Sunday, October 28, 2007

So, we got a dog. Meet Miss Dixie.

My life as I knew it is temporarily on hold until I am through the stage of chasing her away from the carpeted staircase, spraying Bitter Apple on my bamboo area rug border, twice daily trips to the lake for an extensive game of fetch and chase, a walk around the neighborhood, 8x to the backyard for potty time, waking up before dawn to sit under the moon, my hands becoming chew toys and the process of bonding a boy to his dog.

I am desperate to knit but I have not had time, and besides, Dixie has already found my Louisia Harding Angora and managed to unravel about 1/2 a yard before I caught her and relocated my knit bag to a secret location.

She's a good dog, overall, but being 7 weeks old, she's a HANDFUL. Training is demanding, but I'm determined to try!

In other news, I'm a bit anxious because Judah's Optimus Prime costume is in the mail, but not at my house and he needs it by Tuesday. Our eBay seller dragged her heels on the shipment and so now I'm watching the mailbox faithfully and just praying it arrives tomorrow. His school costume parade is Tuesday!

Friday, October 12, 2007

Filed under "You know you're a parent when..." you spend a full hour with your nose pressed to the glass at Krispy Kreme watching donuts make their way through the conveyor belt, toast in the hot oil and pass through the glaze waterfall. Judah was completely fascinated by the mechanics. A cup of coffee, three donuts later and our little family considered this a terrific Friday night.

Micheal did carpool today (I need to thank him for covering me this week while I get ready for my meeting!) When he and Judah got home, I greeted them at the garage door. Judah looked up at me with wide eyes and asked, "Mama, are you hurt?" I said, "No!" Then he asked, "Do you have a cough?" I didn't understand why he was asking until he pulled out a construction paper "doctor satchel" in which he had pasted a red first aid cross and filled with a tongue depressor, a medicine dispenser, a Q-tip, a piece of gauze, two cotton balls, a latex glove and a Band-aid. I feigned a coughing fit and he grabbed me by the hand saying, "Come on, Mama, you need to lay down on the couch so I can fix you all better." He filled the medicine dispenser with water from the sink and had me prop up on a pillow to drink it. I did feel better! :-) He put the Band-aid on me and then rubbed the cotton balls all over my face and arms. Then, he finished up by wetting the gauze and placing it on my arm. Such a sweet boy.

This is going to be our busiest weekend in a while. I went out with the moms in Jude's PK4 class last night, had a breakfast meeting w/Morgan related to our church volunteer work, got back to my regional board meeting prep (been pulling 11 hour days this week...working whenever I can...miss my family!). I had to bake cookies at the crack of dawn today because I'm a home baker at school and we've got a fall festival tomorrow where baked goods, books, music, etc will be sold. Tomorrow I get a couple hours to myself while the boys go sailing, then it's off to the school festival where I am the class shift coordinator and am working a shift of my own with my friend Tiffany. Sunday is church, seasonal decorating of the church playgrounds and campus, then a birthday party followed by a Cowboys viewing party.

"Getcha popcorn ready!" - T.O.

Next week is going to be my hell week of getting my board meeting locked and loaded (it nearly is, so maybe the remaining bits will be sorted out by Tuesday!), then next weekend is fall break where we're hopefully going to the ranch for a few days of R&R, then back for the meeting, followed by another weekend at another ranch with high school friends of Micheal's and then Halloween carving and trick or treating, capped off by a Rocky Horror party in early November. Whew!

Somehow in the middle of all of this, I'm knitting socks for Socktoberfest, a scarf for Judah, which I have love/hate for the merino it's being knit with (the up side is it's soft and has good drape, the down side is it sucks the moisture out of my hands and I am not fond of the colorway and intense fuzziness now that it's knit up.) It looked prettier when it was wound up in a ball.
I'm busy adding my projects to Ravelry and my books to LibraryThing. And thinking of adding a 5th knit project - Maine Morning Mitts (copyright Clara Parkes) out of the ball of Noro Kureyon that was to be a hat for Judah, but I am repurposing for these fingerless mittens. I'm rereading Harry Potter's Goblet of Fire, rereading Pride and Prejudice (for the millionth time) and also poking through Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Kiss the Girls

We are completely settled into our fall schedule, though I feel like I am busier and needing to stay more focused on my calendar than ever before. Between work responsibilities (a board meeting, and two conferences in Sydney, Australia and San Juan, Puerto Rico), school (Annual Fund Grade Level Sponsor, Fall Festival Shift Coordinator), personal (PK4 soccer, social engagements) and church (Parent Leader for 4/5 year olds)...whew...there's never much down time and though I do fantasize about just "sitting down", when I do, I feel guilty and restless like I should be doing something and just go around cleaning things.

