I recently updated my Blogroll, and one of the new blogs I added was APOD, NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day. I heard about it from Sinnick about six months ago and since then, it’s become a daily fixture in our house. The Captain is really into space — typical for a five or six year old boy, I think, and also amplified by his Star Wars obsession — so he is very excited to see the daily photo. It’s almost always beautiful and amazing and dazzling.

Take, for example, the photo from two days ago — this is Saturn, back-lit by the sun. It’s hard to spot in this small photo but if you go to the APOD site, you’ll see a teeny tiny blue dot inside the rings (on the left hand side, just outside the very bright inner rings), and that’s Earth. SO COOL.

Anyway, I just wanted to specifically mention it, in case you happen to also have a space-obsessed boy or girl. It’s a fun thing to share with them.

In other news, I have my big PTA Art Thing today, so naturally, instead of practicing my presentation or gathering materials, I’ve decided to pick today to take all the recipes I’ve ever cut from magazines and paste them into a scrapbook. It’s a project I’ve been meaning to get around to for like, a year and a half, so why not today, when I have a large, looming deadline that I should be focusing on instead? Maybe, while I’m at it, I’ll reorganize the closets and start getting ready for the garage sale I’m hoping to have in June! No time like the present!

Yeah, it’s going to be GREAT tonight.

Well! That was one hell of a week.

We had a great holiday, really we did. Everyone was healthy and happy. We didn’t travel, so we were able to maintain the familiar schedule, but we also did lots of fun, special things and had lots of fun, loving visits with family and friends. The kids had a great time — they were calm, contented and collected.

Then, school started on Monday.

I’m not sure if school exhausts them, or stresses them out, or possibly gives them daily injections of HYPER, but Jesus, the older two have had a tough week. Every day it’s been a roller coaster of moods from boing-boing hyperactive to complete hysteria and back again. One or the other was either crying, slamming the door to their room, or shoving and kicking the other one at any given moment.

Next week can only get better, right? I’ll have to look back in my blog — I don’t remember September being this terrible.

Recently Sir Monkeypants and I were having a conversation about how some activist groups are making noise about eliminating the long summer break, and having four breaks per year of 2-3 weeks each. I think this past week has made me a firm NO on that idea. I can only live through a week like this once a year, I think.

It doesn’t help that I am completely swamped with PTA stuff, on top of my usual referee duties around here. I’m running an art program for the school where parent volunteers present a famous (or not so famous) work of art to a primary class, and teach them how to analyze and appreciate it. To tell the truth I am doing a lot more in this position than the bare minimum. I decided on my own to create an online library of all the art that the program owns, which is hundreds and hundreds of prints that I had to document and photograph, and I also updated the volunteer handbook which was way out of date. Now I have to give a training session to the volunteers next week, so I’m busy making slides and practicing my speech and burning CDs of the resources they need.

I’ll be very happy when next week is over and we can get back to the usual routine around here. I miss my blog!