Schools out for summer how freaking long???

So school ended somewhere around the end of June and then we almost immediately had company for a week in which we went to 3 museums, the Musical Ride, and did Canada Day on the Hill with 250,000 of our closet friends. Oh yeah...and a little bit of scrapbook shopping managed to get done too.Then I made 374 trips from the house to the trailer getting ready for our vacation. The first week we spent on quiet (until we got there) Lake Cayamant, Quebec where I positioned a lounge chair next to the lake while everyone else fished, swam and boated and did my own small bit of obligatory fishing, swimming and boating (it was a family vacation you know!) between reading and sipping cool drinks. After an eventful departure (Dan will hate that I'm sharing this but his beloved GM truck got stuck, with trailer attached, trying to get out of the cottage driveway and had to be towed out - by a FORD!) we returned home for a quick turn around where I took 72 loads of dirty clothes into the house and then took 72 loads of clean clothes and 67 loads of food back to the trailer for a trip to a Provincial Park.Today is Monday. Dan went back to work today. Leaving me at home alone with 2 girls who, although they have been sleeping in quite nicely, are still short about 2 hours of sleep each night due to extremely late bedtimes. This does not make for an enjoyable summer vacation.

I have not been relaxing on a lawn chair, magazine in hand and drink (preferably a pina colada) on the side table. Instead I've been doing lots of work around the yard. Why, you ask, would Denise, the Queen of Chillaxin', be doing manual labour? Duh! Of course there is an ulterior motive...don't tell Dan, but the jobs I've been choosing to do all involve really loud machines and, while time consuming, do not require much physical effort. So, in order to keep sane I have taken up a new hobby. It is called pressure washing. So far I’ve done the deck, the patio, the windows and the stone walkways. It has taken me hours and hours to get all that work done. “Quite a hobby!” you say. Well don’t knock it til you try it. Pressure washers are very noisy. Get it? Very noisy? Due to the loud noise generated by the pressure washer I've been required to spend long periods of time without hearing any of the disruptions going on around me. I don’t hear all the fighting, screaming, bickering and crying - I just plug in my MP3 player and spray away

I also kind of wish my grass would grow a little faster. Nothing like a ride on lawnmower for noise. And why is it that every time I start mowing one of the kids comes out and starts hollering at me? I just point to my ears and shrug my shoulders, avoiding the entire explanation of why Sister A hit Sister B after Sister B

a) took Sister A’s favourite Barbie (my kids are deprived, only 1843 Barbies!)
b) sat on the wrong couch cushion (we have assigned seating in our house)
c) ate the last Popsicle (which Sister A dozen’t like anyway, but that is beside the point.

I’m thinking I could probably come up with a couple more noisy hobbies. Unfortunately we don’t have any hedges and we don’t have a wood burning fire place or else hedge trimming or chain sawing might have been good choices.