Weekend? What’s a Weekend?

Howdy!

I’m squeezing in a hasty post today. You know why.

It’s a “Where Blogger’s Live” post: “A Day in the Life. Weekend Edition.”

Let’s be honest, For me, EVERY day is a weekend. I don’t have an “out-of-the-home” job. Not that we didn’t give it a whirl at the beginning, but when our kiddos came around, it got a little tricky to juggle our schedules because both Mr and I had deadline-driven jobs.

I was a tech writer for a government contractor, and frequently we had documents due by a very hard deadline. We also helped the people in our company prepare presentations for varied purposes and audiences.

The dealbreaker for us occurred when a video was due for a morning presentation and I worked all night to finish it, arriving home just in the nick of time for Mr to hand me our one year old before he headed out the door during his busy season.

When he came home later that night, we began planning for me to stay home with our daughter, and to pick up free-lance jobs whenever practical.

SO…yes, for me, everyday is a weekend.

Over the years, I’ve always–mostly–felt that weekends belonged to Mr. Generally, my schedule at home had all kinds of enviable flexibility, but because Mr bore the primary burden of the daily grind, I’ve always thought the weekends “belong” to him (even though I am usually involved in their planning).

Weekends through the kid years involved shuttling them to different activities: Irish dancing competitions, hockey games, school and college sports….and we followed our kiddos to lots of venues here and in other cities in support of those pastimes.

But now that our family has grown up and out, we’ve reclaimed our weekends, and surprisingly, they involve plenty of work, which we now define as “fun.” Whodathunk?

We hadn’t even finished putting away the Christmas trees this year, and our weekends started revolving around, well, deconstructing our house. We still have two deconstruction projects left: taking out all the carpet and wood flooring on our first floor, and, FINALLY, taking down the interior portion of our existing fireplace in preparation for the new one. (We didn’t just “decide” to get a new fireplace, btw. We had a chimney fire that wrecked our old one; but that’s a tale for another day.)

I’ve posted here and on Instagram that we are refinishing our stairs. THAT has been a lot of “fun” (AKA huge amount of freaking work) and I have to say I am THRILLED to be almost done with that portion of our remodel. If I never see sandpaper again, well….it’s not even worth finishing that sentence because OF COURSE I will see sandpaper again.

I’m also pretty sure there’ll be some weekend wall painting in the hall and family room before the year is out. The last time that happened, this blog was born.

But the weather is also beginning to change, cueing outdoor weekend warrior-ing.

In the warm weather, the weekend starts with everyone’s favorite couples activity: tandem grass cutting.

We each have our own riding mower and our “assigned” sections. The fun never ends, folks.

Seriously, we have a pretty huge lawn to cut, so our mowers are more like go carts, and they’re actually a blast to ride…drive….er use. I’ll admit that the trimming is significantly less fun than the mowing. But I do look forward to tooling around on my Toro.

If they could see me now, haha.

Spring and Summer Saturday mornings are for other yard work,

Planting, weeding, pruning, trimming back bushes. Setting up the yard and furniture for summer, taking down the furniture and finding places to store it for winter. There’s also outside painting and, since we don’t have an underground sprinkler system, setting up a fairly complex arrangement of hoses and timers to keep all our plants watered.

And of course there’s the annual big outdoor extravaganza project that usually involves a skid steer rental, loads and loads and loads of dirt, large rocks and a bit o’bickering about where and how they’re placed. Just keepin’ it real, kids.

And then there are Sundays. We’re up early for 7:00am Mass. Well, ONE of us is up early and drags the other one of us out of bed, Pretty sure you can guess who is who in that arrangement. Hey, a girl needs her beauty sleep. After Mass, we usually get to the grocery store before the throngs of humanity arrive to compete for the best tomatoes, bread and luncheon meat. Okay, there’s no competition, but definitely less people-ing if we get there early enough. The rest of the day is for whatever fun we find…a trip to Lewiston or East Aurora or Rochester, summer street festivals, relaxing in the yard and enjoying the fruits of our labor, inviting family for a cookout and swim. And, occasionally, being too wiped out from whatever project is in progress and declaring a post-church couch/movie marathon day.

As, I sometimes say to Mr, it almost makes you look forward to Monday, doesn’t it?

Be sure to check out how the other women spend their two-days of chores weekends by visiting:

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Bettye at Fashion Schlub
Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own  
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style

Welcome to “Where Bloggers Live.” It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! 
Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes? The second Friday of each month is when this group of six bloggers links up to share their workspaces, homes, towns… or whatever our fearless leader, the fabulous Bettye, proposes.
Make sure you visit everyone to see where the magic happens!