I had a really lovely break – a full two weeks off, two weeks to sleep in (more on that later), read trashy novels, eat junk food, and bond with Georgia (Ruby took off to St. Louis with her dad for the break).
Mostly, as I said, it was lovely, although when I went back to work on Monday, I was blissfully happy to not have to make snacks for another human twice an hour that would inevitably end up crumbled in my bedsheets or sofa cushions or car upholstery.
Here’s the numerical representation of my winter break:
Days off, counting weekends: 16.5
Minutes on the last day of school that my child sobbed about missing her friends over the break: 23
Minutes on the last day of vacation that my child sobbed about having to go back to school: 17
Playdates we attended: 3
Playdates we hosted: 2
Approximate hours of cleaning we had to do to make our home remotely close to clean enough to host: 3.75
Approximate amount of time it took my child and her friends to mess our house up: 25 seconds
Snacks I made for my child at her demand: 64
Snacks she actually ate in full: 2.4
Snacks she ate some portion of – sucked the filling out of pizza rolls, squeezed the juice out of orange slices, gummed the white part of the apple off of the peel: 37
Surface of my home now covered with some sort of greasy, sticky residue: 100 percent
Times per day she demanded to go to McDonald’s: 17
Times we actually went to McDonald’s: 3 (I know)
Movies we saw: Four
Times we watched two of those movies (The Star and Home Alone): 1,864
Latest my child stayed up: 2 :17 a.m. (New Year’s Eve)
Latest my child slept: 12:12 p.m. (It was amazing!)
Episodes of Law & Order: SVU I watched: 26
Episodes I’d already seen: 25
Number of episodes I watched on mute with subtitles on because my kid was playing Barbies in the corner of the room and I didn’t want her hearing Elliot Stabler screaming at perps: 7
On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad I felt when my child revealed just how much her reading skills have improved this year by reading one of the subtitles: 6 (adjusted to reflect conflicting emotion of parental pride in her reading abilities)
Times we drove to the Northshore just to have something to do: 1
On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely I am to ever again buy a Hatchimal: -5
Factor by which teachers are underpaid: 88
On a scale of 1 to 10, how ready I was to go back to work: 10
On a scale of 1 to 10, how much I actually missed my kid once she was back in school: 10
Overall, it was great, and I had a wonderful Christmas and a delightful New Year’s Eve, and as much as I liked the down time, being back at work reminds me how much I love my job, too.
And just how bad I would be at home-schooling.
One week down, seven more weeks till Mardi Gras break. Let’s do this!
