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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Rita Mita bo Bita, Fee Fi fo Fita

Texas and Louisiana, you are on my mind a lot today. I'll have to bring my credit card to the retreat so that I can check the news periodically on their little Internet kiosk. (that's my EXCUSE for using the internet kiosk anyway. But seriously, I would hate to have to wait till Sunday evening to find out how things are down there.)

Also, finally a hurricane season that gets to R, and they don't use Rachel like I've always kind of hoped they would. *miffed* How else am I ever going to have any notoriety, stick-in-the-mud that I am?

Here's hoping that Rita yawns and decides Texas is boring and she'd rather just turn into an annoying little misty drizzle so that she can at least tick off all the news people who thought they were about to make their careers in this one story.

I'm feeling better (again). We took a mental health day in school today -- which means the kids practiced their Awana verses and then watched the complete Schoolhouse Rock DVD. No printing practice, even! Remember walking into history class and seeing the lights off and the TV on its stand in front of the room? I just have to recreate that feeling for them occasionally. You know, so they don't feel deprived on account of not getting a public-school education. :)

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

why I'm not around

I don't feel exactly bad. Life's OK. I just don't feel particularly frothy, witty, theological (or any kind of logical), or funny, and generally I have to at least think I'm one of the above if I'm going to post here regularly. Instead, I feel blah. I'm in the kind of mood I look at myself and see a person who is am a bad wife, a really bad housekeeper (lost not only the water bill earlier this month but also the DMV registration bill for one of our cars; also, the laundry pile is beginning to grow and the floors are screaming WASH ME PLEASE and I'm ignoring them, because in order to appease them I'd have to also dig through all the ... STUFF ... sitting on them, and before I can do that I have to organize so that I have room to put things away, and before THAT -- you see how it goes), spiritually blah, ten pounds heavier than I was six months ago, and generally a flop as a person in general. I'm hopeful that the Christian ladies' retreat I'm heading for this weekend will help with at least some of the above. I think I need a little kick in the pants from God. Plus, there will be six meals for which I do not have to shop, plan, cook, or clean up. Man, I feel better already.

and boy do I need it

I'm going to a Christian ladies' retreat this weekend. The timing is perfect -- not because (as is so commonly discussed among women, and which actually sort of torques me off) I need a weekend break from my family. Although the idea of six meals for which I do not have to shop, plan, cook, or clean up has a certain appeal. No, it's because I've been feeling spiritually flat as a pancake lately. Not dead, not empty -- just kind of la di da bored. I'm hoping that one way or another, a weekend of study, praise, and worship will give me a bit of a jolt.

And here's another thing I need. It's actually a favor from all of you. What makes you weird? Is there anything you do or used to do as a kid that was... a little different? Bonus points if a) you thought everyone did what you did but boy were you wrong or b) you had tics or oddities as a child and outgrew them. This weird mom of some non-average kids needs a bit of help remembering that normal is just a wash setting on her dishwasher. It would help my sanity. :)

I'll start. Many of you know (because I think I've talked about it here before, but maybe not) that I see words in my head when I hear speech. (Hi, I'm Rachel, and I see words in my head). It's like -- a transcript, if you will, or subtitles, of everything I hear, and it's always happening. Sometimes it flashes up all at once; usually it comes up one word at a time; occasionally (especially when I'm talking) one letter at a time, like typing. There are... fonts involved. And occasionally colors. I have a theory: I am a visual learner, this I know, which is why I'm a good speller. I think that this seeing-words thing (which I can not remember ever NOT doing) is my brain's way of making me remember what I hear. If I don't visualize the words (as in, if I'm sidetracked or very busy), I don't remember what was said, and then I get things like my husband saying, "I TOLD you I was going to work on his car this weekend," and I have to kind of just fake it and go, "oh yeah. Of course you told me; silly me, I forgot." I was all of about twenty-eight years old when I found out that I was the only person I know of (besides Anne Shirley) who does this. I thought everyone did, until one memorable morning when I mentioned it to T in a matter-of-fact sort of way and he started slowly...backing...away from me.

Also, for years, I couldn't sleep if anything was touching my face. Hair -- sheet -- hand -- nothing. It gave me a sort of cold-chills feeling that wasn't exactly cold chills. I did eventually get over that, but until I was married I thought nobody could sleep with something touching his/her face. And I can't stand the feeling of taking an acrylic sweater (or egads, an afghan -- I beg the kids to do the afghans) out of the washing machine, or of erasing a chalkboard. This last is a new one. I do it, but I get chills up and down my spine every time.

So. If you haven't fled yet (and I didn't even mention what I see in my brain when nobody's talking!*)... add your contributions in the comments. Please? It always helps me feel better to know I'm not the only one; doesn't that work for you too?

(*It's random words. Serendipity. Oglethorpe. ending. heavily. multitudinous. I stopped typing/actively thinking, and those were the words that came to mind just then.)

Thursday, September 15, 2005

moving on

Things are looking up. T seems back to normal (I think he really was just sick), LT was asleep at eleven last night (although he was awakened by a bloody nose this morning), we're being proactively very careful about using gas to help with the money problem, and mostly I just wanted to bump that gripe-fest of a post away from the top slot on my blog.

