“Thought I should let you know, I’m failing Recorder…the only one who can’t do ‘Hot Cross Buns.’”
My mind raced. Recorder–some sort of online speed spelling bee? Yet another homework checklist organizer?
(I haven’t begun to discuss the adjustments we’ve made during our transformation from homeschooling to public school, but this is a grand example.)
Joseph continued, patiently, “When you achieve your goal, they tie a tiny white string to the end of it and then everyone knows you are a White Belt.”
I reel. What are we tying a string to, and what’s this about a white belt because the last time I checked, nobody has done Karate since kindergarten.
“Mom,” he drones in that just-turned-ten kind of voice, “That blue plastic thing Grandad bought me from Target when he was trying to find all the school supplies because you hadn’t moved here yet. That’s the recorder and we play it for music class.”
He continued to regale on the “fancy” Japanese recorders brandished by all classmates other than a suffering fellow called “Henry” who was left to languish with an older brother’s cast-off gray recorder which was, in Joseph’s astute estimation, “more cheap” than his own blue Target option and smelled of apple sauce.
“Do you think it’s bad that I’m the only one in the Fourth Grade who can’t play ‘Hot Cross Buns?’” he asked, semi-concerned, “Because Mr. A told me today after I tried to play it that I needed a lot more practice. I mean he said a lot more practice, Mom.”
“I didn’t even know you were playing any musical instruments at all. How long have you been working on this recorder anyway?” I ask, the panic settling in.
“Eight weeks or so I guess. Most people are on, like, song number 10, somethin’ ’bout some saints marching.”
This doesn’t sounds good. This sounds like an “N” in music.
So cut to Friday afternoon. See what I found in his backpack?
Yep.
I am so proud of my white belt.
Now we are off to master “Merrily We Roll Along.”
I was watching some random news channel the other night and learned of 50 or so lamenting Edgar Allen Poe fans waiting for a glimpse of the famed “Poe Toaster,” — a devoted Poe fan who faithfully, (and stealthily), leaves a half bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave in the wee hours of his death day.
This year, however, toaster never showed.
Those poor, poor Poe fans. What happened to the toaster? Did sh/e pass? Consume all the cognac?
Not that I can count 60 fans or anything but the story made me feel quite lousy. That and all the emails from so many of you worried that I might have succumbed to some contagion or simply not survived the move…
I know it appears I am making light of the situation, but I truly feel horrible. I have been a terrible friend to many of you and all I can say is that I am sorry and I hope you can forgive me. I’ll be revealing more of what went on during the past five months and what God is teaching me through it once I have sorted it out a bit further.
In the meantime, I leave you with a sketchy timeline of a few momentous occurrences you have missed.
1. We all lived with my brother and his new bride for three months where my children, naturally, relished “sleepin’ like slaves” once again as they shared a bedroom with a cousin. I slept on a couch downstairs and became addicted to Tylenol Cold PM.
Yes, that is a level holding up a mattress next to a train table in a makeshift fort bed.
2. All six of us shared one bathroom with a leaky toilet that required us to wrap towels around the bottom to sop up the watery leakage. Yes, I’d spray a little Clorox around there now and then because the whole thing squeemed me out considerably.
3. Our puppy, Sophie, went into heat. (Just imagine the questions and comments this created, such as “What is that red on her pull-up?” and “Look how popular Sophie has become since we moved! She’s got so many other dogs coming to visit!”)
4. My laptop crashed and I lost EVERYTHING!
5. Since we now live in a town with grand restaurant variety, Edward has developed a love of the bento box!
6. We made an offer on a great cul-de-sac house within walking distance to that school as well as nature preserves and libraries only to have the inspection come back with a promise of toxic black mold.
7. Valiantly I try to homeschool at my brother’s kitchen table but between the puppy heat, house hunting and general homeless craziness, I enroll the boys in an award-winning public school down the street from my brother’s house. Believe me, it’s been interesting.
(I know I just lost all my homeschool readers…)
Yet I am now becoming fluent in IEPs, para-pros and peer helpers…
8. We finally close on a house and move in on Halloween.
9. Because nothing says Christmas like a Sasquatch cookie!
10. Joseph writes an essay for school in which he laments, “I have always felt that something was missing from my life–something small and furry that I can cuddle and take care of.” (Isn’t that why we got the puppy??) Anyhoo, that painful cry resulted in Taco, a fragile, sickly creature who succumbed quite rapidly to some unknown ailment
only to be replaced by Fajita…
A hearty, loud, messy creature who can kick potty pellets 12 feet across the room to the delight of Sophie (the dog) who views them as tasty nuggets of goodness.
11. Before I moved I had this many friends:
But now, I have to start over, which is much, much harder than I thought it would be!
Thanks for sticking with me through all this!
I staged my house to sell. Yes, you know the house–the one with literally thousands of books scattered mindlessly and moths procreating in jars throughout the kitchen next to tadpole colonies.
Yes, believe it or not, this is MY house. I staged it myself…with a little help from a few friends who loaned artwork, lamps, patio furniture and the like.
