Snapshots of a weekend

It's been a hugely busy weekend for us, managed on not terribly much sleep - the first of several such as the end of year season starts to kick in.

It all started with the 9 year old having a dose of stomach flu overnight on Thursday, and vomiting all over her bed at 3am, which woke the 7 year old and necessitated both much cleaning up and much resettling. Poor 9 year old was then subjected to the usual sequel of vomiting bugs, and spent the next 6 hours wearily trotting back and forth to the loo. I didn't really sleep again after her wakeup, being on alert for a repetition.

Friday was preparation for, then running of, the bake stall at the school night market. I was also on fairy floss making duty. (Here's a hint - if you are ever tasked with doing this, wear no sleeves or something old that you don't mind thoroughly stickyfying).

All day Friday baked goods were being delivered to me in preparation and for pricing, much to the mounting frustration of my 3 year old (look but don't touch being a very hard commandment when jelly cakes and Mars Bar slice is involved :-)

The stall itself looked pretty good:

and it was fairly successful too, raising $370 for the Cancer Council as part of a Relay for Life fundraising effort.

Saturday I was up at 6am for some bizarre reason, but the plus side was that I managed to get my pre-reading finished for Tuesday's new work project meeting. By 8am the kids were up and breakfasting. Then it was on to our usual swimming lessons, followed by a lightning shopping trip then a race to a 9th birthday party, which featured this:

Yes, that IS a giant Scooby Doo jumping castle! The kids liked it rather a lot.

Home again, home again, and the neighbour kids were wanting to sleep over, so we organised fish & chips and sleeping bags in the lounge room. Hubs, however, was reporting feeling off colour by this stage and was really not looking smashing.

(This resolved in the middle of the night into full-blown stomach flu - poor guy - which unfortunately woke the 3 year old, who was then very hard to resettle).

Today, on reasonably limited sleep, I've made pancakes for sleepover breakfast and dispatched the neighbour kids home, then took the girls to a combined birthday party on the other side of town for our friend J, who is 40, and her beautiful boy X, who's 3. It was a BBQ picnic in the park, and there were two kinds of cake!

Home at 4:30, with the 3 year old asleep in the car, we've found poor hubs socked out in bed and I've realised that the mountain of laundry ain't gonna do itself (I haven't really caught up from Thursday night's vomit storm loads, actually). So there's quite a bit to go before bed tonight.

Weekends like this are fun - well, barring the stomach flu part - but they also take quite a lot of stamina. I'm looking forward to a few easier ones once the seeasonal mayhem is over and blissfully empty January is upon us.

This is post 11 in NaBloPoMo. 11 down, 19 to go!