When I come up with some actual content to replace it, I'll let you know.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

things I worry about late at night

• LT's bedtime anxiety has returned. Three nights in a row he's been unable to get to sleep till really late because he's worried.
• T is either sick or depressed or both, except that I think maybe he believes that Real Men Don't Get Depressed. Actually, that's doing him a disservice; he'd be willing to admit depression if he honestly thought that was what was wrong. I just don't know if he's willing to honestly think that's what's wrong. ;)
• Money. Even when I think there's nothing to worry about, I can always fall back on good old Money. Especially when our gasoline budget has completely swallowed up our grocery budget, and if it weren't for Barbie the tenant next door, whose rent is supposed to be paying sundry credit card bills, we'd be, I dunno, eating grass until gas prices go back down. If they ever do.
• LT has a new Tourette-ish tic after having been pretty much tic-free for months.
• C has started to do this weird snorting thing which she says she "feels like she has to do". I resolutely refuse to think about the fact that this is similar to how LT's Tourette-ish symptoms started, tra la la.
• My mother-in-law
• New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast
• All the usual stuff like terrorism, North Korea, my dad's health, my own sanity, whether my kids will turn out normally or whether I will damage them in some irremediable way, all the stupid things I've done or said and whether the witnesses to said stupid things think of them every time they see me.... you know. Normal everyday Nameless Dread sort of stuff.

I guess that's all. I guess that's probably enough, too. The thing is, I am generally not a worrier. Generally I'm way too spiritual for that. (HA HA HA THAT WAS A JOKE. Did you laugh? Hee hee. I did. Almost.) No, seriously, generally I just try to look on the positive side and all that happy sort of thing, and truly I do trust in God to handle my issues, most of the time. But sometimes when things start to happen, especially Thing One on that list up there, for some reason my usual sunny outlook starts to get submerged, and worries ensue.

I suppose, if I'm to maintain my Miss Annoying Optimist title, I should make a list of things that don't worry me, while I'm at it.

• Both kids are doing really well in school stuff, and it's a blast teaching them.
  
• Our household is full of love.
  
• Our house is intact and my husband has a good job. We have all our faculties and are reasonably healthy. (sometimes you have to go back to the very basics, no?)
  
• The Nikon still works just fine.
  
• I just spent an hour reading funny stories and poems with my son, who has decided to lay off the Hardy Boys and get back into the Ramona books, just because he missed Ramona and Henry and Beezus, and they're so funny.
  
• I have a daughter who writes letters for fun. ("Dear Ant [sic] Lamar and Kaitlyn, Thank you for the clothes. I love you. The clothes are all very nice. How are you? How is your day today? Love, C")
  
• After twelve years I can still be taken by surprise when I realize anew how much it is possible to love my husband.
  
• God is faithful, even when I'm an anxious, cranky, crazy wreck.
  

something to make me feel better

I am having a thoroughly cruddy sort of few days, here. Over the weekend the house was a disaster and I had kind of an amateur nervous breakdown about how I suck at what I do and everyone who knows me and is related to me wishes they didn't and weren't and all kinds of fun stuff like that. (Melodrama: It's not just for junior high anymore). Yesterday the kids and I worked hard on the house and made some serious improvements. Today we were going to continue, and are, sort of, except that I feel really ill, so our efforts at Operation Regain Mommy's Sanity are haphazard at best. And there was an emergency with the town water so we've no water to our house at all, which we found out when LT went to flush the potty, and no, he hadn't just done an innocuous little-boy pee. (fortunately we are survivalist freakos who have water stored in our basement, so that, at least, is taken care of, even if it did involve a tiny bit of a hassle).

ANYWAY. All this is to say, if you're ever having this kind of day/weekend/life, it's easy-peasy to get cheered up, all at once, with almost no effort at all. You just have a friend like Valerie who falls in love in a really romantic way and then goes and gets married in a beautiful dress on a lovely Australian spring day and then posts pictures of it in her journal. Thank you so much, Val, for brightening my day. God knew how much I personally needed you to marry that handsome young man and post pictures of the event. ;-)

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

party at Rachel's house

Be prepared for some accounts of serious debauchery; I'm throwing a party.

hee hee.

Seriously, it's going to be a slumber party for three or four very young girls, this weekend. The boys will be gone (at Lick Observatory, or, as C calls it, "Look Observatory", which really makes very good sense), so we can do all the girly stuff we want. This means the evening will include a VHS video of the Royal Ballet performing stories from Beatrix Potter, and maybe the video of Anne of Green Gables, and probably some fingernail painting and maybe even face painting and I don't know what all else. We'll have brownies and ice cream and popcorn, and if C had her way we'd have cookies and our weight in candy as well. We'll probably dance around the living room a little. It's going to be wild, you don't want to miss it. We might even stay up till, I dunno, eleven.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Thunderstorm

We had a HUGE thunderstorm last night. It was really spectacular. It started probably around 2:15 a.m.; LT woke up scared of the thunder and came into our bed where he promptly fell asleep with his hands over his ears. He's been tolerating storms better than he used to but this was some LOUD thunder; I can hardly blame him. I went out on the couch (scary that my baby boy, that little boy who used to cuddle next to me like a comma and nurse, is now so big that there's no room for both his parents and himself in our double bed!) and was actually kept awake by the lightning and thunder. It rained, the power went out, it was all very exciting. C slept through it all until about 7 this morning, when it was either still going or had started up again. By this time T was up getting ready for work so I was back in the bed; it ended up being me and both little ones in there.

