New Growth

That's what spring is about, right? New growth? I am very much looking forward to some evidence of such, but we still seem to have two feet of snow in much of the yard. It's been that kind of a winter, which has bled over into that kind of spring. I am as tired of hearing people complain about the weather as I am of the weather, but it's all we can seem to talk about. Winter 2014/Spring 2015 will forever be known as the seasons that Massachusetts became one-track boring. Sigh...

Since I can't find any new growth outside, I shall have to concentrate on the inner type. Today is Day 2 back on my ADHD medication after an...oh...maybe...three-month hiatus. The break just served to reinforce to me (again--when will I learn?!) that I need to take it on a regular basis or risk becoming a giant lump. Ten pounds heavier and surrounded by piles of stuff. Not my favorite way to be.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Today is a new day.

We took down the ceiling in the kitchen this weekend. I am slowly but surely returning things to their homes and/or finding them new ones as needed. I am keeping my fingers crossed that we don't sport the exposed beams, pipes, and electrical wires look for too long. It will be beautiful when it's finished, and I will no longer remember the frustration of starting each day by cleaning up the assorted ceiling detritus that descended overnight.  I appear to have short-term construction irritation memory. This is a requirement if you're going to buy and old house and tackle most of the jobs yourselves. Thank goodness for Kirk and his bank of house knowledge. My husband can never leave. The house and I would just desintigrate!

Back to The Big Clean.  Yay for Vyvanse!!!

Wedding Sappiness!

I'm sitting at my desk, listening to the rain pour down outside, looking again at the photos I took this weekend.  Sunday, Kirk and I went to a wedding in New Jersey.  I used to babysit for the groom and have known him almost his whole life.  Watching him get married was a somewhat surreal experience.

We shared our table at the reception with my mom and her boyfriend, our friends Erica and Mitch, and their daughters, Whitney and Bailey.  I used to babysit for Whitney and Bailey, too. Erica, my mom, and Judy, the mother of the groom, are the original Wild Women in my life.  I was lucky enough to be initiated as a Wild Woman myself a few years back.  Now, Bailey and Whitney, along with their younger sister Annie, have joined the ranks as well.

This is my chosen family.  Will's, too.  They are Funny Auntie Judy and Uncle John and Auntie Erica and Uncle Mitch.  Let's not even get started on how he feels about Whitney. 

Judy and her husband John live in Rochester, NY these days.  Erica, Mitch, and the girls are in the DC area.  We don't see them nearly as much as I wish we did, and the time we spend together flies by like nothing at all.  I cherish those moments and hold them close to my heart.

Thanks, Judy, for including us in Charles and Sarah's beautiful day.  I am so lucky to have you--all of you--in my life.

I admit it.  Weddings make me sappy.  In the best sort of way.  They make me look at Kirk and want to marry him all over again, which is a good thing, 11 years down the line.  They remind me of the promises we made when we stood in Charles and Sarah's place, and make me happy to realize that we've done pretty well with each other.  They make me look forward to our future, and they help me celebrate our "middle."

I'm glad I married him.  I'm awfully glad he married me.  We fit, I think.  Even when one of us is literally broken, like I've been these past few months.  He's picked up what I've dropped with grace and composure and compassion, and I am so thankful for that.

Onward and upward.  May we all live happily ever after.

What I did today (7/18/2013)

So it doesn't appear that any of the things I planned to do today are going to come to fruition.  What am I doing instead?

• I washed the back door from top to bottom after I opened it to let Will in and realized it was ridiculously filthy!
• I vacuumed the loose paint chips (probably all lead paint) off the floor that came off while I was washing the door.  
• Then, while the vacuum was there, I vacuumed the ceiling, which is a peeling mess and desperately needs some attention. 
• I chose potential paint colors (pending agreement from Kirk) for the teensy hallway just inside the back door.  It's one of those spots in the house that looks terrible and would give us HUGE bang for our buck if we painted it, but we've gotten so used to it in the past ten years that we stopped seeing how awful it looked.  
• I cleaned out the linen/vacuum closet in the dining room, removing anything that isn't either dining room or vacuum related.
• I added more stuff to the ever-growing yard sale pile that is taking over the dining room table.  And the floor in front of the radiator.  I think we should set a yard sale date!
• I weeded (almost) all of the non-functional raised bed in the yard.  There are three strawberry plants that came back from last year (one good sized one and two that are rather anemic, none of which will have a strawberry survive the deer), one volunteer squash plant, one tiny volunteer tomato, and something that my friend Heather says isn't a weed but I can't remember what she said it is.  My mom's boyfriend thinks we could dry it and smoke it.  I'm not certain he's wrong, but I'm certainly not the expert on the subject. 

Why didn't the original to-do list happen?  Because Will is busy playing with the kid who recently moved into the neighborhood.  Play time always always ALWAYS trumps errands in this house!

Now, we're off to the grocery store with a stop at Friendly's for some dinner first.  Why Friendly's?  1.  Coupon.  2.  Ice Cream.  3.  Air Conditioning.  4.  No need to cook or clean up.  5.  Kirk's having dinner with his boss.

Stay cool, Pony Boy!

This has been a year of change.

Since I posted that brief and rather depressing entry in January, I've done a lot of soul searching and talking with Kirk and number crunching and more soul searching and agonizing and overthinking and decision making and more talking with Kirk and a little more soul searching, and in April I finally gave my notice at work.

