Whack, Whack, Whack, MISS

Yesterday?  I drove.  I drove David to community college, and then I drove to a friend's house to pick up Brian and a friend from their study group.  Then I drove that friend home.  Then I drove to another friend's house to pick up my girls (I had driven them there earlier for a mosaics class), and THEN - instead of heading home - we drove to the shoe store to find dress shoes for the girls, because Brian's Confirmation is tonight.

I live in this now, apparently

I spent, in all, probably 2 hours just driving yesterday, because later I had to pick up David from school and take HIM for dress shoes (I don't know about you people, but it is a tradition here that any fancy occasion triggers the we-don't-have-dress-shoes-that-fit syndrome).  Luckily, we experienced the Miracle of Kohls and found him shoes that both fit and were appropriate for the occasion. Plus, the cashier gave me 20% off.

So! Despite all the driving, I felt proud of myself.  I GOT IT DONE.  I whacked those moles, as it were, and could sleep the sleep of the just.  That is, after I finished cutting out the 100 cloth circles I had promised our Girl Scout leader, for the re-enactment thing-y the girls are doing on Saturday at some local historical place.  No worries - I got that done, too.  I felt good.

That is, until today, when I announced to my Girl Scout leader friend my success with the cloth circles and she asked me, "Did you ever sign up for that Fall Fun Fest you said you would take our girls to?"

"Was that for today?" I asked, panic rising into my throat at the thought of everything I had already planned to do today.

"Oh, no, it's next week," she said.  "But the registration deadline was last Friday."

Smells vile - do not buy

Well, that was one mole that went unwhacked, I guess.  Who knows what other balls I've dropped?  Who knows how many other promises I've made that will not go unbroken? At least my friend, well acquainted with human fallibility in general and my personal fallibility in particular, was willing to forgive and forget.  Or maybe she just didn't want me to give up on those cloth circles?

Hey, I even made some handmade potpourri to go in them, once I discovered there wasn't any potpourri in Michael's that didn't smell disgusting.  That's something, right? Right?  Whack.

Whack-A-Mole

Just popping in to let people know I am still alive, just life is kicking my a**.  It's a non-stop game of Whack-a-Mole, and I don't foresee its stopping any time in the near future.  Maybe when Brian goes away to college in 3 years or so?  One can hope.

This looks like fun, but it isn't.  Not at all.

We're in the middle of David's college and National Merit Finalist applications, with all the concomitant requirements and deadlines.  This is stressful, very stressful.  Brian is quickly turning into a disenchanted teen, and the loss of his cheerful countenance pains me so.  Rachel is engaging and cooperative and cheerful, but all I can think is "I've got one more year, max, before this changes."  And Susie, praise be to God, has truly caught on to reading and has been holed up for the past 2 weeks or so in her freshly painted room with the Harry Potter series.

A side note here: scientists did a study where they took identical twin babies and let one (the control, as it were) figure out how to crawl up a flight of stairs on its own while they trained the other one intensively on how to do the same thing.  Both babies learned the skill at the exact same time anyway.

This didn't work for us.

Why am I sharing this with you? Well, my oldest (Theo) was the only other really late reader in our family; I pretty much let him be until I saw him picking up books and trying to puzzle them out, at which point I did some intensive phonics with him for maybe 4 or 6 weeks.  He learned to read at the age of 9 years and 3 months.

But for all these years, I've wondered whether or not I should have been pushing him sooner, doing more phonics, etc.  Maybe I had done him a disservice by being so laid back about the whole reading thing.  So along comes Susie (aka Guinea Pig #6), who also seemed to have no desire to read on her own.  Oh, I worked on that child, people.  I tortured her with phonics lessons for 2 straight years, but guess when she finally took off with the reading.  Anyone?

That's right - 9 years and 3 months.

Where was I?  Oh, yes, Whack-a-Mole - despite the craziness that is my life right now, I decided that I have lost the habit of reading real books and magazine articles that are longer than a page.  I set a new goal for myself of reading my New Yorker cover to cover (instead of just glancing at the cartoons and then misplacing it) and also reading an entire book each week.  I know! So 20th century of me, right?

I started with The Handmaid's Tale (by Margaret Atwood).  I knew the book was some sort of dystopian story, but people - I was so depressed at the end of it, I could barely convince myself to get out of bed the next day.  I'm unloading it on PaperbackSwap if anyone is interested (friend me - I'm suburbanmama), just to get it out of the house.

I decided to follow that up with something inspirational and tried The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It was an excellent antidote, and it also made me realize that, if David had been born in Malawi?  He would have been the one supplying his entire village with power by building a windmill out of scraps from the town junkyard.  It almost made me feel guilty for not letting my resident tinkerer junk up his room more - who knows what he would have invented by now?

I have more to share (I met another blogging friend in person - I'm on a roll!), but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  I've got to go pick up my mallet again; these moles are getting out of control.

This, That, And The Other Thing

It's HEEEEEERE! Welcome to America, Ebola - and tell me, WHY are we letting people fly out of the infected countries at this point?  Doesn't 50% survival rate scare anyone but me?

On the other hand, if I get Ebola and die, I won't have to finish trying to put the girls' room back together.  So, there's that.  For some reason, after we put all the stuff they actually use back into their room (beds, dressers, clothes in the closets, a few toys), there is still stuff of theirs strewn all over the other bedrooms.  It defies the laws of physics, I tell you.