--------

Thursday, August 11, 2005

cardboard sign says "yard sale"

We spent the afternoon preparing for tomorrow, when I hope that many obliging people will come to my house and pay staggeringly small amounts of money to haul away things I no longer have space to store. Oh please. Today was such a better day than yesterday, which ended up being one of the few days when I really really WANT a break from my kids. Or, in this case, my kid, but I won't tell you which five-year-old I'm talking about. I had an "I am the worst mother ever" headache (that is to say, a headache brought on by high levels of stress compounded by an excess of yelling), and it took "Ocean's 11" on the DVD player, some sugar-free ice cream, and a drawn-out relaxing discussion in the dark with my husband to make it go away. Then this morning I had him bring C in for a snuggle before he left for work, and by the time we got up I felt much better in every way.

And then of course today was full of that feeling of satisfaction you get when you finish a task. Drat it, why can't I get that same feeling without all the work? How manifestly unfair.

I'll leave you with a short list of seminars which my child or children are fully qualified to teach:

• Bathtime as Recreation
  
• How To Get Completely Sidetracked Without Even Trying
  
• Mud: Its Manufacture and Use
  
• Heart-Melting 101
  
• The Healing Magic of Malapropisms (with labs: Backward Letters and Cute Misspellings)
  
• Construction Workshop: Tall Piles of Stuff You Don't Want To Put Away
  
• Nutrition 17A: How to Convince Grandpa that Pop-Tarts and Sugared Cereal are Good for You
  

Hurry and book now; the conference season is just around the corner.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

I really am more cheerful than this entry would imply

Things I don't want to do today, but must:

• Catch up with laundry, again, before it gets to be too daunting a job
  
• Clean the kitchen. Ugh. One corner of one of our (admittedly generous, for the size of our kitchen) counters is completely taken over by T's clutter. Some of it is stuff that he sets down there and abandons. Most of it is stuff that he sets down somewhere else in the house, but I later corral in "his spot" so that he'll deal with it. Every few months, either I empty the corner into a box and put it in his garage, or he spends an evening going through the pile and putting everything away. Then, for a few days, it's actually worthwhile to clean the kitchen, because I can get it really clean. (Don't think I'm being critical of T here. He's way neater than I am by nature. And yes I've heard of Flylady, BTDT, the thing is that Flylady doesn't account for a beloved spouse whose things are not yours to throw away or mess with too much).
  
• Avoid eating everything in the house. (Yes, Rachel's on 1300 calories a day again. Rachel had a very unhappy scale moment when she got home from Morro Bay* and is determined to regain control. sigh.)
  

*Morro Bay was a wee bit of a disappointment this year. It was nice to see the family (which, let's face it, happens every week at home anyway), and to have T off work, and to have no projects or chores beckoning to us. And the food was, of course, really really good. But the sun never came out, and yet I managed to get one of the worst sunburns of my notably sunburn-ridden career. The campground was really noisy at night, and we were only there for three days/two nights. Worth going, but we're definitely hoping for better weather and stuff next time.

Things that have annoyed me so far this week:

• "Finding Nemo". The kids checked this out of the library and I was reminded yet again why we don't own it. Enough with the "kids know everything, so parents, shut up and quit trying to protect them" nonsense. Sheesh. Yeah, my five-year-old has madd decision-making skillz, doesn't yours?
  
• "Tom and Jerry: The Movie". Ditto with the checked out of the library thing. THEY TALK. Ugh.
  
• The way the National Weather Service keeps teasing us with slightly cooler temperatures, far away in the weekly forecast (ooh! next Tuesday the high temp in the local range is only supposed to be 99!) but then, as the days get closer, the numbers go up. It will be a hundred and five on Christmas, I am convinced of this.
  
• Working hard to help C clean her room so her friends could come over, while C kept getting sidetracked and playing/staring into space (definitely her mother's child, that one), only to have the room destroyed completely within five minutes of the friends' arrival
  
• I had several other things on this list when it was merely floating around in my head, but God has mercifully allowed me to forget them. Thank you.
  

Fortunately, life is still more than good. I've been carving out lots of time for reading (see above re: laundry). Our chapter summaries are done for tonight -- we did them yesterday like good boys and girls. My parents are coming over for supper before Bible study (see above re: cleaning the kitchen). I've been going for nice evening walks, and if I bribe C with a trip to the elementary-school playground, she'll come with me. Things are peachy-keen marriage-wise, like they almost always are, and we haven't had any disasters worse than a pile of books falling off LT's bed and landing on my foot (which is the sort of thing that I think only happens to me). So I can't complain, except sometimes I do anyway because I'm a dork.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better get out of my jammies and wring something productive out of myself.

the round of life Archives | Page 10 of 29

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