Oh my goodness.  I had no idea what we were in for.

We’ve always led busy lives with activities nearly every night, so our current Monday through Friday after-work schedule is no surprise.  But the amount of time Trevor has to himself has dwindled down to practically zero.

It will get better soon.  Football games started last week, which means practice drops to just Mondays and Thursdays (whew!).  He has soccer on Fridays…and any Wednesday that he doesn’t have a football game he’ll be heading to soccer practice instead.  That still puts us at 5 nights a week for sports.

Activities every night are not an uncommon thing in this family…. but this new Middle School schedule- whew!  It’s a bear!

This is how a typical Trevor day looks right now:

He gets to sleep in later than the girls because his bus doesn’t pick up until after 8:00.  He usually gets up at 7am (after the girls have left the house!).  He has school all day, of course, and he gets home usually around 3:45pm.  This is a big change from last year when he got home at 2:30.

We are normally out the door by 5pm for football or soccer or dance or whatever….which leaves Trevor with a whopping hour and 15 minutes to unwind, get something to eat (dinner), get ready for sports and do any homework he has.

Back home around 7:45pm usually- unwind, take a shower, clean-up, bedtime at 8:30.

Yep.  Trevor has about 2 hours a day to accomplish eating, showering, getting dressed, homework, and playtime.

Three days into the school year I realized Trevor helping around the house really isn’t a reality at this point in time.   For the past 2 or 3 years, Trevor has been responsible for the dishwasher….unloading it whenever it’s clean.  He used to do the dishwasher immediately after school, but after school started this year that wasn’t working out so well for me-  I’d be making dinner (at 4:00) and he needed to be out of my way- the kitchen dishes would be piling up and then we’d eat at 4:30 and put our dishes by the sink since the dishwasher was still fulll….and then it would be time to leave.  Get home, go to bed.  Trevor would unload the dishwasher in the morning before school.  Yep, at 7am the kid was unloading the dishwasher.  I have now assigned that task to Riley.  It is now her job to unload the dishwasher first thing after school each day (I run it after daycare lunch).  Riley got to relinquish her dog-doody-duty and that now belongs to Brooke.  Trevor- well, he’s in the free and clear.  Maybe I’ll assign him laundry duty on the weekends or something.  We are forgiving him of all home chore responsibilities at the moment.

My point being- there’s really no time for the kid to have any time for himself right now!  He’s loving football though, so I’m glad for that.  It would be really hard to have a kid with no free time in a sport he doesn’t like, complaining all day long about it.  But he likes football, he loves soccer, he likes his new school, he’s not complaining at all.  He obviously wishes he had time to play with his friends and such, but it is what it is.

It will be really interesting in 4 years when Riley is in the 7th grade and Trevor is a Junior.  What will our evenings be like then?  I shudder to think about it!  Yikes!

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update: Trevor asked me to wake him up at 6:15 last Friday and 5:30 this morning.  I’m thinking he’ll probably start getting up at 6am every day- to get that bonus time in and wrap up any homework that wasn’t done the night before.