It’s hard to say if the holiday weekend was the cause or not, but I feel like we have lost all pretense of a daily schedule around here. The kids have started sleeping in later and later – for school work purposes, I wake them at 10 a.m. on weekdays now, but on weekends we’re lucky to see them before noon. As a result they’ve started staying up later, too. Last night the Little Miss was up until almost 11 p.m. with me watching Grey’s Anatomy and then the boys stayed up past 2 a.m. watching Justified and it feels like everything is just the wild west out here.

Also different: my youngest is now free to watch just about anything. This past weekend we binge-watched both seasons of the horror TV show Scream on Netflix and then we moved on to Grey’s, which she has previously been banned from watching. Now I just shrug when my son recommends we put on a Quentin Tarantino flick over dinner. Whatever, man. Everything is horror, now.

I had to go grocery shopping on Saturday and these forays out of our home fortress are feeling weirder and weirder all the time. Saturday was especially crazy as, due to the Easter holidays, our stores were closed on the Friday and the Sunday. For the past few weeks I’ve been heading to the store for 8 a.m. on Saturdays, when it opens to non-seniors, and I’ve just walked in, got our stuff, got out.

Easter weekend Saturday: I arrived at 8 a.m. and there were already about 100 people in line.

It was pretty crazy. Luckily I was wearing a winter coat, hat, and gloves. Lots of other people clearly had thought they’d just “dash out” to the store and were only wearing hoodies. I got a lot of envious looks and I actually wondered if I was going to have to fight people off to defend my gloves. Eep.

There was a very upbeat and cheerful young man monitoring the line. He was letting in five shoppers at a time, in five minute intervals, and stopping any couples that tried to go in together. He got yelled at. A LOT. I mean, on one hand, I get it – everyone was cold and scared and tired. But seriously, people, he is like a TEENAGER working a minimum wage job where he’s exposed to tons of germs every day and STILL keeping it positive and you want to yell at him? NOT COOL.

Anyway, I got just about everything we needed, and got home, where my children looked at me with envy because, as Gal Smiley said to me the other day, “I forget what the inside of a store looks like.”

I had luckily been hoarding Easter candy for a few weeks, because by the time I went on Saturday, the candy section was cleaned out, so we were still able to have our egg hunt. I think my kids are getting a little old for it – the Captain actually said it was fine if we didn’t hide any eggs for him this year (our eggs are colour coded due to allergies and each kid finds eggs of their own colour). But I went ahead with it anyway because I felt like we needed SOME kind of celebration, no matter how small, and I do think the kids really enjoyed it.

Then I spent all day making an elaborate dinner of many family favourites, even though it was just the five of us, and that was great. We called family and did the best we could to have the best holiday we could, and it was actually a really nice day.

I told my mom while on the phone with her this weekend that I’m trying very hard to just take things one day at a time, and not spiral out into a frenzy of trying to figure out a plan for the entire future right now. This weekend went well for that – I’m learning to live in the now. Hope you had a lovely holiday weekend, too.