And, since this is normally the week when I would consider getting everyone the flu shot, we are all sick with one thing and another (but not Ebola - not yet).  The boys gifted me a lovely stomach virus, plus we have all been passing around some sort of sore throat/head cold thing.  I also have this weird thing going on with one of my eyes that feels like a low-grade infection of sorts, which I would normally hurry to the doctor for, as I do appreciate the gift of sight and have no desire to lose it.  But I've been too sick to go, if that makes any sense, and have been ineffectively dosing myself instead with one of the kids' leftover pinkeye drops.  So, in addition to feeling lousy, I look pretty awful, too.
Whatever happened to house calls, anyway?

Other than that, though, it is gorgeously fall around here.  The only problem with fall nowadays (meaning, now that climate change has really taken hold and our frost date is a full 2 weeks later than it used to be) is that we still have mosquitoes around to torment us during our crisp autumn weather.  Lest you think that I am just a whiner and our mosquito problem (all day long, people) is not that bad, I heard from one of the new-ish residents in our neighborhood, a doctor who works with the US Health Services and who collaborates with the CDC. He wanted to discuss with me the possibility of pesticide spraying in our neighborhood, because, in his words, "I've been to Africa on medical missions and these mosquitoes are worse."

Sometimes a little validation is all I need to make it through my day, you know?

Orange You Glad?

The girls' room is looking a teeny bit better (i.e., less glowing) with a second coat of paint.  So today our long-suffering handyman painted the bathroom.  You know, the one I had made several trips to Home Depot to pick out the color for, the one where Larry and I had painted umpteen stripes of different paints so that we could select just the right shade.  I was aiming for a sort of burnt orange - the kind that goes well with browns and sage greens and dusky purples.  Something, you know, grown up.

It turned out bright orange.  Jack-o-Lantern bright.  Blindingly bright.

"Don't worry," said the handyman. "Let's see how the second coat looks; if you don't like it, you can go back and get a different color."

At which point my head sort of exploded, because it should be fairly obvious by now that I am incapable of selecting the proper paint.  I mean, he saw all those little containers of paint samples we had tried on the walls already.  I would have done better if I had closed my eyes and just picked one of those sample cards out of the display and handed it to the paint mixer guy. What the heck is wrong with me?

What with the girl's room and Brian's room (a bright deep blue) and the bathroom, we've got an exploded-Easter-egg-dye-factory motif going on upstairs.  And the kids love it.  The bathroom, according to them, looks "cool."

Which wasn't quite the word that Larry used when he came home this evening and checked out the paint job...

AWOL

I miss you all when I don't write.  It's just so damn busy around here - not exciting busy, though. More like hamster wheel busy.  Whack -a- Mole busy.  You know what I mean?

Larry's ongoing project to totally gut our house is proceeding apace.  He actually waved the white flag and allowed me to pay the handyman to paint the girls' new walls, a job that Larry up until now had always insisted on doing himself.  We made our usual mistake and chose a color that is so blindingly bright that I doubt anyone will be able to sleep in there.  Glidden's Thai Teal, for those of you who want to know.  It looks so darn innocent on that paint card.  I'm telling you, it GLOWS, as though it were a radioactive substance.

Is it bright in here, or is it me?

Larry's also allowing the handyman to paint our main bathroom, mostly because all the paint was peeling off the back of the door and mold was starting to grow on the shower ceiling.  Initially, the girls and I chose Egyptian Sun, which I thought would be a bright yet muted shade of orange.  The reality was closer to neon orange. The girls, of course, loved it.  Larry and I decided that there was no way we could handle that color early in the morning and switched it out for Ripe Peach.  I had had high hopes for Apricot, but that had a pink tinge to it.  I was also partial to Juicy Cantaloupe, but it was too pale.  I wish I was making these paint color names up, but I am not.  I also wish I had not wasted 10 hours of whatever time remains to me on this earth running back and forth to Home Depot for paint testers.

Like I said, hamster-wheel busy.  Let's not even talk about the 3 trips I made to Home Depot looking for closet organizers.  I'm not proud of it, you know.  Not proud at all.

These? Are very complicated.

In the meantime, I am still struggling to open my kitchen cabinets, because I had Brian remove all the handles from them 3 months ago, back when I assumed we would spend part of our summer painting them with a fresh coat of semi-gloss white (a color, incidentally, that is much easier to choose than is a burnt orange, say, or a cheerful teal).  Somehow, that never came to pass; and every time I can't open a cabinet, Brian cracks up.  Not to mention that the white wood looks dingier than ever, as we have been putting our fingerprints all over them because they DON'T HAVE HANDLES.

In the middle of all this, the seasons are turning, which means children keep coming at me from all directions claiming that their clothes don't fit.  I had both girls try on ALL their jeans today and we conducted lengthy discussions over fit, style, and color.  This took a very long time.  Then we went to Target and had Rachel try on ALL THE SIZES of jeans to determine what size we need to look for at the thrift store (where there are no dressing rooms).  We did buy one pair to tide her over, so I don't feel guilty about that.

Before I did that, though, I had to run to the post office to mail back a very late standardized test before I was thrown into jail. AND I had to drive David to community college, because Larry had a work thing going on. AND I went to Home Depot AGAIN to pick something up for our handyman.

Whack-a-Mole busy, people.  It's my life.

[Thai Teal image: InPublishers]
[Storage cubes image: DealMoon]