Just like Lisa LaPorta commands on Designed to Sell.
I recklessly decluttered.
I rented a storage unit and hid all the offensive Little Tykes cars, Little People villages, farms and zoos, Hot Wheels tracks and Star Wars Lego villages.
I organized everyone’s clothes by color.
I threw away half my tupperware and countless useful bug jars in the name of “creating space and giving an illusion of storage.”
(I’ll probably never again own a stuffed egg caddy from the 1970s. Gone forever are the jello molds from the 1960s. I don’t know how I can live without four bundt pans, but I guess I’ll have to learn.)
Yes, I skewered myself in the name of home staging. I planted flowers, edged beds, created herb gardens, spread pine straw, bleached grout, repainted rooms, touched up trim, replaced ovens, purged books, alphabetized canned goods, removed personal photos and children’s artwork–all in the name of home staging so that my house would sell, BY OWNER, in a timely fashion during a less than robust housing market.
I pressure washed that patio myself!
And then I sold my house to one of my dearest friends in all the world who has seen my house with peanut-butter encrusted grout, spider sanatoriums in every corner and endless laundry mountains.
(No, you don’t need me to tell you God has a definite sense of humor, but I do seem to be a frequent vehicle of such a reminder.)
So here I sit the night before the movers arrive–a night when I am supposed to be deciding which items we cannot live without for the next few months versus which which things can go to some random storage unit in South Georgia–now I sit at my computer and sob and sob and sob to leave my friends and my home for eight years, only to return to the home of my youth–a town I haven’t lived in since 1985.
Times, they are a-changin’.
That is certain.
It’s about to get really interesting.
Have you ever had a period of time where life flies at you so fast and furious you feel like that double-eyed fellow in the old Ripley’s museums?
Well, that’s me these days.
We went to pick up Joseph from Space Camp. Here are a few images I captured:
You can just imagine how many people fell over in laughter and just had to have their pictures taken with this fetching sign. I am hoping to use one of them for my Christmas card this year!
After spending three hours at a cutting-edge space-science museum, the most fun was found in some red clay dust found in the parking lot.
Can’t you feel the joy?
Incidentally so far the only questions I’ve gotten from Space Camp involved hippies and a request to see Terminator movies. (Thankfully I can easily handle both those…so much better than last year!)
On the rare book scene, I have succeeded in infesting my house with book lice thanks to an unusually large, and frighteningly old estate acquisition.
Yes, book lice. Should you be so lucky!
I sell books online for my local library system, and that works exceedingly well. I love the ladies who run the store; many are active women in their 70s and 80s who heft book boxes about with aplomb and can tell you the most obscure details about every Southern writer from our area.
Yet the other day I picked up a large collection to sell online and was taken aback to find that one box was brimming with books of an, ahem, incredibly questionable and racy nature.
I mean these ladies are ex-English professors and pillars of the community! The whole thing is troubling to say the least. I can only imagine that they took a quick peek in the box and thought it was brimming with “art books.”
I sealed all the “reading” materials in a box and stuck them in my garage so I could return them to the library. Later that day, I was pulling in the garage and accidentally ran over the materials with the van.
(This was of course accidental…I promise!)
To further protect the precious works, I plunked them in the back of the van and dashed off. One nearly-squashed squirrel later, I found myself whiplashed in the middle of the road screaming to my three children at the top of my lungs, “Close your eyes! Don’t look! Cover your eyes with your hands! Do it now!” while these books shot out of their shoddily-taped box and rocketed all over the back of the van.
Poor Joseph was trying to help. “Mom, I can load them back in the box…let me help! See, I’m already strapped out!”
“No!” I panicked. “No, seal your eyes! Please, please!”
I hastily scrambled in the back seat and threw the books back in the box. I then drove straight to where I was meeting H and dumped the books off with him.
I did what any self-respecting wife would have done. I let him take those books back to the library.
And if you want to know what is particularly funny about H’s interchange with the library ladies when dropping off “the box,” you’ll have to email me for details.
Believe it, or not!
Isn’t it fascinating when you see your child leaping forward developmentally with apparent abandon? That is when I know God is working mightily.
The past two weeks have been such for Edward.
Last week we went swimming with two slightly older friends–one who is a fairly skilled diver and swimmer. Edward watched this friend absentmindedly, attempted dives halfheartedly, and later annoyed the friends by splashing them and simultaneously blathering “blah blah blah” in an cloying voice.
I was so thrilled when this most patient child finally told Edward that what he was doing was “dumb” and held up a kick board to shield himself. Edward actually garnered enough self control to stop his mind-numbing action immediately. This is big for him.
A few days later, Edward shocked me beyond belief by laying out a decent dive into the deep end of our neighborhood pool. Apparently, when I thought he was in “La La Land,” he had been watching his friend. His swim coach was equally surprised when he claimed he knew how to dive and then dove off the diving board to prove it.
At swimming lessons the next day we saw a dear friend from kindergarten days. He was with another boy and the two were lounging by the pool watching the lessons, dangling their legs into the cool water.
