More old family photos, a set on Flickr.
Most of these are from the trip we took to Europe in 1983 — I was 7 and got a camera for my birthday for the trip. My parents occasionally took photos of us, but most of the photos I took. The other one is one of our engagement pictures (the color weirdness is due to the fact that it sat in my Dad’s office window for 15 years. I think it’s the only copy we have of this picture).
No, I’m not. Really, I promise. I got an iPhone, rarely go near the computer any more, and so blogging has fallen by the wayside, as I’m not entirely proficient with the thumbs-typing-on-small-keyboards thing yet (though I am trying. This for example).
So, what’ve we been up to lately? Lots of stuff, mostly kids, school, church, more doctor visits for me. Whirlwind. I will try to find time this week for details and pictures maybe tomorrow night while people are off at scouts.
I did finally sit down & read this week, a nifty little book about feeding your children called “Hungry Monkey”. It was more of a memoir than really helpful with what to do with your own kids, but it had some fun recipes (we have overlapping cookbooks with the author, so some things we’ve already tried) and things I may try with Greg that I hadn’t thought to do with him. So add this to the book list at #11 for the year.
February catch up: It was a long month, full of weirdness. We started the month with a trip to the library. The regular story time lady wasn’t there, and the substitute let us pull out watercolor paint. 
Toddlers and preschoolers with paint over carpet was surprisingly not a disaster. :) The next day playgroup was going to be cancelled, but we got Kya to come over and hang out with us all morning instead, so it was all good. We made the Gloop that Molly’s mom taught us to make a couple weeks before. It didn’t turn out at first, but after a while it firmed up nicely.
Nick got the family a new (well, new to the kids; we played it in college) game to play: Settlers of Catan. The kids were enthralled. 
Greg was sick over the weekend so he and I skipped church. Sunday was not only the SuperBowl, but our kids first Pokemon Tournament. Nick had to work that day, but Ben’s best friend’s parents offered to watch the kids while they were at the tournament, so I just dropped them off and picked them up. 
They loved it, though! In the evening we had special junk food and watched the game and/or the commercials (guess who did which!)
Tuesday David had his introduction to middle school/jr. high (ours is all in one at the moment, but that will change in upcoming years). There was an unexpectedly two hour event telling us in detail what to expect next year. 
It was awesome, but some warning that it was going to be that long would have been nice. We ended up picking dinner on the way home & sending the kids straight to bed; it was that late. The week went on. The last regular week for a while, actually, if you didn’t mention the fact that Greg had pink eye and I caught a cold that didn’t want to go away. The weekend came. Ben lost another tooth after literally weeks of gentle wiggling.
My parents visited and we had a pre-Valentine’s dinner since they weren’t going to be here on the day.
Book fair happened in the middle of the month (I was in charge of volunteers and when they didn’t show up, I filled in, which meant I was up there a lot.). 
The school always puts on extra stuff during book fair to draw people in, so there was Pastries for Parents (which I attended because I’m on our PTA board), Teacher Appreciation (which I also attended as a member of the TA subcommittee), a field trip to the art museum (which I attended as a chaperone — they frown on taking pictures in the museum, so this bus photo will have to do)
, and a Family Fine Arts Night that week as well (Ben & his drama/dance troupe)
. Greg learns about mixing colors
David and his violin class 
Greg’s class had a Valentine’s party, too. I nearly missed it with all that other stuff going on. 
The week ended with a hike for scouts, which I blissfully missed out on.
That weekend was the Regional Weekend at church, so instead of resting, I got to go up there and help in the kitchen for a couple days, providing food and drinks 
round the clock for the hundreds of people that came in to play basketball, volleyball, and attend seminars. The kids and Nick had a blast participating in Bible Baseball, 
the team sports 
and the other programmed events. I mainly made tea over and over and over and carried food out to tables over and over and over.
The next week I rested for a couple days, then had three coffee dates in a row. I know that doesn’t sound exhausting, but for an introvert it was quite a big deal. Two were with people I know and love, but the third was with a stranger, someone new to our kids school that wanted to talk about, well, everything. She stayed for four hours. It was mind boggling. The next day I saw my doctor and got surprising news: all my problems could be explained away by an extremely rare drug interaction reaction. So I switched meds and started feeling better within days. The crazy schedule continued, though. There was a PTA meeting for the spring carnival, various kids over or out on playdates (including one memorable time where the firetruck at the park was covered in plastic)
, Nick going to the doctor for a long denied back issue, another school field trip, etc.
The last weekend in February we had a Chocolate and Wine Tasting with some of our good friends from church. 
