It's been ages...
Lordy, it's been forever. But I am going to make a concious effort this time around to stick with my journaling again. It's probably good for me.
SO much has happened I'm not even going to attempt to catch up. I don't think it's possible for me to sum things up at this point. Instead I'm just going to stream of coincious my current thoughts because I'm just overwhelmed with feelings and thoughts tonight and I'm not sure where to go with it all. So. Please excuse any typos or gramatical errors in the forthcoming paragraphs, I am about to just close my eyes and let my fingers do their thing without my brain interrupting them.
First off, it's 8:30pm and I should be starting to get on the girls about going to bed, but that sounds like a lot of work and I don't know if i'm up for the arguments and protesting right at this moment.
Summer break started on Thursday and I've already had to institute new rules between Maddie and Lilly. They just snip at eachother constantly until one of them is in tears. And since it really is mutual snipping and irritating and genearal siblingness, the first time that either one of them comes to me crying because "she did..." whatever it is she did, I just send them each to their own bedroom for 30 minutes. The second time one of them comes to me crying because "she did..." whatever it is, they get sent to their rooms for 45 minutes, etc etc etc through out the day with the timeouts increasing 15 minutes every time. So far they've peaked out at 45 mintues, but we're really only 3 days into break so I'm sure that will change.
I've not been feeling well at ALL today. My period snuck up on me yesterday, usually I've got 4-5 days of being an irritable bitch to give me a heads up that it's comeing and this time I did not have that at all. I felt pretty normal all the way up until I was surprised by blood yesterday. Today has just been exsahusting. I had a tick on me Wednesday night after shoveling wood chips ( more on that later) I didn't think too much of it as I found it just before I got in the shower. I followed my usual tick protocol of grabbing the little bastard, pulling it out, making sure it's legs were all wiggling and it had a head still attached, and then i flushed it down the toilet. I didn't bother cleaning the wound as I was naked about to step in the shower and so the site got cleaned off with soap and water about 2 minutes later. Thursday afternoon the bite area was looking pretty pink and swollen. Friday morning it was bright red, quite swollen, and had a faint pink area around it that was warm to the touch. Damn. So today I headed out to Murfreesboro to get to the VA hospital (a 1 hour drive one way, because that's super convienient, yay VA). The doctor checked it out and said that especially since the tick had only been on me for 2 hours at the very, very most it was most likely a localized alergic reaction rather than an infection, but she gave me the option of profolactic antibiotics against Lyme Diseise which I took her up on. I won't normally take antibiotics unless it's really clear that I need to so I don't contribute to antibiotic resistant bacteria, but I don't mess around with tick bites. I've gotten more infections from those little bastards than anything else and while so far I've managed to avoid Lyme I have had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and I'd rather not repeat that if I don't have to. Anyway, before they sent me down to the pharmacy, they needed to make sure I'm not pregnant. The doctor came back to me and said, "Ms Schwab, can you give us a urine sample, just to document you're not pregnant." I said, "Sure." But what I was thinking was, "My period is happening right now incredibly heavy flow today, I had to take 800mg Ibuprofren to be comfortable on the one hour drive out here." I wiped off as best I could before I pee'd but, as is always the case on my heavy flow days, it wasn't enough and a bit of stringy tissue was in the sample cup. I debated leaving it there, but decided not to, so I dumpped it and pee'd a little more and got a sample that at least didn't have visible tissue floating in it. Next time I'm going to leave it in. ;-) Once I got back home I was about done in. I emptied my menstural cup, took the dogs for a walk around the block with Lilly, and then lay down for about an hour. When I woke up I could tell I had overflowed my cup. Those things are supposed to be good for 8-12 hours before they need emptying and on my heavy days I'm overflowing it in 2-3 hours. It's absurd. But it does explain my occasionally dibilitating cramps and why Tampons never worked for me, I always had to back them up with a giant pad.
Joe spent all day smoking the entire meat department of the grocery store. A couple weeks ago he got an exelent deal on a lightly used smoker off the internet and he's been champing at the bit to give it a try. He got up at 630am to start in on 3 racks of ribs, 3 chickens, a huge pork shoulder, beef jerkey, and a smoked mac n cheese. Tomorrow afternoon we're having over more people than will fit in our house to help us eat all this food. We're hoping that the rain they're predicting will hold off so they can overflow into the yard rather than be all mushed up inside the house. *fingers crossed*
Since I was feeling so awful and Joe had been cooking all day, he ordered a couple pizzas for dinner. While I was driving over to pick up the food I wound up behind a purple Chevy Nova for part of the drive. It brought me immediatly back to my highschool boyfriend Jeff. He bought an old Nova with the intention of fixing it up. We went to our senior prom in that car, the primer gray of the exterior at the time perfectly matched my silvery dress. :D Jeff's favorite color is purple too, so there was no helping my thinking about him in the moment. We really haven't talked at all since I left Washington back in 2003 but we are FB friends. He either doens't get on often or is a champion lurker, but I suppose it counts. Either way I shot him a note this evening and said I was thinking about him and hope he and his family are doing well. From what I've gathered via FB stalking (he was tagged in a post by his wife... not sure if that counts as true stalking or not but there it is) is they've recently moved to San Antonio, TX. He is still an RN in the Air Force and he and his wife are expecting twins as their 3rd and 4th children. God bless them for reals. Their other two kids are somewhere around 3 and 2 I think. 4 under 4? yikes.