We have a kid who faces big challenges, many of them different from those other kids his age face.  He needs me more.  Work needed someone more, too.  I couldn't be more of me in both places, so something had to give.  More and more, it was my sanity, and that was no good.  Work can replace someone.  My child can't.  So...I took a deep breath, wrote up my letter of resignation, and gave my notice with an end date two months out, allowing enough time to find and train my replacement.

About two weeks later, early in the morning of April 22, I had an accident on our trampoline that left my left leg/knee with a complete tear of the ACL and the MCL, damage to both the medial and lateral meniscus (menisci?), and fractures of the patellar pole and the tibial plateau.  I spent the next six weeks on the couch, getting up to pee and (eventually) go to physical therapy. 

Today, I am walking with a brace and preparing for ACL reconstruction surgery in October.  In the meantime, Will and I are hanging out for the summer while he gets to just be a kid, not get shuffled off to camps and programs he dreads so that I can go to work to earn enough money to pay for the camps and programs he dreads.

Given the accident, things have not gone quite the way I expected.  I never went back to work, save the one day I went in to clean out my desk and eat cake.  My project list, the one I made during all that soul searching and discussing with Kirk, has been pushed forward, given my limited mobility and summer sidekick.  It also grew, given the six weeks I had to watch HGTV and DIY until I wanted to knock down walls and create an open floorplan (not gonna happen in this house; hello, structural supports!).  But regardless of that, and of the fact that there is a gigantic learning curve involved in shifting to being home full-time after, well, truthfully, never doing it before.  I don't count when Will was a newborn and my life was dedicated to either feeding the baby or waiting to feed the baby 100% of the time, and then, once he was 12 weeks old, I went back to work for at least a few hours each week. 

I told Kirk I'd given myself a new job title:  I am our household's Domestic Engineer.  The pay isn't so great, but the benefits are out of this world.  I look forward to enjoying the fruits of my labor.  You know, once I can walk without feeling like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. "What hump?..."

Here's to living, not just existing!

Right now, we are not living.

We are just going through the motions.

Boy, that sucks.

Holding My Breath

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Friday, I spent a chunk of my day as a parent volunteer at my son’s school’s annual Holiday Shoppe, helping kids in grades K-5 choose gifts for their loved ones--innocent, touching, thoughtful and sometimes humorous purchases; there are lots of grandpas out there getting whoopee cushions for Christmas this year.  The scene was a jarring juxtaposition to the news being brought to the parents via text messages and smartphone browsers, discussed in hushed voices in the gym’s corners away from student ears.

As a parent, I an devastated at the news of any child being hurt.  It’s the reason I’ve been gently but strongly steered away from shows like Criminal Minds and Law and Order SVU.  My brain puts Will’s face on each kid, and that’s hard to take.  I would like to think that it gets easier as your child gets older, but I’m not sure that’s true.  I believe my mom looks at those same stories and sees the face of grade-schooler me.

I remember the morning after the Station nightclub fire in Providence.  My mom and I were working in the same office at the time, and I was pregnant but didn’t know it yet.  I just thought I was fighting off the flu.  Exhausted and worn out, I’d gone to bed early the night before and hadn’t turned on the news in my drive to work.  When I walked into the office, my mom stood up from her computer, ran to the door, threw her arms around me and said, “I am SO MAD at you!”  When I was finally able to extract myself from her arms, I asked her why.  She said, “for all those nights that you were out and I didn’t know it and something could have happened to you and I wouldn’t know until it was too late.”  I was 33.

Now I have my own child, and I understand that hug.  Will is my everything, and the Mama Lion in me wants to protect him from anything bad the world might throw his way.  It’s impossible, though.  Will has ADHD, Dyslexia and Sensory Processing Disorder.  Each day is a mental balancing act .  And days like Friday—well, they bring on the flying trapeze.  With no safety net.

As the investigation continues, a picture slowly starts to emerge of the 20-year-old boy who did the unthinkable.  One early report said that he had some kind of learning disability and/or behavior disorder.  Neighbors talk about how he was a quiet kid who kept to himself.   I listen and hold my breath.

As the parent of a child who struggles, I watch and desperately hope for the magic answer that  explains what brings someone to such a horrible place in his own head.  Because before this boy became the vacant-stared “shooter” on the news, he was just a boy.  He was a boy with a struggle.  And as parents of children who struggle, we desperately watch and hope for a clue, an inkling—a map to show the right turn we can help our own children take where this boy turned left.   Of course, there isn’t one.  Even with every profiler and psychology expert and sociology expert in existence filling the airwaves, there is no magic answer to tell us, “this is how you keep your child from going here.”  Because if there were, Nancy Lanza would certainly have taken it. 

And yet, I still watch and hug my own child tight as I hope and pray that his life is never touched—from any angle—by the horror I see on the faces of the families left behind.

Life is so overwhelming these days.  There's just SO much to do. 

Striving toward simplification.  Right.  I know.  It's the New Black.

How can we get the Move to Vermont without actually moving to Vermont?

So this spot will help me chronicle those changes.  At least that's the plan for today.

In the life I imagine I live, there's a lot less clutter, both physical and mental.  I look forward to that. 

Ready?

                      Steady...

                                                GO!