and I head out to the garden. The sky is brilliant blue and we plant a long row of morning glory seeds along the chicken wire fence. He also digs lots of holes, then mists everything with the hose until the dishwasher guys are finished, around 10:30.

11 am Off to drop Gabriel at the play date to which he was not invited, though the moms and kids are awesome and cheerful and I say a little prayer of gratitude for the generous and caring people in our lives.

11:28 am Arrive home, do a quick and frenzied job of making the bathroom presentable, including a mad dash to the basement to find more toilet paper.

11:30 am Three inspiring, strong women arrive to have lunch and talk about how to best implement health-promoting activities and education into the holistic, excellent mentoring and tutoring program I now work with. The conversation travels the intersections of so much that I care deeply about: health and mental health, supporting immigrant families, giving adolescent girls what they need to grow.

1:30 pm I bid adieu to my colleagues with a long to do list, call to find out where Gabriel is, do some quick emailing and drive downtown to pick him up at his dear friend Wyatt's house. He is devastated to see me. It means he has to leave. We read a book about sharks together to ease the pain. Both boys look like wet noodles, draped across the furniture, exhausted from playing all day.

3 pm We pick up Frances and play, play, play some more with our favorite Key School friends in the glorious spring weather.

4 pm Arrive home. My cell phone rings; it is the developer I've been waiting to hear from so I can write a follow up post to this one, all about the other side of things. I interviewed the mayor at length yesterday about his change of position. It is meaty stuff, and complicated, and my children stay miraculously busy with toys and books while I conduct an impromptu interview for half an hour.

4:45 pm A quick game of Catch the Kid. Gabriel runs laps around the house and I have to try to catch him each time he passes the hallway I guard.

5 pm Begin making dinner.

5:45 pm Spaghetti!! And a few lovely moments with my husband, who soon will have to leave to lead seminar.

6:15 pm Stories. I have been losing my voice over the course of the day (allergies?) and whisper-skim a book to Gabriel that is simply and elegantly titled Snowboard (no link, you don't want to know) and then a few pages of The Penderwicks before I give up and announce (in a pathetic, cracking voice) that it is Bath Time.

6:30 - 7 pm Bath, teeth-brushing, good-nights, one last story, minimal singing, one last hug, and lights out for the boy.

7 pm Frances read The Penderwicks aloud while I painted her nails a gorgeous gold and glittery shade, a loaner from the mama-friend-babysitter whose son had a fever yesterday. She knows Frances admires her glamorous taste in nail polish. (In an androgynous sort of way.)

7:45 pm - 8 pm Frances is allowed to read in bed now. She spends the time silently gobbling up The Dandelion Cottage, a children's classic that I have never read and most likely never will. Seeing as how my kiddo has that one covered on her own. Sigh.

8:15 pm Settle in to tell you about today! And share the below garden pictures. And later, maybe, I'll try to make sense of the playground/parking garage/redevelopment mess and write something that isn't too too boring about it. Mike will come home around 10:30 pm, and he'll tell me about seminar, and I'll tell him little bits, like how I set up the baby gate for the cucumbers to climb on, or how Gabriel roped a mother on the playground this afternoon into listening to a never-ending story called The Ocean of Sharks, or how I feel sad that Levon Helm died today. And then a little later we will climb into bed where I will read a page of this or that and then curl up against Mike, feeling bone-tired and content, and within minutes fall deeply, deeply asleep.

And that will be my day. What was yours like?