Survival, not thrival

Tyler works for a subcontractor, right? So they contract for, say, 5,000 hours in a given time period. When that time period is coming to a close, they may look around and see that they've only used up 4,000 of those hours. If no one works those extra 1,000 hours, they'll just have to give the money back, so they tell people they can work extra time (not "overtime" because they don't get paid more). There are two rules to working these extra hours,

1. You must work at least 8 extra hours per week.
2. You cannot use PTO to count towards your 48 hour total.

Last week, Tyler told me he wanted to work extra hours every week until the end of the year. I died. Then he told me about Rule #2, and I came back to life, but it was touch and go for a while. Rule #2 means that he can't work extra hours next week (Veteran's Day), Thanksgiving week, Christmas week, or New Year's Eve week, which leaves 4 weeks of me in survival mode.

He decided he was going to do the extra 8 hours over M-R and leave Friday well enough alone. This is fine, but it means he is gone from approximately 6:30 AM to 6:00 PM, give or take depending on traffic and whether or not he falls asleep in the shower.

When I'm in survival mode, chores fall away; I tend to only clean the pans when I need them again, which is not often because I've stopped cooking, to cut down on dishes. I switched to disposable diapers to cut down on laundry. I spend the time I would normally spend cleaning or cooking or shopping for groceries trying to make life fun for the kids (so they don't eat me alive): going to the park, going for walks, spending a whole hour helping Lillian find and sort acorns from the tree behind our house.

Query: are they called acorns if they don't come from oak trees?

Here it is Thursday, and I've only seriously thought about selling my children... well, just Lillian, to the gypsies once, so it's been pretty good so far. I also like that Tyler doesn't say things like, "what happened in here?" when he comes home and all the toys have been dumped out of the toy box and scattered hither and yon, there are dishes piled in the sink, and I'm laying prostrate on the ground with both children climbing all over me. I think he knows that if the shoe was on the other foot, there is a 99% chance that one or all of them would be dead, so he's just happy we're all alive at the end of the day, the condition of the house notwithstanding.