When Mom's Away...

Last week I had to go to LaCrosse, Wisconsin for work.  I left Monday afternoon before school was out and did not return until Thursday night after midnight (I guess technically that's Friday morning).  So dad was running the household basically all week.  I tried to help by having a few dinners prepped and ready, hiring a babysitter for Reid's hockey practice and enlisting the help of our neighbors in the morning so Russ could get to work only "slightly" later than usual...

I left notes and lists, etc but basically it was all up to dad for FOUR whole days.  I've got a well oiled scheduled machine at home though... how bad could it be with me being gone only four days?

Well, apparently all rules go out the window:

filling their shoes with rocks and dumping them on the swings

Russ sent me this picture by text message.  The clean freak in me starting breathing into a paper bag.  The kids were at the playground, with their shoes off and they were putting rocks and sand in their shoes and then dumping them on the swings... WHAT??  UGH.  I imagine all h*ll going lose at my house - I bet they were hanging up their shirts backwards or the short sleeves were in the long sleeve sections of the closet.  I started calling for earlier flights home.

The next night they went to another park... and what do you think Ross did:

same dirty shoes, now in his face... ugh.  Where is the antibacterial soap?

Seriously, this stuff would not happen on mom's watch.  I may find it hard to relax at times most of the time.

But, HONESTLY... I'm so glad that Russ had this time with the boys.  They had a great week.  They went to a park multiple nights (I think three different parks), they had a picnic, the managed JUST FINE without me.

When they weren't causing cross-state panic attacks for mom, they were having tons of fun:

McD's and Gatorade at the park

This guy can tackle any obstacle at a playground, he has no fear and he's an awesome climber!

They did what boys are supposed to do... they played, and they played hard.  I hardly ever heard from them at all actually.  Russ did send messages to make sure I knew I was missed and I appreciated that but I didn't get any panicked calls because things were going rotten or anything like that.  The boys were well behaved and they had a great week.  I'm actually enjoying that as the boys get older it's easier to get away and easier for one of us to handle the three of them.

Now, if you'll excuse me - I need to go make sure that my spice rack is still alphabetized...