The woodchip issue. Our yard has had flooding issues since the second year that we've lived here (that is 9 years all told.) The soil in this area is pretty much clay silt with outcroppings of limestone and our yard is no exception. We've tossed around the idea for years about installing a french drain system, tieing in the back downspouts and having several drains positioned along the line leading to the large drainage ditch that surrounds 1/3 to 1/2 of our property. The downside to doing a proper french drain is that they're a TON of work and for the length of pipeing we'd have to lay it would be extremely expensive, not to mention having to cross our sewer line and several underground utilities. Ugh. So this year I decided that I would figure out a more cost effective solution. After a lot of googling and thinking and contemplating I decided that the easiest, cheapest, and not "wrong per-say" way to do it would be to till up the area that floods, then till IN some mulch, and THEN cover the whole area with a good 6 inches more of mulch. The initial tilling would loosten up the incredibly compacted soil, adding in wood chips will add some organic bulk to the soil letting it soak up more water, and initially the additional mulch on top will keep whatever water that can't soak in away from the surface so we have somewhere dry to walk as the area that floods the most is the only way to access the shed and most of the yard. After a year or two the mulch that's been tilled into the soil will be mostly decomposed adding some organics to the clay, and the bottom layer of the mulch on the top of the soil will have partially decomposed and worked itself down into the muck as people and dogs walk over the top of it daily. After a couple years I can till the top layer in and then worry about planting grass or something again.
I talked that all over with Joe and he said that sounded like a good deal. I started looking up local sources of truckloads of mulch that would be needed and was trying to estimate how much I'd need and what it was going to cost. Not two weeks after I'd planned out what I wanted to do a friend announced that she had a whole lot of fresh wood chips from two oak trees that they had to have cut down and said they were free for the taking. Hot, freaking, damn!!! Free is definitly in my budget. So I contacted another friend who not only has a pickup truck, but also has a big walk behind tiller. Wednesday night I picked up the truck and the tiller from Friend B and drove out to Friend A's farm with a shovel and some gloves and started loading up. Drove back home and Joe helped me unload everything into a pile in the back yard. Thursday morning before things got too hot I fired up the tiller and in the course of 4 passes, an inch or two each because that dirt was PACKED, I got things tilled down to the full 6 inches the tiller could go. Friday morning I started tilling in the wood chips. We replaced our fence last year and the new posts are all roughly 7 feet apart so I filled up the wheelbarrow and mixed into the soil one barrow load for every fence section. For the wider areas I did 2 barrow loads per fence section. All in all one pickup-truck load of mulch was mixed into a roughly 30x8 foot area. As soon as I can work out the logistics again, I'll borrow the truck again and spend a day going back and forth. I think I'll need a solid 3 loads to cover the whole area with the 6 inches worth of mulch that I want to lay down.
I've been missing Rascal this week. Last summer he had a couple of seizures and was no longer really himself. He was nearly blind and mostly deaf and he lost most of his personality after the second one. Physically he had a nearly complete recovery, minus the old age arthritus and stiffness that can be expected in a 15 year old dog, mentally he was pretty much gone. We nursed him through the winter, but it was nearly impossible to keep weight on him. Nearly all of the 13 years we had him he was between 17 and 19 pounds, and he got down to 14 over the winter. We kept a sweater on him so he wouldn't be cold and were putting an extremely high calorie supplement on his food (120 calories per tablespoon) and he was just barely maintaing his weight. Joe and I had decided that we would bring him through this spring and summer, but wouldn't put him through another winter. Then on April 30th Joe came to me while I was taking a bath and said that Rascal had had another seizure and was not doing well. I knew right then that it was over. I got out of the tub very slowly because part of me didn't want it to be true. I wound up staying up with him almost the entire night. It was awful. He had actually had a stroke, his whole right side was paralized. And then when he started waking up from the stroke I think he was just having constant seizures. We dug through our supplies and gave him all the doggy motrin we could find, it didn't help. Joe went to his own medicines and over the course of the evening gave him 4x the human dose of phenegrein in the hope that, if nothing else, it would help him sleep. It did not. He was awake all night yelping and moaning. I think I slept for an hour and a half. Joe brought him to the vet first thing the next morning. Apparently, in spite of my calling the after hours line and leaving a message that we would be there first thing to have him euthanized the vet was not prepared for that and tried to convince Joe that we could medicate him and see if we could get him back. Joe told him no. No, he's 15, he's blind, he's deaf, he has no quality of life at this moment and we are not going to pour money into him for a 50/50 chance that we could get back our blind, deaf, confused dog. I had been mentally preparing for him to go since he had his first seizure last summer. While I was a mess the night of the 30th and most of the next day, after that I was pretty ok. Mostly I had a huge sense of relief that he had made it VERY clear that it was time to go. When I knew that we woulnd't try to pull him through another winter, I was pretty worried that he would just keep on at the same level of not-great health and we would have to pick an arbitrary calendar date to put him down which would always haunt me, was it the right time? should we have waited? should we have done it sooner? Etc etc etc. But by 2am the night that I was sitting up with him I was telling him to go. I knew it was time and I just wanted him to feel better. And honestly, up until the last couple days I've been absolutly at peace with the whole thing. Not that I think we did the wrong thing, becasue I KNOW we didn't. I just miss his furry little face. We had him before Alta was born and in so many of her baby pictures he's there. Heck, in most of our memories he's there. Recently in my FaceBook memories was a video of Lilly's birthday when we got her a new bike and in the whole video Rascal was barking and barking and barking because the neighbor kid had come in the house and he had to tell her who was boss. It was the absolute right thing to do to put him down, and I don't regret that whatsoever. But damn I miss his little fuzzy self.
