“Why it’s been a week since my last blog post: Our week in newsy bullets”
Monday: K~ wakes up feeling nauseas and achy. Is this the flu? Thank God I got the shot. Home school is delayed two hours while we watch Freaky Friday on the couch. Her afternoon guitar lesson is cancelled. The heavy rains turns to heavy wet snow on the way home from getting the kids from school. By bedtime we have a good two inches on the ground.
Tuesday: K~ is mostly better. Not the flu. Whoo-hoo! Kids’ school is delayed 2 hours. Husband takes Dixie to the vet to be spayed and then heads off to work, in the SUV. Leaving me at home with the van that doesn’t respond well to snow and ice. I make the executive decision to keep the kids home all day. Late in the afternoon I brave the roads to take R~ to a birthday party held at a weird little loft room above a barn at a local tree farm. After dropping her there I pick up Dixie from the vet. Can’t believe they don’t even keep her overnight, I swear our other pets stayed longer after surgery. The paper of instructions from the vet says Dixie shouldn’t run or jump for 7-10 days. “Have you told our dog this?” I ask them, only half joking. Dixie’s only means of movement is running and jumping. Thankfully that night she is still groggy from the anesthesia and hardly moves at all. K~ cries herself to sleep because Dixie can’t sleep in her bed that night.
Wednesday: Tuesday’s snow melted a little and then refroze overnight. Another two hour delay. But this time hubby can drive them in his SUV. After a very late start, we have a semi-normal day of home schooling. When I pick up the kids from school I realize we are the only ones who have any snow left - and we still have quite a lot! Weird.
Thursday: Can’t put it off any longer, must make a trip to Fred Meyer for groceries and other random stuff. K~ says she really wants to go. An hour into the trip she says she wish she stayed home. So do I. In one of my finest parenting moments I snap at her because she refuses to go half an aisle away from me to look for ingredients for a recipe she wants to make. If this girl grows up to like cooking it will be a miracle. By dinner everyone and everything is getting on my nerves; Hubby mercifully brings home dinner.
Friday: “PJ Day” at Zeeb’s pre-school - darn it, all his warm pj’s are in the laundry. I pull a shirt off the top of the basket and hope it isn’t too stinky. “Anything Day” at R~’s school. Apparently this means they can wear pj’s or do their hair “crazy” or whatever. I haven’t seen a note about this and worry that the kids could be wrong. Put R~’s hair in 4 pigtails that verge on “crazy” but aren’t too freaky-looking, just in case.
Day three of Dixie’s recovery. She clearly did not get the memo about not running or jumping. Keeping her inside and relatively still is becoming quite the challenge. Even on her short “walks” outside to do her business she can’t help running at full speed in mad circles. Wish the vet gave us tranquilizers for the dog instead of pain pills.
Mixed in with the week’s activities… in frustration over the brick wall we’ve hit in the job search in Colorado, Hubby and I go back to the map and expand our list of possible states. The list now includes Texas, Virginia and Georgia, though Colorado is still the number one choice. Spare moments at the computer are spent researching the three new states, especially Texas. Nicki has done a fabulous job making it sound like a wonderful place to live.
And that was the week that was, January 14-18, 2008.
No sooner do I rant about our endless progression of dark rainy days then we get an incredibly beautiful sunny day. Seriously, this was no “partly sunny” or “sunbreaks” day, no siree, it was sunny all day. And it was even relatively warm - 50 degrees! I was opening blinds all over the house and gasping at the blue skies every ten minutes. This place is really beautiful, when the grey skies finally clear. See?
K~ and I took a walk on the trail near our house - this mountain is in the Cascade range, no idea what it’s really called, but we’ve named it “Mt. Fred”
Yes, it was a lovely Sunday. Ahem, minus the part where I walked full speed into the door jam when I was bringing our collie into the house. Smashed my nose so hard I heard a crunch sound. And all I could do was yell “OW!” while my kids stared at me and said “what happened?” And then I ran upstairs to cry because for some reason I can not really cry in front of my children. Is that weird? The best part was, Hubby was on the phone with his mom so she probably heard me yelling and then he was worried about me so he hung up to make sure I didn’t need 911. Yeah, that’s not embarrassing. Imagine that call back: “No mom, Chris just smashed her own nose…” I’m not very graceful on the average day, but this time of the month, I’m extra clumsy. I swear, I can blame anything on hormones. Just call me Mr. Magoo. After today, I even have the nose to match.
I’m at that time in my cycle when everything makes me weepy. And we’re at that time in January where I’ve forgotten what a sunny day looks like. And it’s that time in the winter when spring feels a million years away.