Judah has been thriving at school this year. He's pre-reading and very interested in books. He speaks a smattering of Spanish quite frequently and seems comfortable switching between the two languages. He gets to play with schoolmates just about every single weekend.

An amusing development is a friendship with a little girl in his class who for the past few weeks, according to her parents, has become very interested in Judah. We had dinner at their house last night and they told us that she kissed Judah at school. Sometime later that night, Judah called me into the living room and said that she was trying to kiss him again. He, being a boy, was reacting by tactical diversion. Trains, TV, jumping off the sofa, wrestling, anything to avoid THE KISS. He **absolutely adores** her, but I think he's entering the very beginning stages of "girls, gross!"

A funny comment by Judah this week while playing with pretend cheese. He was grating it and told me, "Mama, I'm cheddaring the cheese."

Any discussion about people behaving badly, such as when I told him that Marion Jones might be stripped of her Olympic medal because she cheated (my reason for explaining this was because he saw her TV admission of guilt and wanted to know why she was crying and I thought it was a good lesson in honesty), Judah turned into, "Well, if they take her medal away, I will punch them!" Sigh. Boys.

We took Judah roller skating (old school style) this weekend. Tons of fun and something we will likely do more often now as it took about two turns around the rink for me to get the hang of it again and Jude is pretty keen to **try** it...although he played air hockey most of the time that he was there.


Thursday, August 23, 2007

This pretty much sums up how Judah felt at the end of the second day of school:

So far school seems to be fun for him, although when I picked him up at carpool yesterday he informed me that one of the new girls poked him in the eye, pinched his cheek and bit his knee. I wrote his teacher a letter since I am only hearing half the story and don't know what led up to this, but I have to say that I'm pretty unhappy about it because he had a rash on his knee where he'd been bitten when he woke up today. His "pinch" was a scratch down the left side of his cheek.

Funny story. We have been digitizing all of our CDs -- we had around 2,000 and have been slowly getting through the stash, burning and selling for cash. We went to a certain very popular used bookstore in town and turned in about 200 CDs. A couple hours passed and they still had not called our name to pick up our cash offer and Judah was starting to get really antsy, so we investigated to see what was up. Turns out they had given our cash offer to another customer, completely by accident, who had just turned in a stack of books. $355 offer. For used books. That guy hit the jackpot! Of course, they had to then give us our $355, so according to the gossip mill of other waiting customers who knew what happened, that guy made off with about $300 more than he should have gotten. He was walking toward the cash register exclaiming, "Man! I usually only get $20 when I come here!"

We're anxious to finish burning the rest of our CDs...it's a slow and deliberate process as we never really have a lot of downtime to sit around loading up music and deciding which of the approximately 12 songs on a CD we really can't part with -- the filler doesn't make it to my hard drive.

My mom is coming for a visit over Labor Day, so I have set my sights on gardening this weekend. After traveling for a month this summer, the 50 days of rain and then 100F+ weather, my garden looks horrible and I'm trying to regenerate some plants that have gone south on us. My wildflowers are still "eh" but not dead, my ferns are pleading for cooler weather, the fuschia did not make it past June, unfortunately. I don't even know why nurseries sell fuschias in Texas. But, my tomatoes and beans are producing and starting to grow new stems, so it's not all bad.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

First Day of School

Judah started PK4 this morning. Going cold turkey on early bedtime and waking up at 6am was HARD. He has been staying up 'til 11pm sometimes and waking up around 8am.

This was Judah when he first woke up, poor thing:

Once we reminded him that friends would be at school:

We had a quick costume change into his uniform, "nametag banana" included, and he was ready for school. The class theme is Curious George and with half the class being new kids, they have to wear their bananas this week. Ha!


As soon as we joined the carpool queue (which went very smoothly....shock!), he was THRILLED. He really missed his friends so much and I'm sure will have a blast today. And although I miss him like crazy since he's been my little sidekick all summer, I know he's having tons more fun and I can actually get some work done.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

As Time Goes By

Having had some type of online journal for years and at some point always dropping off for months or even a year at a time, I am back again as I always regret not keeping a written record of the day to day experiences with a little boy in our household.

Judah is almost four and a half years old and begins his PK4 school year in two days. He remains a sweet and fairly easygoing little boy temperament-wise although his "boy energy" level has kicked into high gear and we have to engage in a lot of discussions about why it's absolutely not OK for him to hurl Tinkertoys at me even if they are "arrow pointers".

He loves to sing and his current favorites are "the Shrek song" (All Star from SmashMouth), Tutti-Frutti from Little Richard, the theme song from Jimmy Neutron and Kids in America from Kim Wilde.