Another perspective

Remember the day I wrote this post? The one about my chasing of the dog, braless, through our neighborhood? Lucy also wrote a journal entry about it in school that day. I asked her if she minded me sharing it with my friends and she said to go for it!

Here is what happened that day from Lucy’s perspective:




"Me Mom and Bud where sad becuse my dog Haley is not suapost to go near the cars in front. When we opened the gate she ran"




"away. I burst into tears. Mom cuold not cache her But then mom told me to go and get her leash."





"Mom chuate her."

**************************************
Her few sentences say a lot to me. I was not at all sad that the dog got out. I was straight up pissed. She had ruined my morning. Remember how I turned around to just leave her? If something would have happened, these kids would have been devastated. This is an example for me. I say that I put my kids first in everything I do, but in this situation (and many others) my emotions were guiding me. I was only thinking in the moment, and not at all about the outcome. I know this is a pretty mild example, but it sure did get me thinking.

I’ve got the kids journaling this summer and it’s not just to keep them in practice with writing. Their thoughts mean a lot to me. If they are seeing things differently than I am; getting different things out of different situations…I want to know about it. I want to learn from it.

And if I learn nothing, at least I will be entertained.

Catching Up...bullet style

• Bud slept in his own room for the first time last night. He and Lucy, being so close, have shared a room since she was about 1. And when Liv was ready to move out of our room, we gave all 3 kids the master bedroom and moved in to the nursery while Hub worked (slowly) on converting our upstairs in to 3 bedrooms. It’s been 2 years now, and while the kids enjoyed being together (MOST of the time), it was time to get Bud away from the girls. We were pretty close to being able to hang some drywall and paint and get Bud upstairs, but with FIL’s room now standing empty, we decided to move Bud back there. Basically, he is a 7 year old with his own apartment. The stipulation is that the girls are allowed back there for TV and to play, but he has a nice area to be all his. It was tough on me to have my baby on the other side of the house. In fact, I may have asked Hub to go pick up a baby monitor (he may have declined). Bud woke up at 6 this morning, and settled in to the recliner. I woke up at 7 to find him watching Star Wars, happy as a clam. So far, he likes having his own room. Lucy was nervous about sleeping without her big brother, but rather enjoyed being the boss of the room.
• The big kids started summer camp today. My job gives a stipend per kid per month, and it works out to cover just about 4 days, so I signed them up Monday through Thursday this week to take full advantage of my June allowance. Apparently, drop off didn’t go so well because Bud and Lucy are not in the same room as we thought they’d be. Lucy was devastated.
• We are planning on putting the pink color in to Lu’s hair tonight though, so hopefully, that will make her feel better. I’m not sure the color is going to take in her dark silky hair, but we are going to try. I’m not willing to bleach it, so I’ve been scoping out feathers and tinsel extensions on etsy. One way or another, this girl is going to have cool summer hair. (I’m bound and determined to have cool summer hair as well) She’s also been saving her money to go to the salon for a real pedicure. I don’t know whose daughter she is sometimes.
• The baby will be 3 in 4 weeks. My baby. 3. This sort of make me want to curl up in a ball. This is the longest span of time since I began having children that I have not been pregnant. When I think of Lu being not quite 3 when Liv was born, compared to Liv being not quite 3 now…it seems so weird. I don’t really know how to describe it. I sort of feel a void, but I also feel so far away from that crazy infant period that I’m not sure I’d ever really want to go back. I’d like it if Liv could stop growing up now, please.
• Liv’s birthday always satisfies me a bit though because for about 3 weeks when I’m asked my kids ages, they are quite evenly spaced. This is crazy I know, but I like to say “They are 3, 5 and 7.” It satisfies some weird OCD tendency inside of me. Plus, even now people raise an eyebrow over Bud and Lucy being so close in age. It makes me stabby.
• I worked my very last day ever in my actual workplace (as in, not my home office) last Thursday. One of the stipulations of the work from home situation was that I visit the site one day a week to maintain connectivity and such. Then this project came along, and I was spending 90 days in the office, which sucked on an epic level. A few weeks ago, a reorganization was announced though, and all of the people I used to support here, were redeployed to another line of business. I now support no one in that site—or in this state for that matter. And with that being said, I am home for good and breathing a huge sigh of relief as our life gets back to normal. It’s kind of amazing how different life became for us because of me being here and how incredibly hard it was for us to adjust to me being back in the office. That is a post for another day though.

Wordless Wednesday-Father's Day 2011

A bright spot in an otherwise crappy Father's Day. My Family.

Anatomy of a Garden: Part 1

I was worried that with the weather forecast for this past weekend as well as the many many things we had going on we would not be able to get the garden planted. It’s was already about a week later than I’d have liked for it to be, so I knew that it was Saturday, or never. I talked Hub in to going to buy the plants on Friday night, as well as 1.5 yards of dirt and compost. He’d already dug to make the garden bigger than it was last year, but we definitely needed dirt. He knew that I’d be planting, rain or shine on Saturday so he, Bud and BIL shoveled all the dirt in at around 10PM Friday night.

