Sooo tired

Yesterday was such a strange day. It was the first day of school for others but not for us. In fact, we watched the whole morning routine for the school as it is just down the street. So we saw all the minivan-moms (aka speed demons) barrelling down the street, we heard the buses go by and the noise from the school grounds peaked at 8:30 a.m. It was a strange, strange moment when I realized, no, ‘realized’ isn’t quite the word, when it hit me that my kids weren’t going there.

That was the start of my day. The rest of it was spent smiling, laughing and screaming, all of pure joy and fun. We spent the day at Calaway Park, and I mean the day. I have two nieces that came up too as they don’t start school until next week. The Park is open at 11 a.m. and doesn’t close until 7 p.m. and we had to take 2 vehicles to accommodate all 8 of us (we brought Sweet Pea too). There’s a great rollercoaster that my youngest practically lived on in the afternoon. The line-ups were non-existent because the weather didn’t seem like it was going to be perfect (it was anyway) and being the first day of school for half the city brought the numbers down quite a bit. There’s a lot of rides for many ages and Punk was only ‘too short’ for one ride. The park limits ride-ability to the size of the child and has the limits posted by each ride.

At 5 pm I was ready to go as we’d arrived right at 11 a.m.,and I imagine Sweet Pea was too. It was amazing that at 11 months old he spent 6 hours there and was really, really good. He sat in his stroller, more like slumped as he was a tired babe, and even snoozed in it! He snoozes nowhere, not even in vehicles, so this was great. So my mom and I were sitting on a bench really thinking of ways we could convince the girls we should go now when my dad walked up. We told him our idea and he gives us a smirk and says, ‘well you could go, there’s no stopping you’ … oops, the second vehicle was forgotten as it was thought that we needed both to transport the kids. Uh no, we needed both to transport the two extra adults and a baby *snort*. Ah well. So we left right at 5:15 pm, which is not a good time to leave, but I was really ready. Calgary traffic is mental, it truly is. It’s not the people per se, but just volume itself combined with Calgary’s shitty infrastructure. So it was slow going, but we didn’t make horrible time, just burned a lot of fuel.

The girls didn’t arrive back with Grampa until 7, and pizza arrived shortly after they did, which was grreeat! I haven’t had pizza in a long time.

All-in-all it was a fantastic way to spend a day that would have been spent thinking weirdly about where my kids were last year at this time.

This morning, to hear the buses go by barely registers in my mind.

A little off

I’m off today again. Not physically, my body was betraying me yesterday with a bit of illness, but today all is good again in the system of Schmode. But the mind today is off. I’m still forgetting things like crazy. It’s unreal. I’ve been packing a diaper bag for 11 months now, and of course with 2 others kids before me you’d think I’d be a pro at making sure I have everything to travel with cloth diapers. Hell no, of course not. When my mood is fluctuating like it has been lately, I not only neglect the main source of keeping my sanity (my writing), but my mind stops working in an orderly fashion.

Don’t get me wrong I am no Martha, I am not an organizational guru whatsoever, but I have a system whenever we go somewhere. With cloth diapering there has to be a smidgen more thought than just tossing wipes and disposables in a purse. Nope, it’s quite important to have a change pad so no surfaces become wet. I also carry sealable bags to carry the wet diapers home in. I carry about 3 diapers for a good outing, but each has to be lined properly, then there’s the plastic pants for covering.

I went to my mom’s Wednesday for a visit and to go shopping for patio chairs. I forgot liners in all the diapers, and with a teething baby liners are nicely important. I forgot plastic pants, so we had the one he had on and that was it, and again, with a teething baby it’s also nicely important to have fresh ones. I had no baggie, luckily we were at my mom’s when I changed him so I had access to those.

DAYUM I was braindead – notice I said ‘was’ to try and emphasize, or kid myself, that it’s changing. I’m going out today, and I’ll be damned if anything is going to be missing this time…now where’d I put my keys?

Mundane and not so mundane thought vomit

It’s been a while, I get it, I hate it, but I get it.