We’d originally invited three families over, but one family had The Plague and couldn’t attend, which turned out to be a good thing, as our kitchen couldn’t hold any more people than we did. 
We provided the chocolate, the wine, and the ice cream for the event.
Another family brought a bunch of different toppings for the kids ice cream and the the third family brought their Keurig and a billion drink options. 
We ate quite a bit less chocolate than we thought, no one drank wine besides Nick & I, and we didn’t put too much of a dent in the other drinks. A fabulous time was had by all. We talked and played games and talked some more. It was a great night! :)
The next night we drove way way way out of town for a party at Nick’s co-worker’s “house.” Well, no one told me, but the co-worker was building his own house. 
So far he’s got a giant garage/workshop with a cute little apartment tucked inside for them to live while the actual house building goes on. 
The kids had a great time playing in the giant dirt pile. David got to play with his first friend from our town who we’d lost contact with over the years (they actually have a friend in common, it turns out, and they bonded over talking about her). 
Nick enjoyed talking with his co-workers. 
I fed Greg. He was starving. 
The next Monday I took Greg to the park in the morning
, then finally made it to a Bull’s Eye Forum at David’s GT program (here they take the kids out of school one day a week and bus them over to another school; they call it T.A.R.G.E.T., which thoroughly confuses everyone that’s ever heard of the Big Red Store). 
They were supposed to have one every month, but they skipped September, the kids were out of school that Monday in October, I missed November, then they skipped January. So this was my first one. I got to sit with Ben’s best friend’s grandma, which was fun. The classes took turns going on stage and presenting something. Naturally David’s class went last. He was dressed as a macrobiotic organism, eating away at bits of the pond they had on stage. :) 
It was fun. :) That night Greg got a chance to go to scouts with the big kids while I headed out to help with Box Top sorting for PTA (we go out for margaritas & dinner. It’s a good night out.).
Tuesday ran as normal, Greg in MDO school, me volunteering at the school library. That afternoon we had an unexpected playdate with some random neighborhood children. It didn’t go well. We had to ask them not to come back. :( It was not a pleasant experience. Wednesday we had a busy day. Our neighbors came over for coffee, the kids ran around & played. Then we had David’s best friend over for the afternoon and Ben had dance class. That night we opened up our new game, Carcassone, and tried it out.
We really enjoyed it and it was in some ways easier to play than Settlers, which meant Greg could play alone rather than paired up with me. He love that. We got the Big Box Set, which means we got a whole bunch of expansions for the game (which we’ve yet to try, but we’re excited about playing some during Spring Break).
Thursday was March 1st, which is Nick and I’s dating anniversary. Longtime followers of the blog know that this usually means one thing: disaster. I don’t know what it is, but every year something terrible happens and we can’t have our date. This year’s calamity: we totally forgot our anniversary. Hahahaha. It was our 15th anniversary and we totally forgot to plan something. We ended up waiting for the weekend. The rest of Thursday wasn’t terribly eventful: I met the kids at school with a snack and let them play on the playground for a while, which they loved.
Friday we had another day at playgroup. This time we had added bonus friends unexpectedly:
Surprise! It’s Caroline from school!
Afterwards I took Greg and Kya on a date to our favorite pizza buffet:
That night we had dinner with my parents, who were in town. The kids loved having my mom’s version of Strawberry Shortcake (which involves angel food cake instead of actual biscuits):
Nick’s parents took David for a couple nights and my parents took the other two Saturday night. We were going to try the new Chinese place in town, but I wasn’t in the mood for Chinese, so we went to Chili’s instead. 
Nick’s food was lovely, but my Shiner Bock BBQ burger tasted like guess what? Teriyaki sauce. It was hugely disappointing. It did not occur to us to ask the waiter to take a photo of us for our anniversary. 
We were exhausted from all of February, so instead of doing anything exciting we went home and started our giant catch-up on watching Castle (we’d not started the current season yet). Sunday Nick got up and started all his regular schedule (grocery shopping, the gym, then up to work), while I headed out and picked up kids from various places, stopping to chat and have tours and help with stuff along the way. We didn’t get home til nearly 5pm.
That brings us up to the current week. 
