How in the heck do you single parents do it???? Jim’s away for the weekend at a NASCAR thing and I’m having a glass of wine at 4:19pm to calm the “I MUST KILL THEM NOW” voices inside my head.
Oh, and in case someone in law enforcement is reading this, I don’t really want to kill them. I just want them to pick up the darn sticks in the backyard and stop whining about it. For 3 hours and 22 minutes.
So he could watch Inception with me and explain it to me when I kept forgetting that no, the real people aren’t in the van, they’re on the freaking PLANE.
(sidenote: if you haven’t watched Inception, do so. It will blow your mind. In a good way.)
Sunday was the Annual Overbrook School for the Blind Pancake Breakfast. And annually we go to it. The meal part is always a rush and never quite something to relax and enjoy (given the fact that we have so many kids and helping Ethan and..and…and..), but the after-breakfast part of them playing on the playground is such fun. This year we met Ethan’s BFF there and they played on the playground until she had to leave. My three sighted children were playing on the merry-go-round and then I noticed someone playing with Ethan. This boy, in a bright orange sweatshirt, was actively engaged with Ethan, clapping as he walked so Ethan would have sound to follow. They went all over the playground and had so much fun. And I was, frankly, DELIGHTED. So many times kids either: Stare because he’s different, or over-help him because he’s blind and therefore must not be able to do anything for himself, or ignore him because they just don’t know how to interact with him. So yeah, I was thrilled that this boy was interacting appropriately.
At some point he left the playground and I was disappointed, but Ethan kept on playing and it was fine. Then he came back, grown up man in tow.
“Are you his father?” I asked.
“Yes….Quinn came into the cafeteria saying he had made a new friend, and I really had to see it because he has Asperger’s”
!!!!!!!
So both of us parents got to experience a thrill that day.
1. I’ll start with a familiar phrase: I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted! This is busy time at our household–school and after-school stuff, paperwork, taxes, etc. The blog tends to go to the bottom of the list and then off the list completely. But I’ll at least try to keep up with 7QT’s from now on.
2. It’s been one heck of a week here. Let’s start with the dog, Jake. He has a partially torn ACL (ligament in the knee). Thankfully it’s only partially torn, because otherwise it’s a $2000 surgery. Now it’s the nigh-on-impossible task of keeping him quiet (as I type he and Coco are wrestling in the living room) for at least a month. We are opting to get a brace, which will basically immobilize the joint and make it easier to heal while having normal life at the same time. But the appointment is two weeks away and then the brace takes two weeks to make after that. So, yeah, we’ve got to find a crate somewhere, or the partial tear is going to be full.
3. Let’s move onto the 1st child, Bennett, who went to the pediatrician first thing Monday morning with what ended up being walking pneumonia. He’s on Albuterol, Azithromycin, Robotussin with Codeine and a humidifier. Holy COW can that kid cough loudly! He’s actually had to sleep downstairs a few times this week so the other kids could sleep. Thankfully, he seems to be on the mend. Also thankfully we are doing cyber school so he hasn’t missed one day. If he was in traditional school he would definitely have missed several!
4. 2nd child, Catie, was eating Fun Dip…you remember it from when you were a kid, right? Paper pouches of powder with a white candy stick you dip in..yeah. that. Well, she bit on the stick Wednesday night and broke a molar. Whoa. First thing Thursday we went to a not-so-close branch of our her dentist, who looked at the tooth and thankfully determined it was a baby tooth, and that it need to be pulled. But they didn’t have any availability for a few days. Our regular branch didn’t have any availability for a WEEK. Enter yet another branch, who could fit us in that afternoon. Drove home, took the kids out to lunch (more on this later), then later that afternoon got her tooth pulled out in three pieces. Her adult tooth was well above the gum line, so the tooth would have come out soon anyway. Dodged a bit of a bullet on that one!
5. So. Lunch. With Bennett and Laura doing cyber school, I try to be a nice mom here and there and take them out for either lunch or a special snack. They don’t buy lunches at school anymore, so I try to make up for it a bit. I gave in to peer pressure and we went to Chili’s. I had them order off kids’ menus, but learned the hard way that, unfortunately, we have hit the sad milestone of kid menus no longer filling up my older kids’ stomachs. We got some extra fries to help, but from now on they will have to get regular meals. 😦
6. If any of you watch The Chica Show, you actually have seen one of my kids. There was an episode called Chica’s Sense-sational Day, and had a blind boy using a cane, meeting Bunji and getting a hat. That, dear readers, was my Ethan! It was on NBC last week, but has been on Sprout in reruns for a long time. Catie and I are in the background very, very quickly. I’m in a peach top and Catie is dressed like a cow.
7. After a winter for the record books, Spring has FINALLY reached Pennsylvania. We had tons of rain earlier this week, which washed away the last of the snow. Temperatures are regularly in the 50’s, although we keep having rain and lots of mud. We just saw the first crocuses on our front hill, but haven’t seen any grape hyacinths, which usually pepper our front lawn. Birds are regularly chirping and it’s actually starting to FEEL like winter is over. We are very, VERY thankful.
Multiplemom's Blog 