We are starting to get into the homeschooling groove and setting up stuff.  We’re chatting about science topics and experiments we’d like to do, and even what math we might be able to push through and others we’d have to pour over.  It’s been an interesting few weeks.  We planned out a special thing that both girls agreed they really wanted to do.  In their old school they had a daily helper.  I’d call it a replacement TA for the day, but I digress (and I’m completely kidding of course).  The daily helper would help out the teacher in little ways, and often got to the head of the line for things as the ‘leader’.  Our daily helper was planned out and even Punk was excited about it.  She’s my more, umm… how do I put this politically correct … screw that, it’s my blog I’ll say what I want; she’s my lazy child.  If she can get out of it, she will, if she can be as slow as possible so that someone else gets frustrated and does it, so be it (side note – both dh and Bing fall for this repeatedly, I however, am much too stubborn and am better planned for time for Punk’s idleness – side note ended).  But she was very willing to help plan and agreed whole heartedly about the ‘jobs’ for the helper.

The neat list they came up with:

• White board eraser
• Librarian – someone who keeps track of that week’s library books
• Mail fetcher – we have super-boxes for our mail
• Calendar girl – no, not pin-up girls, but we’ve decided that we’re going to have a major calendar where each day we’re going to check out the weather, see the date and each month is going to have a new theme.  These themes will be stuff like: Signing month, where we learn the signs associated with the days, weeks and months of the year (and any special holidays), French month, the same as signing but in French, etc.  Plus I’m gathering daily events, sometimes hilarious (did you know today is “National Spumoni Day”?).
• Water plants – only when needed, this isn’t a weekly occurrence so we’ll often skip it.
• Hot Lunch – something the schools did was have optional hot lunch for a decent fee pre-ordered, so the daily helper would pick a friend and go pick it up in the kitchen for their class.  Here, the helper will help make lunch, or at least pick it.
• Sweet Pea helper – through all this we have an 11 month old scootching around (literally scootching, he’s a bum scootcher, not a crawler), so we have to be cognizant at all times of his whereabouts or what he’s doing (aka what he’s into).  So we have a helper for if I’m in the middle of a ‘lesson’ per se.

Fun huh.  You wanna come be my student dontcha *snort*.

So I learned a new thing about Sweet Pea and the sibling connection this week (my thought vomit rambling onto another topic without a smooth transition – are you over it now?).  This past week the girls got to go on the annual camping trip with Grampa.  It’s a trip they look forward to every year as my dad takes his four granddaughters camping and it’s all fun, and “no stinkin rules”.  *ahem*  The only criteria my dad has for taking grandkids is they had to be potty trained during the day completely.  So of course, Sweet Pea didn’t go this year.

He picked them up on the Monday and all was fine and dandy.  Me and the kid had a pretty good day. Then came Tuesday when he was, well just awful.  He woke up super early, crabbed before breakfast, crabbed during breakfast and then screamed bloody murder when I put him down on the floor like normal with his bottle.  So I immediately scooped him up and put him back to bed.  Not a peep came from him as I laid him down, nor when I left the room and closed the door.  He had been up maybe an hour.  He laid in there and played quietly for about an hour and then fell asleep.  Fast forward a couple hours and he wakes up cooing and cutesy, so I scoop him up.  Now, I have learned from him that he needs a few moments of being held, like five minutes, immediately after he’s picked up, just a bit of a cuddle I’d say.  So I lug him around getting his bottle doing a few things and then put him down, where he proceeds again to cry and fuss and have a temper tantrum that I won’t immediately pick him back up.  He refused food, didn’t want his bottle, was clean and dry, and kept spitting out his soother so I put him back to bed … and he wanted to!  It was unreal, he was happy to be back in bed and quieted right down and played quietly again before he snoozed off again.

This went on another 2 days of that same thing.  I thought he was just teething because he is popping another tooth.  It wasn’t until Thursday when my Gramma came out that he actually stayed up more than an hour and played on his own, and she mentioned he probably misses his sisters.  I thought that of course he did, they maul him all the time, so he must miss even that, but it didn’t hit me that it truly was the source of the issue until he saw them again.

Aw man it was so cute, and he was so excited.  Squealing and flapping his arms and giggling when he spotted them coming towards him at the campsite (we meet my dad at a campground on the Friday and camp the weekend with them).  It was so cute.  Of course he wasn’t perfectly back to normal immediately because we were camping and it was stinkin hot, which threw him off a bit.