Edward sauntered up to the pool, took keen aim, and laid out a perfect dive in front of the two boys.
The new boy turned to Edward’s friend and admired, “Wow, that dude’s good! Who is he?”
The friend replied, “That’s Edward. He’s my friend!”
I blinked back tears behind my sunglasses.
Edward is a dude who’s been “good” at multiplication, reading and memorizing. He’s a dude who I’ll wager knows more about the Tudors than most adults. Yet I think this was the first time Edward had ever been genuinely admired by a peer for something athletic.
Then the child who has been terrified to stand on his head and flip over at gymnastics, a child fearful of somersaults and a child who would never consider a backward handspring, began doing back flips under the water in rapid succession.
The next day at gymnastics he garnered more shock and awe by doing an assisted back handspring.
Something is going on in that brain of his, and I am beyond awe.
Still, isn’t that the way God works? He wants to bless us so much more abundantly than we can ever imagine, and so often He comes through so mightily just when life has begun to look rather bleak.
“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” Matthew 7:11.
I have more stories of Edward’s progress that I will share next week. In the meantime, I am going out of town for the long weekend and will be back Tuesday!
Peace!
9,854 Times I have asked Sue to stop playing the “pan flute” a well-meaning baby sitter bestowed upon Edward.
Yes, she’s a tiny Ian Anderson…
8 Numbers of bacon slices Sue and Edward felt H should have for his Father’s Day breakfast–that and a cup of mandarin oranges! I guess nothing says Father’s Day like bacon.
And having lots of help while fixing a sprinkler system in 102-degree weather…
Why puppies and puzzles don’t mix well:
777,777 Number of prayers that have been prayed for sweet Elliot, who is doing quite well after his heart surgery and may actually come home this week! Thank you for praying!
I’ve written before about the evil leveled against me by my “Internet service provider”–a term I use loosely.
I’ve railed on the dangers of their wires criss-crossing my yard and tripping unsuspecting trick-or-treaters.
I’ve lamented the unsightly holes, mosquito-attracting mud bogs and outright grass murder their many attempts at “burying” important wires have wrought.
I’ve threatened “supervisors,” “client retention agents” and poor call center workers alike.
I’ve racked up overages on my cell phone waiting to speak with a “live agent.”
I have seen this company install signal “boosters” all over my house–the last one in my daughter’s room because it was the optimal site.
I’ve been charged by this company for work done down the street.
I could rail on and on about my displeasure with this provider but that would only bore you further.
And lest you wonder why I wouldn’t just switch to a different provider, let me assure I have tried other providers to no avail. There are few choices in this sad sister of a town: remember our restaurant options?
A year later and this billboard still stands, the restaurant thriving! Thriving I tell you!
OK, I digress. Back to the cable issue.
Yesterday they actually managed to send a live person to my house to, yet again, “check the line.”
This fellow plodded his muddy feet all over my house (even when I told him the problem was with the outside line) and then charged out into the yard only to emerge, triumphant, twenty minutes later.
“I found it, ma’am. Yes I did,” he encouraged, sweat dripping onto my newly-mopped floor.
“Found what?’ I countered, fully ready to believe that rodents or snakes or bats had severed a cord or built a damaging nest.
“The (insert complicated cable part here) had melted. You see that occasionally but not that often.” Figures…
“I’d like to have that old (complicated cable part) for my records if you don’t mind,” I challenged.
He returned a few minutes later with this:
Doesn’t look so complicated, does it?
Are you buying this?
Does anyone agree that he might, just might have grabbed some old part out of his truck in an attempt to appease the ignorant but slightly belligerant housewife?
I’ve got the piece in my posession and there is nothing melted about it.
Nothing melted at all…
I haven’t abandoned blogging, but between swimming lessons, irrational bat fear, Huck Finn camp black eyes and trying to teach cursive to a 7-year-old, I’ve had little time online.
Seriously, my Internet connection is sketchy again–it’s up for like 30 seconds at a time–so I’ll be doing short, quick, blog bursts that I’m sure will be a relief to some. (In fact, I’ve tried to post this for two days and haven’t been able to do so…)
Joseph, who is nine, is quite interested in learning how to prepare food for himself, which I applaud! H reminisced about his own childhood culinary forays and popped up, not surprisingly, with the Steak-ummm.
(No, I didn’t know they still made that product either.)
H set Joseph up in the kitchen with hot pads, a spatula and a non-stick pan. He plopped the package proudly on the countertop.
Here is an opportunity to test yourself. Study this photograph and see if you can determine what’s offensive and troubling about this image.
So Joseph walks over and begins to study the package. He then quickly tosses it aside like so much filth and cries, “Horrible! Dad! Why? Why? Why would you try to get me to eat horse? Horse! Aghhhh! What is wrong with you?”
H is puzzled, “What are you talking about? Horse? What do you mean? Steak-ummms are pure beef!”
Joseph, a child who can discern diced broccoli hidden in apple muffins, is wary and shrewd: “You can’t fool me. I know horse when I see it! Look here–’Hot, sizzling Philly’…everyone knows philly means horse!”
Mean, mean daddy…
