Vikings and Volcanoes

Two very cool and exciting topics this week! We even made a volcano with the usual vinegar and baking soda lava, which impressed the kids, although Drew thought it would have been more exciting to use matches and somehow blow the clay mountain apart for real. :-) Next week I am packing all the school things up and it will be a couple weeks before they emerge again, so this has been a fun week to end things on.

But speaking of volcanos... Aimee's issues have been improving in the last couple months so that things have been much more tolerable for everyone; interestingly, this has been in the midst of a time I would consider pretty stressful and I would have thought might have actually made things worse. At any rate, we had backed off the counseling/therapy path for a time, and had stopped talking about different school options. But this week, as I mentioned before, all the kids have been acting a little like they've been let loose out of cages, and last night Aimee's behavior in particular culminated in an explosive episode the likes we haven't seen in some time. Fortunately we hadn't forgotten the things we've learned in dealing with all that, and it went as well as it could have. But it reminded me that I will need to get back on top of things soon after we move - maybe not a strict schedule (just too stressful and exhausting to keep that up), but definitely more structure and less flexibility.

Of course structure is nothing I can even think about now. We are living among a maze of boxes, and the packing is tiring, as well as seemingly endless! :-)It seems like I work and work and work, only to turn around and see what looks like the result of an explosion - where is all this stuff coming from? And why is something irrestible to little eyes and hands just because it has been put into a box? If I don't tape up a box quickly, they start pillaging like the Vikings we've been reading about! I'm excited about the move and so happy everything is turning out well, but I am already so tired! Not looking forward to the work that will just escalate in volume and intensity next week.

Memories...and the Amazing Brains That Hold Them

(The HOUSE - all is well this week! Things are proceeding according to plan, and even though there were a few hitches yesterday, they've all been ironed out, and we are still on schedule to close on both houses in two weeks. We were all feeling excited again last night - the light at the end of the tunnel grows larger every day!)

Yesterday morning I was having breakfast with Aimee and Chase (the boys were, uncharacteristcally, sleeping in) and we heard something on the radio about "The Price is Right." I was telling Aimee about my most vivid memory of that game show; namely, the time I was in second grade and home from school because of unusually cold weather, and I was watching it with my mom. As we watched, the program was interrupted to show the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, and thus I witnessed the demise of the same. I told Aimee that even at the memory, I still have that slightly sick feeling in my stomach we often get when watching disasters those kinds of disasters unfold. Drew had come in as I was telling this, and we began talking about something they might have seen in their lifetime that would have had a similar impact on them (this really wasn't as dark a discussion at it seems! we were actually having a neat sharing time). I asked if they remembered Hurricane Katrina, because I know they had watched some of that coverage with me, and Aimee at first wasn't sure, but Drew immediately piped up, "Yeah, there was that city underwater! You remember," he prompted Aimee, "all the water came because of the lake." I was puzzled for a moment, but then a memory hit me - watching someone on CNN explain how Lake Pontchartrain compounded the disaster. Then I was completely astounded that Drew, who was just 3 at the time, could still remember that! Aren't their little minds incredible?!?!?!

A HUGE Mistake!

At about 7 this evening I realized today's date - and with horror, instantly realized that I had not done anything for my mother on her birthday! I had thought of getting together with my sisters and doing something really nice for her this year (since on the whole this has been one the worst, if not THE worst, years of her life), but then the month wore on, and evidently I've been terribly behind. I've left her a couple messages, but I feel so awful, and I wonder if there's any way I can possibly make it up. :-(

Holding My Tongue...and Exercising My Faith

I was, as usual, relaxing in the glider in the nursing mother's room at church this morning (and listening to the "talk" through the speakers - a very laid-back way to enjoy the service, let me tell you!), when I was joined by a young mom with a relatively new baby. She began to nurse her little one, but it sounded as though the baby was struggling at it a little. The mom didn't seem bothered, but also didn't nurse the baby very long before she got up and changed the baby's diaper. When she was finished she sat down again and began nursing on the other side, which gave me a full view of the baby's position. The baby was having more difficulty, and I could see quite plainly why, but I spent the next few minutes resisting the urge to tell her what she could do to fix the problem. Of course that would have been really obnoxious, and I suppose is the kind of thing that leads some experienced mothers to become elderly ladies who feel they need to share their unsolicited opinion and advice at every opportunity (we have a prime example of this in my family already!). Dave agreed when I told him about this later, but he also joked that I might feel really guilty if I see this young mom giving her baby a bottle next week! I suppose there might have been a way I could have begun a pleasant conversation that could have wound its way to breastfeeding...and there might have been some remote chance that the mom might have been interested in pursuing my expertise on the subject - but I didn't, and she probably wasn't. So I have scored in keeping my opinion to myself on this occasion, which hopefully will serve me well when I am old. :-) Not everyone needs to know what I think - or even what I know - and I hope to remember that later in my advanced years.
Now that I have spent an entire paragraph writing about something other than the h-word, I can't help coming back to it again. I spent all weekend cleaning things up so that I could get around to some packing. I am pleased to say that I am in a fairly upbeat frame of mind about it all, and I am feeling confident about getting the house as well. Dave was siezed with my worry bug from earlier this week, so we spent way too much time talking about it this weekend, but it actually had the surprising effect of increasing my faith. I had asked the Lord earlier in the week that if things were going to fall through with the Lexington house, he would have mercy on us and let it happen last week. So when last night came and this morning dawned with no bad news or even the slightest setback all week, I was ecstatic. It's not as if God has to operate by my timetable, of course, and it may be that he has plans he has chosen to reveal to me later, but I really feel he answered my prayer and that all will be well with our purchase of that house. Our fate is not in the hands of the underwriters after all (and who ARE those people anyway? Are they people who really move among us? Has anyone known anyone whose job is that of an underwriter for a lending institution?!), and even if our financial situation is such that they would ordinarily cluck their figurative tongues after reviewing our bank statements and withdrawal their approval of our loan, I believe that this time, they won't - that this time, they will be moved to continue their approval. (That was a sentence of almost Jane Austen-worthy length and complexity, wasn't it?) I am saying before all of you (all three or four of you, my dear and faithful readers!) that I believe God will do this for us! When you think of us in this, pray this with me! Next week I hope I will be telling you of God's faithfulness in our particular situation.
The baby has at least drifted off to sleep, so away I go to pack, pack, and pack some more!