But Monday came and he was absolutely back to normal, as if the week never happened.  In fact I had to type it out here just to make sure it actually happened like that, it just seems so weird

What this made me realize is how much of a sibling connection children really have.  When we were first adopting, we applied for a sibling pair, and we learned that it is vitally important to keep sibling groups together, no matter the number.  Now I get why.  I truly get it now, yes, children love their parents, and are devastated when separated from them.  But the siblings, siblings are a closer bond, especially in more abusive or neglectful situations because those children ended up relying on each other for what the adults in their lives didn’t, or couldn’t, give them.  Amazing, amazing revelation.

Of course I had this marvelous revelation and then snuck a peek at my local government adoption website where they profile older children, especially sibling groups, and guess what I saw.  A sibling group of 4, ages 10, 8, 6 & 4.  I just cried, I actually cried.  I want to help them all.  I definitely get why Angelina Jolie has adopted three in quick succession.  I wish I could too.

Unfortunately, and I guess fortunately, I think dh is only willing to do one more, but I’ll work him down *snort*.

Lost solace

I do this occasionally where I slink back from the computer’s pressing glare and retreat into the fantasy land of books.  I really don’t feel like a chatty Cathy, or the fact that I thoroughly miss the enjoyment of spewing out my thought vomit onto this screen to clear my brain of its ever fuzziness.  Nothing usually drags me out of this void of any particular significance.  I don’t have an ‘ah-ha’ moment that all of a sudden I feel like chatting.  It never happens like that.  I don’t just wake up one morning and go, ‘oh today is the day I feel like being chatty instead of reading 8 books in a week’, no, it isn’t that easy.  During this time I miss the little things I enjoy, like the solace of my thoughts displayed upon the screen.

Wanna know what got me into writing today?  A wacky comment from a random reader that cracked me right up.  Nothing profoundly funny, but he must’ve been on the front page and noticed a smattering of tags that are used on WordPress blogs.  Of course everybody and their dog uses the word ‘random’ at some point to help a reader visualize that the blog they are reading truly has no distinct tag easily conjured.  I didn’t want to keep using the damn thing since I used it in my blog’s title already.  In fact I rarely use the word ‘random’ at all because it, like the word ‘über’ and ‘doh!’, has been so overused that I loathe to utter it from my mouth or spell it with my fingers.

When I came up with my tags, they represented me, pretty much to a tee.  So this reader commented that I was the single blogger using the tag “Thought Vomit”.  In fact, I’ve had others comment to me before, namely Pam, that it may be a fairly original tag.

See?  I told you there was no rhyme or reason to why I was posting again.

Thought Vomit, it seems to have returned.  Welcome to my spewing.

I stand corrected

You know that when a newspaper has a misprint of some sort, or they got the story wrong, or some how, some way, they totally messed up, they tend to put this teensy little itty-bitty retraction at the bottom corner of some unspoken page because they don’t want to admit that they were completely off base.

Well let me tell ya, that’s not going to be me.  I’m going to shout it from the rooftops … okay, not seriously, I’m just going to put it in print online, in a very public way that I was oh so wrong.

The other day, dh asked me a question, that truly wasn’t looking for an answer, but was one of those moments where it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission.  He asked me, do I mind?  Of course I minded, he had asked his parents, of whom I just spent my “holiday” with reluctantly, to come to our house and help us pour concrete.  I was so put out, I was quite upset that he didn’t even ask.

It is not easy to say, but I was completely wrong.  Sure my garden is missing a lot more than just weeds after she lovingly weeded my garden while I worked pouring concrete, but she did it, so I won’t ever complain.  Sure, she will not eat venison that is out of my freezer, but she’s cooked all of our suppers while I pour concrete.  Sure, my kids have gotten away with a lot more than they normally would have, and Sweet Pea has been held more than normal, but I was able to pour half the concrete with dh and my fil, while she watched over the kids.

She worked her ass off, needless to say, and I’m … I’m … well, I don’t know, I feel sheepish.  I considered her an avoider of work, but no, she avoids work she doesn’t understand and does stuff she does understand, which is watching kids and feeding people.  It’s her thing.

I must have sounded so awful the previous day.  I don’t recant my words, I won’t do that as they were words that described the feeling of the moment.  But today they are wrong.  Yes, my ils do drive me batty sometimes, and sure I wouldn’t like to spend too many weekends with them, but dammit, they have helped us out so much this weekend, I am just so thankful that they were here.

Shit, I wrote that out and it can’t be taken back, just don’t tell dh *snort*.