First day of holidays

Yeah, I made it through the first day of holidays . . . only 76 to go (says my 12 y.o.).

I got to sleep in. Yay! Hubby woke me up with a kiss as he left for work just before 8.

But then I had the kids to deal with on my own all day. The "first day" of most anything around here is the hardest. The first day is an adjustment and our kids don't do brilliantly with change. Particularly challenging was our middle son today. I lost count of time outs and other reprimands, losses of privileges and yes, even a smack or two (which rarely does any good on this guy, which is why we generally don't use them). He seemed the happiest when I was ordering him around – I guess he misses the structure of seven hours of school. Never mind, he'll adjust. Our youngest had a few emotional melt-downs too. Some of it was flow-on from his older brother; at least one had to do with his brother who is twice as old as him, just not knowing how to "go softly" in a board game to give his younger sibling at least the illusion that he had a chance of winning.

I did some fun cooking on my own, after making some salt dough for my 6 y.o. to muck around with – it kept him busy for over an hour while I messed around in the kitchen. What I did was way more yummy. 

I made a chocolate slice called "Buttery Slice", which doesn't sound all that appealing now, so I'm thinking of renaming it "Aunty Mel's Chocolate Slice". 'Aunty Mel' is a great friend of mine, the "Aunty" is an honorary title for our kids' use. She is apparently the source of this recipe that I typed out of Mum's recipe books many a long year ago in that gap between finishing high school and starting university (Australians don't talk about "graduating" from high school, different to Americans . . . ). 

Anyway, this is one of my favourite recipes, but I hardly ever cook it in Japan because it is full of coconut and that is hard to get here and when you do get it, it is in tiny packages, expensive and very coarse! But as it happens, I have some coconut on hand and decided to indulge myself. And everyone else, it seems – all of the boys gobbled them up.

I also made some Apple Muffins, but the chocolate slice won over them. They'll have their moment of fame soon, I predict.

In the midst of the random chaos this morning I managed to submit twelve photos and text for the OMF Japan 2012 prayer calendar to the publisher. This is one of the many jobs that I do and something I usually complete in late March, early April, but we all know what I was doing this year at that time, don't we? Thankfully they gave me some latitude and now it is in their hands.

After lunch, which is so much longer and more complicated with three boys then when on my own, I sent them all to their rooms for quiet reading time. After I'd washed up all the cooking (the only bad thing about cooking yummy food) and lunch, I roughly mopped downstairs and headed up for some reading time myself. Nice!

Later after afternoon tea (and chocolate slice) we went back to school. Yes! CAJ is a social hang-out for students outside of school hours and even in the holidays. It has the best playground around here, so of course the boys wanted to go back to play (not to learn, they hastened to add when I queried their choice of place).

Close to 5pm we came home and ate left-overs quickly before settling down for a Family Movie Night. We watched "Holes". Not a really little kids movie. Our 6 y.o. didn't really like it, it had some sad bits and the story was a bit complicated at times (quite a bit of flipping to back-story). But it was fun to stop as a family and slow down to celebrate the start of holidays  – for now my husband is officially finished teaching too.

Thus our first day of holidays (US=vacation) is almost over. Now we have a weekend and then a four-day conference with our mission. The school year really is over and we survived!