Monday was another regular day. It seems like lately I’m exhausted a lot (I’ve been in a mini flare), so I ended up resting most of the day. Greg watched Power Rangers (he’s obsessed) and then acted it out for me afterwards while I’m doing laundry or something. We went on a short walk and pulled weeds in the yard. Very quiet stuff, Mondays are. Tuesday was a fairly regular Tuesday as well: Greg at MDO, me at PTA board meeting, then volunteering in the library. After school was piano lessons. (I apparently don’t take photos on “boring” days.) Yesterday was pretty quiet, too. We thought a friend was coming to take Greg off for some fun, but we never heard from her, so we did our own thing. We took a long walk, looking for signs of spring, then had a serendipitous “signs of spring” day at the library story time as well. Then I did some housework while Greg tinkered around, then we watched some more Power Rangers (did you know there’s different kinds, not just different colors, but whole different kinds of teams? I did not. It’s been exciting. No, really. Those costumes the monsters wear are spectacularly bad. I’m enjoying it.) Today was likewise fairly quiet. Greg went to MDO, I ran some errands and did some housework. I am really enjoying some quiet after all those weeks of GOGOGO. It gives me time to catch up on my Words With Friends games and setting up the iPhone (did I mention that? No. We upgraded our phone plan finally, after ages of paying extra and yet more extra for texts and photo mail people kept sending us. I got a white iPhone 4; Nick stuck with his regular phone. The iPhone has had more of a learning curve than I was expecting.)
And now we’re all up to date. (This really took me just about all day to do, sadly) Whee!
5.The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
6. Chasing Fire by Suzanne Collins
7. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
8. Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese
9. House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo
10. Watcher in the Woods by Robert Liparulo
At some point last week, umm…Tuesday, I guess it was, I had one of those Big Giant Weird Episodes. Kids were home, blood pressure machine was brought to me in the moment, and I discovered to my utter horror that my blood pressure was way above normal and into the “Oh Wow, I Might Die From This” level of blood pressure. I say “discovered” as if it happened right them, but in the moment numbers meant absolutely nothing to me, I just saw big ones and went “lightbulb!” and moved on with my day, as it was both a piano lesson day and the day that we metaphorically toured the junior high with my eldest son. There will be another post with pictures and meanderings about that subject another day, perhaps later in the week when I’m not tremendously busy with the 12 billion things the school scheduled this week (why do they do it like that?!?!?!).
In any case, I called around and tried to report this info to various doctors the next morning. My primary care doctor was the only one that responded in a timely manner and provided a quick fix, too, so he gets Extra Bonus Awesome points. I followed the program provided, having been following it diligently the last week, and am happy to report that my blood pressure is back in the Land of the Living range. I’ve stopped being tremendously dizzy all the time. I am not nauseated all the time. My Headache of Doom gradually went down to the level of Rather Annoying Daily Occurrence instead of OH MY GOD, MY HEAD. Best of all I’m able to read again.
So I spent three days doing practically nothing besides luxuriating in reading (well, some laundry and dishes) and marveling on the fact that I waited so long to read The Hunger Games trilogy. Greg had pink eye, so he wasn’t feeling up to much either.
To sum up: I am not dead. I am terribly busy. Some day in the future there will be actual updates with pictures again, if I ever find my camera. Woo hoo.
Sorry about last week, y’all. Didn’t mean to scare/worry anyone. I was having some problems with the meds I was on and apparently it wasn’t just the head-poundingness that was a side effect, but the depression as well. I got a call from the neurologists office, apologizing for having not called me back sooner (my message went astray and the doctor was off at a conference). The told me to stop the new meds immediately and they’d call me back this week with info about NEW new meds, et al. So I stopped the old new meds, felt a bit better Saturday, but had to stay home for the weekend to attend a sick boyo. Yesterday I was doing all right, but today I feel weird again. Not so weird as last week weird, just different. So I’m taking things one day at a time and trying to be easier on myself when stuff doesn’t get done on the schedule I set for myself. And now I’m going to go wander off and do something that requires less concentration because talking/typing seems not to be my strong suit today. *waves at the internet*
I’ve been writing this post in my head all day. The long and short of it is this: it’s February, I’m depressed, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, and instead of fighting it I’m going to go with the flow and just let it be this week. I’m tired of not knowing what’s wrong with me, tired of pulling over the car to cry every time I’ve dropped the children off somewhere and I’m finally alone, tired of being so freaking tired, tired of the headaches, the buzzing and pounding in my head, worrying, and everything else in the universe. And since there’s not anything to be done about it, I’m going to hole up in my house with some good books, some hot tea, some snuggly children, and ignore everything for a while. See you around when my head is back in a better place. xoxo, me.
Yesterday was the last day of my personal challenge. I will admit that I was a little sad that no one joined me on it. Oh well, moving on.
