Catching up
It's been quite a week. It's also now June, the month of a lot of birthdays, five children off to church camp, and MOVING! June has been so far in the future for so long, this feels a little unreal.
- The first part of the week saw a lot of large family gatherings with the two families we have shared so much with over the past 20 or so years. The H-S family was briefly back in town, and we had a lot of fun spending time together. The little people had several very late nights in a row, which does make for less than calm days following.
- I've packed up (minus wall hangings) both living rooms, front hall, most of the dining room, and the games. The games and puzzles took quite a while because of the needed sorting. I went through every game to check the contents against what should have been there. It was an easy first purge to get rid of any game which did not have the pieces necessary to play it. Why, why, why is it so challenging to keep game pieces together?
- On Wednesday, TM waded out into traffic to rescue a robin which had been hit by a car. ("I couldn't just leave him there to get run over again!") We kept him quiet in a box overnight, and I wasn't sure that he would still be around in the morning. He didn't look as though he was doing too great. In the morning, when he was still alive, I did some quick searching and learned that near our new house there is a wildlife rescue. I called and they would take him. Since TM and I were already going to be out that way anyway, we added the robin to our to-do list and he joined us on our errands and appointments. I haven't heard from the rescue, yet, but he was at least trying to flutter out of his box by the time we dropped him off.
- We now have a storage locker out by our new house, which I am working on filling with the things we either don't want the movers to move, or we are going to want in the 1 1/2 weeks that our furniture is in storage.
- B. officially moved out of the house and into his first grown-up apartment during the week as well. It makes me both sad and proud all at the same time. I adore the man he has become, but will miss him. He promises that he will come out often, since we are now going to be living in the type of place in which he always wanted to grow up. I have apologized for doing this move a little too late for him.
- Yesterday, a friend and I headed out to the state homeschooling conference. There is so much I could say about this, but the short version is that I'm not sure either of us feel the need to return to this particular conference in the future. We did our shopping (the least amount of shopping I have ever done), and we decided to head off and do other things.
- One of those things that we did was to spend hours driving around the area looking through the various Habitat ReStores. We didn't find anything that would work for either of us in the first we went to, but in the second, we both hit the jackpot. Take a look.
That little square is a small glass tile that represents the tile I found for the kitchen back splash. (You have to imagine it in a 12"x 12" sheet.) I had hoped that I could find glass tile for it, but having priced it, had pretty much decided that I would need to come up with another idea because of the price. The type I was imaging turned out to be running upward of $12/ square foot sheet of tile. Knowing this, it was pretty easy to decide to buy the blue glass tile which was marked down to $1 per sheet. (Yes, you read that right.) A couple of texts to my friends husband, who knows about these things, and we put five boxes (equaling 110 sheets of tile) into our shopping cart. It's hard not to pass up a deal like that. imagine my delight when I get to the checkout counter and am told my total is $55. As a surprise bonus, we discovered that there was a 50% off sale on tile yesterday. It made all the driving very worthwhile. We were on our way to the storage locker anyway, so in went all five boxes of tile waiting for when we an redo the kitchen.
- Tilly is really enjoying her aquatics therapy and the therapist is super pleased with how well she is doing and how strong she is.
- While H. was watching R. continue to practice her high kneels, she looks as me and asks if she could do that when she came home. We talked for a moment about what she could and couldn't do, and then notes that she can do all those things now. What struck me about that particular conversation wasn't that she is so much more physically able (though that's great), but at her self-awareness. H. has reached a point where she is aware of herself and what she can and cannot do, and what others can and cannot do. I love watching the real child emerge.
- A friend had loaned me a stack of books, and having run out of books I had for immediate reading, I decided to read a few. I've now read two, and have decided I just can't finish the third. Don't hate me if you love the genre, but it's not for me. I can evidently only stomach two 'chick lit' books (as defined by me, anything with a reader's guide at the back), at a time. I'm not even sure what it is about them that tires me... focus on emotions rather story? set in the current time? women I tend not to be able to identify with? depressing story lines? a feeling as though I know the views of the author far better than I do those of the characters? little humor? It's probably all of these at the same time. At least with mysteries, the claim isn't to be LITERATURE, but to solve some sort of puzzle. There is a lot less pretense.
- Tomorrow afternoon is the big blow out good-bye party that a friend is throwing for us. While I'm excited to see everyone, it's going to be weird, I think. I don't like being the center of attention, and we're not actually moving for another couple of weeks. Plus, when we do move, we are still, technically, in the Chicago area. J. mentioned that he feels as though we should be changing continents to warrant the hoopla.
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