I'm trying to come up with a less depressing note to end this all on.
Alta is now 12 years old, she's shot up this year and is probably about 5'5" or so. Definitly has passed up the shorter females in our close group of friends and family. She tried band out this year on the clarinet but ultimatly decided that's not her thing. I won't deny that I was a little sad that she didn't choose to stick with it, but that's just because band was SO important to me and I loved every moment of it and I'd love for my own kids to have the same experiences and trips that I was able to have. But I also know that my kids aren't me and I can't force them into my path, they need to find their own. Rather than band for 7th grade she requested a computer programing class first and her second choice was robitics. She's still excited to play defence in the rec-soccer league but doesn't want to try out for the school team. Joe and I think she should but she's got no desire to do so. Plus, mom-fail, I didn't get her sports physical in on time so she managed to weasle out of tryouts this year. It's on next year. We have to push her into things. If she doesn't like it we dont make her stick with it, but she will absolutely not do new things if we don't press her to do them.
Lilly is 10 and doing All The Things. Last summer I found an Ariel Silks class here in town and signed her up and she has taken to it like a fish to water. That kid is RIPPED after a year of climbing up and down strips of fabric and she spends half her time upside down either doing hand stands or back walkovers. I think we're going to take a semester off of Silks this fall to do a gymnastic tumbling class instead because she's said she'd like to do cheerleading now that she's looking at middle school next year. One of the local gymnastics studios lets you have your first class for free so over the summer I'm going to sign her up for that tumbling class and if she wants to give it a go we'll do that over the fall instead of the Silks class. She can always go back to Silks for their winter/spring semester next January. She got a speaking roll in her spring Chorus performance and she made the Knowledge Bowl team. The performance was the kids version of the Lion King broadway show, she was one of 6 kids chosen to do the Rafiki/Narrator part. The knowledge bowl team did really well, there was a 4 way tie for first place and in the final rounds to break the tie there was a clear 1st, a two way tie for 2nd, and Lilly's team came in 3rd. Nothing to be ashamed of there! All that plus excelling once again at Cross Country last fall. K-5th grades do 1 mile cross country races and her fastest time this year for that 1 mile run was around 7:45, the highest she placed was 13th out of 150ish 3rd and 4th graders. This kid is definitly my little jock.
Maddie still defies steriotypes. I told my mother in law on Mother's Day that of all three of the kids I'm most excited to see what Maddie becomes. I can equally imagine her becomeing a world renouned brain surgon as I can picture her living out in the woods throwing pottery from clay she dug up from the local stream bed. My MIL looked at me weird for a moment, then thought it all through, and agreed with me. That kid could literally do anything she sets her mind to, and that's not something you can say about most people. Kindergarten Round 2 remains the best parenting decision that I've made to date. She is WAY more prepared for 1st grade next year than she would have been if we had pushed her forward last year. Occasionally I get a twinge when I see my friend's children who were born within a couple weeks of her moving on to 2nd grade, but it really was the right choice to keep her back for a second year of kindergarten. We still haven't found what makes her tick. I'm taking the Shit to Fan method with her: Just keep throwing shit at her to see what sticks. We tried soccer again this fall and that CLEARLY is not her thing. We're going to try her in gymnastics next along with Lilly to see if that's her thing. I'm firmly of the opinion, as are most of the people who know her, that whenever we stumble on her THING it will be done. She will take the bit in her teeth and run away with it. The key will be to just keep throwing things her way until we can find what the right thing is for her. Like I talked to her first Kindergarten teacher last year: Maddie is a Free Sprit in the best sense of the phrase, not a code for "that kid's an uncontrolable asshole" but she truely is her own person and I feel like my job isn't to mold her into her best self like I am with the other two, but it's to encourage her to FIND her best self and then support her growth along the way.