Here’s a round up of areas that I worked on that I somehow managed not to post photos of earlier in the process. Some were places I didn’t have finished on time and others were places I didn’t have on the list but did anyway.
The hallway bathroom I didn’t take any before photos of. It didn’t look a whole lot different. Here it is with its new Reveille:
Here are the handsome new towels my mom got the boys:
And here are the tags for the boys. David is the crocodile, Ben is the love animals, and Greg is the cat.
The desk area hasn’t changed a lot since the middle of things, but it’s still a work in progress, here it is mid process:
The desk area now:
(the main change: I sent away the paper file box and brought back in the plastic box because it’s sturdier in the long run, then piled up the stuff over there while I’m working on sorting through it all. The sorting is taking forever because I haven’t had enough time to dedicate to it yet.)
The shelving units in my room before: super crowded.
The shelving units after:
(I have actually only gotten rid of a small pile of papers and four books. The rest just got re-sorted back to the places they were meant to be living in the first place.)
David’s room, mid process. Ah, it looked so clean. Too bad you couldn’t see all the stuff on his bed.
David’s room now: His aunt April donated an old computer for his use. It doesn’t have wireless access to the internet, so unless a parent gives him the super-long ethernet cable, there’s no internet in his bedroom. But still, he can write papers, play a certain subset of his computer games, use iTunes, and draw lots and lots of weird stuff with the mouse. Plus there’s an awesome outer space screen saver. The other half of his desk is covered in his current Lego battle.
Ben & Greg’s room mid-process:
Greg and Ben’s room now: The matching chairs came FREE from the garage, much to my happiness. Greg decided he was finally tired of the Moon Sand mess, so out that went. One of the teachers at school, who is mom to 2 ladies that have taught Ben & Greg, overheard of my yearning for a second computer for the house for boy use, and showed up one day during my volunteer hours up there with a computer very, very similar to the one April had given us for the big boy. (I know this sounds confusing “second computer.” When I had been talking about it, April hadn’t given us the one in D’s room yet. And then once she did he rejected it because of the lack of internet issue. BUT, once the little kids got and enthusiastically embraced their new-to-them computer, he was all “whatever happened to that other one?” and so now both rooms have one. Little kids room has one that’s more disabled for little kid use, chock full of educational games. Big kids room has a regular one that we’ll put big kid stuff on.)
The top of the dryer wasn’t on the list, but it should have been. Before: mess, mess, mess.
The top of the dryer, now: nice! (sorry for the angle change there!)
The other side of the laundry room has new labels for things (soap & different recycling bins), printed for free from my computer on regular computer paper and laminated with clear contact paper I had on hand as well.
The piano area before: mess, mess, mess.
The piano area after: I showed you where the books ended up, but not how the piano area looks now. I just added a stack off boxes from elsewhere, the snow dragon, and a strand of music garland from my first Homecoming mum (what, don’t look at me like that. Yes, it’s 22 years old. It’s plastic. Whee!)
And that’s all folks. I am done! Well, not really, as there’s always more to do, but I am done having a project a day all week long. It’ll be nice to just take things slowly again. 
It’s the last day of the challenge and today I’m supposed to work on my bathroom towel shelf. I’d asked in advance for my dad to bring his power hammer up for me, but he thought it was already here so he didn’t bring it, and guess what? It wasn’t here. Still, I picked out the wood I want to use for the shelves, picked out the wood that I need for holding the shelves up, and have marked where I want the shelves to go. I just have to wait on the drill, which won’t come until he does.
So since that’s not working out for me (and really, has anything this month?) I’m back to working on memory albums today in the short amount of time I have without meetings or volunteer work or eating (which really just amounts to an hour, sadly).
I have no idea what day I’m supposed to be on at this point in the challenge. I do know that I was supposed to work on the kids bathroom today, spiffying it up. I don’t have anything to do in there, though. I reorganized just as the challenge started, prompted by my husband who couldn’t find sheets (why was he looking for them? I don’t know! I found several of his pairs of workout shorts in there, though, so he was really happy.). My mom bought the kids new towels last week and I ironed tags on them so they know which one belongs to each of them (and I know which kid belongs to the one left on the floor, bwahaha). So new towels ftw! Other than that the bathroom needs some major love and there’s not energy or money to do it with right now. I have made a list, however for future reference:
Also, at some point I skipped finishing the front hallway closet, so that’s what I am actually working on today. (I tried a new photo system upload today, so you have to click a photo to get to the slideshow. If you want texty details, click permalink and it’ll take you to those. I don’t think I’ll use this system again, but it was too much work to redo today.)
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