This is what it looked like in the morning after about 4 hours of rain:




To keep the plants safe, Bud allowed us to store all of our plants overnight in his clubhouse:




This is how you know it is his clubhouse:
girls drule and stink like a but


Lucy thought it would be a great idea to make some markers for the garden with some of her craft sticks:



Here she is inspecting the plants to make sure we had a stick for everything:




Haley thought it might be fun to dig in the dirt. (I thought not):



Lu took my picture before she decided to go inside because it was too wet and muddy:




I had an idea in my head of how I wanted things to be laid out, but you never really know about these things until you do it. I already have chives in the corner by the fence, so I knew that my onions and garlic should go over there, and I wanted the things that grow tall along the back of the fence. The rest was kind of a crapshoot, but I laid it out as best as I could before I started digging.




When I was about halfway done, I acquired a very cute blonde helper. Who wore her winter boots. Because she did not want muddy toes.





Finally, everything was in the ground! Aren’t Lucy’s markers a nice touch?



The girls and I went to a baptism yesterday morning, and then I took Lucy to a birthday party. I came home to find the edges complete, and a nice dog-blocking fence. Yay for Hub! (now he just needs to work on the rest of the mud pityard)

Flappy

**I wrote this on 5/12 and never posted it because Blogger was down**

My day started badly. Very badly. Never mind that I’d stayed up too late reading last night because I am still annoyingly on Pacific Standard time and I was exhausted, but I had to get Hub up and out the door, so he could be back in time to put the kids on the bus so I could go in for day 2 of my 90 days in the office. It turned out though that in order to be back in time to get FIL to his appointment today, Hub would have had to leave for his job much sooner. And so, I stayed back to put the kids on the bus and to make it in to the office by 9:30 or so.

I wait until the very last minute to get dressed, and at the moment that I am completely naked in my bedroom, the big kids start screaming from the driveway. “Haley got out!! Haley got out!” I hear them, but I don’t move right away. What is my option here? Chase her? Let her go? I’m tired, do I really care? As the screams outside grow more frantic though, I throw on jeans and the t shirt I slept in, and run outside. Haley is zig-zagging back and forth from our side of the street to the neighbors across. The big kids are jumping and screaming “she’s going to get kiiiiiiled!!!!” She is a maniac. One neighbor tries to lure her with bones, and you can almost see Haley laugh in her face. I cross the street and call to her, so of course she bolts. We live 2 houses from the corner of a busy-ish street, and that is right where she headed. She wants to chase the cars! I start after her as she makes her way around the corner. It’s only as I’m walking and the cars were speeding past me that I realized I’d forgotten my bra. So there I was, running down the road in a flimsy t-shirt with my boobs ablaze for everyone to see. People who were likely driving their kids to school. People who might know me.

I have a bit of dignity, you know, and really, after nursing 3 kids, I should not be seen anywhere braless. Plus, I’d basically left my kids home alone while I chased her, which was maybe not the best decision in the world. So I say to myself “Screw this. She has tags and she’s micro-chipped. I’ll come back with the car.” And I turn around. And good old Haley turns around and followed me. She did! All the way home! And when we get to our driveway, she bolts again, all the way down the street.

I call to Lucy to grab me her leash. Our neighbors across the street are watching the kids and I go after her. We have new next door neighbors with a German shepherd who is Haley’s age. I’ve not had much interaction with them because they are impossibly young and cute brand new 1st time homeowners and they make me feel old, but of course, I run in to the guy walking his dog. We exchange quick pleasantries and I, already a sweaty mess from this ordeal feel myself turning red as I imagine him going home to tell his fiancé all about my flappy boobs. I see Haley stop a few houses down, so I speed up. Oh! She stopped so she could poop on someone’s lawn. SPLENDID. When I get to her, the someone who the lawn belongs to is staring at me from her kitchen window. Decidedly not happy. I give her a sheepish grin and corner the dog in her side yard where she is eating flowers, and slip the leash around her neck.

She happily walks me home as if everything that happened was normal. A neighbor drives up in a car to ask if I’m going to beat her when we get home. Seriously. I laugh and say that nope, I will leave that to Hub, thinking “Oh really? You got JOKES right now motherfucker??” She is home in time for the bus to arrive, so we see the kids off, I clean myself up and finish getting dressed, get a bag to clean up the poop, and get Liv in the car and drive to the lawn Haley pooped on. Of course, the lady is no longer perched in her window, so I don’t feel as redeemed as I’d have liked, but, at least the poop is gone. We turn around and I stop briefly in our driveway to fling the bag of poop in to our yard.

Finally I’m on my way to work. I neglect to tell Hub any of this until he calls to ask about the poop bag in the yard. Oh, and to tell me that FIL wasn’t up to going to his appointment, so he could have actually waited to go to work. I decide to not blow a gasket, and instead simply tell him that the dog got out and pooped where she shouldn’t have, so I cleaned it up on my way out.

That’s all he needs to know. Besides, I’m sure he’ll hear all about it from the neighbors anyway.