Sylviebead Journal

The best laid plans of mice and moms.....

This is not a beady post. This is the post of a mom who planned a really special weekend for her boys and was thwarted by bad weather and social studies assignments. Bummer!

The boys had 2 days off from school, so I planned a trip away for the weekend a few weeks ago. It was a destination unknown kind of trip (which in our family is called "magical mystery tour") I've done the M.M.T. several times, but our destinations have all been local. I wanted to do something special and planned some really fun ones out of town this time.

WELL... mother nature and Ms. Holloway put a monkey wrench into my plans. Ms. Holloway assigned homework which required the kids to watch specific olympic events, specific athletes and turn in an assignment based on what they'd watched on Tuesday when they returned to school. Great.... just great... does that mean we can't go anywhere, I wondered?? SO, I made arrangements to have things Tivo'd as much as possible (and not all were possible since I get only very basic cable and some of the events were on non-basic channels. Do they assume we all have TVs and extended cable packages?? Luckily I knew others who did have those channels and could tivo them for us to get results from later) and figured we would come home earlier than I intended to finish the assignment. (why do teachers assign things like this on vacations??? They are VERY insistent that we not plan family vacations in times other than school holidays, but then when we GET a holiday, they assign homework that interferes with the time off!!!!! Sorry to rant, but this really bugs me. They do it on spring break too!!)

ANYHOO.... so I had plans to go out of town, but decided to make them a day and a half shorter due to the assignments. THEN weather reports start showing that we might be getting bad weather... so I plan my trip around that... planning to skirt the bad weather by heading north of where it's SUPPOSED to hit.

Well.... again, things did not cooperate. Our first stop on our mystery tour was to be a silly one, but a fun one just the same... a trip to the unclaimed luggage store in Alabama. We were on our way to the Space museum in Huntsville after that and then onto Nashville for the rest of the weekend. WELL.... the snow that was headed to Alabama was supposed to hit fairly far south of Huntsville and my detour to this small town first would help us skirt it even more. I followed the weather channel predictions closely for the 3 days prior to our trip... even the morning of.

We headed out and it started snowing lightly (which I didn't panic about because it was supposed to snow a bit in Atlanta...but not where we were going).... we got further into our trip and it snowed more.... and then more.... and then we were 7 miles from our first stop and the highway was shut down because of a truck being jack-knifed. SO they detoured us onto a back-road for 30 minutes... in that 30 minutes, the roads got progressively worse and they decided to shut that road down due to ice.... that road was the ONLY road to our destination. SEVEN MILES AWAY!!!! We'd driven 3 1/2 hours to get THAT close and be turned away!!!!!!

They said that the roads wouldn't open for quite some time... hours and hours. By then the store would be closed, as would the museum. At that point we had to decide what to do... do we stay the night in nowhere Alabama so that we can go to the store the next day?? Do we try to re-route and go on to Nashville??

The vote from the passengers was "go home and serve twinkies to the neighbors" (which makes no sense to anyone but my kids, but that is their new snow tradition... a tradition meaning they did it ONCE the last time it snowed, so now it's a tradition.) SO being the good mom I am, I decided that I would just bag the trip and take them back home, detouring through the grocery store to buy Twinkies.

It was not the weekend I'd planned. It was not the weekend they planned. But it was the weekend that happened.

And now we're enjoying watching various events that we have no real interest in (Biathalon, Luge, Figure Skating) for Social Studies homework. Why couldn't she have assigned Snow Board Cross or Moguls??? They're at least fun to watch!

Here's to you Ms. Holloway... and Mother Nature! Thanks for screwing up my weekend.

(sorry for the rant. I just needed to get it off my chest)

tiny blah blah blah....

coffee - yes. definitely. SO glad I still have gift-cards a plenty!!!

music - nope.... just the Olympics (gotta love that figure skating background music... ick)