Aunt Kelly is the coolest

It’s been a whirlwind week. Nina had her first full week of kindergarten, and Amelia is FINALLY learning to wake up and get moving in the morning. I’ve been working on three articles for the newspaper and conducted several interviews this week. We also had a parent-teacher meeting at school and a parent meeting for Daisy Scouts. I took Amelia to a preschool art class at a local museum, where we were meeting other moms and kids from one of our Meetup groups. We had our first fantasy football draft today and have spent much time trying to coordinate our second (on Sunday). I wrote two manuscripts and polished up four more to mail for the OCWI conference contests. I’ve been updating my blog every day. And I’ve been trying (though not entirely succeeding) to keep up with laundry, piles of dishes, and other delightful housework. I’ve not been sleeping well (worry-wart gene inherited from my mom), and last night I had one of those very rare splitting headaches that totally immobilized me, putting me behind on many of my self-imposed deadlines.

So to make the fantasy draft today I had to ask Aunt Kelly to watch Amelia for a few hours and pick Nina up from school. When she picked up Amelia (yes, she came by and picked up my daughter, making things even more convenient for me), I told her that we would watch her two daughters tonight, since Kelly’s also going to watch our kids on Sunday for the other draft.

I just called her a minute ago to arrange the transfer of kids, and she said (get this): “Why don’t I just keep them tonight and you and Kevin can go have fun.” I spent five seconds trying to convince her it's my turn to babysit, but she insisted.

WOW! Like that, we went from having four kids tonight to having zero, nada, zilch. I have no idea what Kevin and I are going to do on our undeserved but much-needed break tonight, but I know one thing for sure: we’ll raise our glasses and toast Aunt Kelly.

Happy Friday, everyone!

TGIF

I had a rough day yesterday, but I'm not going to dwell on it. It's Friday (woo hoo), so here's a little Friday fun.

I found this Al Green video for "Everything's Gonna Be Alright." Lots of great shots of Memphis. I can't embed this one, so follow the link. And I have to slide this one in , too--the Rev. Al/Lyle Lovett duet of Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away." The song and video make this Lyle-Lovett, Al-Green, Willie-Nelson-loving Memphis girl a happy camper.

Our friend Chase wears "Friday Fun Socks" to work. She gets her weekend off to an early start by sporting crazy, colorful socks under her business attire. Now, Nina calls all her own printed socks "Friday Fun Socks."

From about.com's late-night joke compilation:

"Barack Obama said today he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone over 70 . . . and McCain said Obama was just pandering to the youth vote." --Craig Ferguson

This tripadvisor.com Travel IQ game is a lot of fun and quite addictive. (Thanks to Gina and Jay for directing me to it a while back. Hopefully one day I can outsscore them.)

A friend and I were discussing Mike Royko recently, and I found a few of his columns online. I still love Slats Grobnik tales, though I wonder if any newspaper would publish them these days.

That's enough fun for now. Better get back to work. It's not officially the weekend, yet.