The Making of Beds

Regarding making beds...I want to stress that it's important to me in my house. Other people's unmade beds don't bother me, and actually I feel a sense of relief at knowing this is something people commonly leave undone. :-) Can I "let go" and leave them unmade here? Well, I have this week; I have, in fact, totally let everything in the house go. I had a major meltdown Wednesday evening (when Dave arrived home very late from work and I was stressing about whether our home loan would go through and if it did, how I was going to pack when I couldn't even get the beds made, etc. etc.) Since then I have just let everything fall where it will, and Dave has been the only one to wash any dishes. However, I have recovered, and while I have deemed it theraputic to let everything go for a time, I have now decided that time is up. I am putting everything back together today, and revelling in the feeling of warm soapy water cleaning dishes and the sound of the vacuum eliminating the accumulated dirt around the house (and the kids are helping a little, as they are usually good at doing). We've tucked in nuggets of formal education here and there, and I am feeling altogether less a failure and much less panicked about the house thing. I'm going to the LLL of NC Conference the first weekend of November, and ever since I decided to go, I've been praying that the Lord would allow us to be in Lexington so that I can ride up with my friends there. We are scheduled to close the week before, so I think I can continue to trust him for that, however He wants to work it out.
On a random note...I was putting the boys to bed last night, and I heard the funnniest Bible story! I was telling them a story myself, but Ryan soon interjected, "And, and, and GOD...God went into the water, and there was a shark....and the shark ATE God....and the shark went to the land, and Ptooey!...he spit God out." "What?" I said, laughing. "Where did you hear that?" Drew told me that Ptooey was a part of Daddy's retelling of Jonah, so I gathered that this was Ryan's rendition of the story. Even more dramatic than the original!

The Move Begins

I began packing this week, and now it looks as though the house has exploded. Sigh. And another sigh. Why is it that as soon as turn my attention to something other than keeping everything in check, it all begins to go haywire? The kids behave as though they've been turned loose out of cages, and there seems to be no catching them any time soon, so school is becoming next to impossible. I am trying to get another couple of weeks in - and to make it meaningful, rather than just tossing them a math page or cramming in whatever history we can manage here and there - but I don't know if I can do it in the middle of all this mess and chaos. I have a plan for packing, of course, and am going about it systematically, but it seems I forgot to make a plan for who would do everything else in the meantime! :-) Even as I type this, I'm looking at a cracker crumbs thoughtfully scattered all over the desk and in the keyboard. There's laundry all over the place - clean and dirty, and the beds are unmade (which is the worst housekeeping crime, second only to unwashed dishes, in my mind!). After an unsuccessful attempt to read to the kids outside (because I couldn't keep anyone's attention, and the baby was crawling all over me, probably trying to escape the dog, who kept licking him), I finally just left them to what they were doing and am now trying to get up the energy to gather them inside in a few minutes for some quiet time. I know I've been distracted (still so stressed about selling this house and buying the other one - it's awful thinking about those underwriters, whoever they are, who could, at a whim and at any given time, decide we're not worthy of another home loan after all!), so it's hard to ask anyone else to focus and keep things together, but I hope we can restore some semblance of order soon.

Taking A Sanity Break

Math today quickly became crazy, so I have sent the boys outside in order to have a moment of peace in which to nurse the baby and calm myself down. Again, at the center of the madness was a certain two year-old, although Drew's wads of gluey macaroni noodles all over the table didn't do me any good, either. :-) Ah, but that two year-old! I think he needs to spend a good amount of time with his father this weekend, which will be good for him as well as sanity-preserving for me. In fact, maybe everybody would benefit from lots of daddy time! Oh, I know this move is driving everyone crazy, though, and we'll all do better and be able to handle more when it's all over. All the same, I'm looking forward to the first weekend in November, when I'll be going to a conference in Charlotte, sans everyone but Chase. I'm sure they'll be relieved to be rid of me for couple days, too. ;-)
That's not to say that I don't really love all this madness, however, and I know these will be the memories that I'll always cherish. Sigh.