Last night we rented Lilo and Stitch because we realized Zeeb and R have never seen it because we saw it in the theaters before they were born. I’d forgotten how good that movie is - the TV series doesn’t even come close. And I sat there on the couch, Zeeb cuddled under a blanket with me, watching this hurt, frustrated misfit child tell her crazy cuddly misfit alien/dog “Ohana means family. And family means no one gets left behind - or forgotten.” And tears were just running down my face as I kissed Zeeb’s head feeling so very grateful.
Today we went 45 minutes south to look at a house in a better school district. We’re sort of hesitantly looking because honestly I’d still rather move to Colorado but so far there are no job leads whatsoever and I can’t keep homeschooling forever. We have a lot of requirements in a house - we want some acreage (1 acre would suffice, but 2+ would be better) and 5 bedrooms (or 4 bedrooms plus something we can turn into a bedroom) and someplace to put the widescreen and XBox besides the family room, and it needs to be in a good district with an excellent program for the academically talented. And it can’t cost more than our current house will sell for. And also we’d like it to have some of the charm of our current house. Yes, we do live in a fantasy world, why do you ask? So imagine our surprise when we got an email from our realtor titled “This is It!!” with a house that is 1000 square feet larger than ours on 1 1/3 acres and in a good district. Of course we had to go look at it. And if you were thinking “it sounds too good to be true” well you would be correct. Because what the ad didn’t mention was the moss covered driveway that was so slick and so steep that our van literally could not go up it. We had to park halfway up and climb the rest of the way. The only reason the house had a “daylight” basement was because it’s built on a very steep hill and so probably half of the acre+ (which was all in the front of the house) is totally unusable. It was built in 1980 and only part of it was updated so it has a very disjointed floorplan with tons of weirdly shaped open space and teeny tiny bedrooms. But it had a pool table so A~ was ready to sign the papers today. He was disappointed to see Mom and Dad vigorously shaking their heads saying, “uh-uh, no way no how, this house is wrong in soooo many ways!”
And thus we are back at square one. In our beautiful dream home which is just a bit too small for our family in a school district that is completely inadequate in a state where it rains so much that the moss grows on all sides of the trees and is so dark in the winter time that people resort to things like “sun” lamps in an effort to fool themselves into thinking life is not so bleak.
Just a light isn’t enough to fool me. So I got some tropical-smelling flowers too. But try as I might, it still doesn’t quite say “Hawaii”
Sorry about the downer of a post yesterday… I just couldn’t contain my shock and outrage, and well when you have 4 little ones around the house, better to journal it than to rant out loud, y’know what I mean? It sure has been one rotten news story after another lately… with the horrific family murders not far from here on Christmas eve it has been a real challenge to keep my kids from hearing something. Even Zeeb had questions after he saw 3 tables full of flowers and cards at the post office where one of the victims worked. (I told him “someone died” and tried to leave it there).
I don’t know what it is… something about the combination of short dark days and constant drizzle and a writers strike keeping everything in reruns leaving me to watch only news 24/7 or sit and stare at my computer screen… well it’s just easy to start feeling like the world’s going to H-E-double hockey sticks in a handbasket.
But take heart! One network has NEW EPISODES tomorrow night … and not just any new episodes, but from two of my very favorite shows: Psych and Monk !! Are you a fan too? If not, you absolutely must give them on a try. They’re over on the USA network so you might have to check your local listings and whatnot but dude it is so worth the extra effort. They’re funny, quirky, intelligent, interesting… and Psych has 80’s flashbacks and references galore - how cool is that?! Seriously, how can you be a child of the 80’s and not love a show like this:
Well, it’s just one more reason I’m glad tomorrow’s Friday.
What are you doing to get through the long dark winter evenings? What’s your favorite show? Give me some ideas for Netflix!!
I generally avoid the tabloid-esque stories on Fox News’ front page, but when I saw the headline on this one all I could think was, “Oh God, please no.”… and then I went against my better judgement and read it.
Police: Man Throws 4 Kids Off Bridge BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. — A man angered after a dispute with his wife confessed to tossing his four young children off a bridge, authorities said Wednesday as they searched murky waters for the bodies.
This man immigrated from Vietnam in the early 80’s…somehow that makes the story worse, to think of these beautiful Vietnamese American children… I can’t even say it. I can’t help but think that the community failed these kids - failed to see this family needed help and these kids needed protecting. But then who could predict that a father would do something so awful, so evil to his own children?
There is no punishment strong enough for this man, in my opinion. My prayers are with his wife and their family, I can not even begin to imagine their grief.
