days of family and thanks

I think this is the 14th day since K left. We miss him, especially since we haven't been able to chat online every day, and he hasn't been able to call either.
Thanksgiving was good, my sister made delicious food and there was just low-level kid chaos. R had a screaming tantrum right after we all finished our "I'm thankful for.." statements. He also had a major stink-bomb. I think he's a shock to other peoples' systems but I'm so used to his ear-splitting shrieks and rotten smells that he still seems like a sweet, dimple-faced cuddlebug to me, 80 percent of the time. 90.
T is not the best company for her cousins, it turns out. She's so intolerant of the smallest slights or irritations that visits go south in a hurry. She's especially vigilant about people not sharing well or asking permission to use her things... yeah.
Mom & John got to drive through the beautiful sites of Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, and the Grand Canyon, before spending Thanksgiving in Albuquerque with Aunt Wanda and her family.
On Saturday night, I took the girls to the Nutcracker Ballet in Anchorage. R was a roadie for Gramma & Grampy at their fiddle dance. The ballet was beautiful and funny, so the girls had fun even if they were so hungry or uncomfortable in a fancy dress.
The only health news for me is that my bone-density scan was bad enough to warrant putting me back on Fosamax. I'll get that report today when I go to Anchorage for a meds refill. Brittle little me!

Tuesday

Tuesday, the day I wake up and the race is on.
This morning after getting the girls to the school door, I met with the mom who did bookorders for third grade last year. I am now (three months late) the official Bookorder Mom for 75 third-graders.
I waded through the rest of the day, picked T up from ballet, and bought groceries, noticing R fading fast around 5. He slept just a little before we pulled into the parking spot at the apartment - and then he barfed. I don't mind so much when kids barf on the floor or in the bath or whatever, but carseat barf is right up there with bed barf in grossout factor and cleanup time. Now I have to do the carseat-dismantle thing to scrub all the smelly stuff off, yay.
Needless to say I pushed onward through dinner, homework, and soccer-prep while watching R doze on the couch after his quick bath. I figured he'd be able to just sit on my lap during soccer for the hour we're there and he'd be fine - but he woke up and barfed on the couch. So I told LittleK soccer was off, she hit her stride in a tantrum all about how she'd already told her friends she was going to score goals, etc. I really almost never cave in to tantrums, but tonight, being Tuesday, I did.
We were twenty minutes late, she didn't score any goals, and R only had dry-heaves at half-time. He's back to his normal self, with just a faint smell. Now they're in bed and I'm avoiding the 150 bookorder sheets on the table.
So I have to wonder, since the dog ate poop last Tuesday, R barfed everywhere this Tuesday, what's in store for next week?

A Saturday, with money

Yesterday the Laramie house closed! I hope the new owners can turn it into a nicer place. We'll be using the money to pay off the debt we amassed since leaving Nome - talk about the weight of the world lifting.
R is glaring at me because I didn't offer him a bite of leftovers the right way. First he shrieked, then fake-cried, crumpled to the floor, and turned around for the glare-finale. He actually started the 'terrible twos' about six months ago, and his shriek is the worst part of it all. It's sort of like the sound an attacking Arctic Tern makes. His future may be in professional bird-calling.
LittleK has a Daisy Girl Scout tea party today. Since I don't ever make an effort to find babysitters, I asked my sister to drive the 45 miles out here just for this... The Tea Party Rules state that an adult must stay with the Daisy and please, no siblings. I just need to spiff up this place a little and lock up the dog since one cousin won't go near dogs. I'm afraid that if I bring Chena to the Daisy thing and keep him in the back of the minivan, he'll destroy something, since his MO now is Do All Misbehaving While The Man Is Gone.

appointment day

The doctors are happy. The echo was good, the PFT was stable and the only concern I had was the early bronchiectasis in my right lung, as seen on the CT scan. It explains the trouble coughing up stuff, it happens often after pneumonia, and it's irreversible. So now I have Advair to inhale instead of Albuterol, and a funny thing called an "acapella vibratory PEP therapy system". It looks like a green shampoo bottle. When I breathe into it, it vibrates the air in my lungs to help me hack up those green mucus blobs you see in Mucinex commercials.

Chunky ChocoSnacks

We're on our own for a little while - K's on his first Lynden flights out of the country. I hope he gets to have some fun in between working and sleeping.
So I have the reins again, no more lazy days for this bum. We're off to a busy start, with Tuesdays being ballet-day for T and soccer-night for LittleK. The chauffeur part was okay except for a big snowfall. I threw together a picnic dinner of salad, milk, pasta and chicken chunks (nothing fancy for these picky eaters) in between ballet and soccer. We were heading out the door to get T, picnic bag in tow, soccer gear on, when LittleK asked, "Mama, why are there ripped-up poopy diapers in Chena's kennel??"
Yep. That actually happened today, our dog actually ate that.

So things could only get better after that, and they did. The kids ate chicken chunks at the sports complex without whining, LittleK scored three goals, and bedtime was stress-free.
Tomorrow I'll talk to my doctors, hooray. I'm not expecting much out of the appointment, just 'stay the course' again.
R had his birthday on Monday! He's allergic to eggs so we celebrated by having him blow out candles on top of a birthday-pie. The toy boxes are already overflowing so he only had two gifts to open, but he was happy.
Happy Birthday Dad! Love you lots.

Tomorrow I'm giving the dog some extra food so he doesn't go in search of snacks on his own.

Life is good

It was snowing a little while ago and it was beautiful.
On Wednesday nights I get to leave the house all by myself and drive to the other side of the lake to the local yarn shop. The women there are older, wiser, and funnier than I am, so I get to laugh and learn humility while knitting projects I never finish. When I get home, the kids are fed/showered/sleeping and K gets to leave for hockey.
My husband is great because he does all the hard work, he's an incredible dad, and he doesn't mind my hobbit-feet and man-hands... I only have to put up with some silence and smelly hockey gear.
Actually I started wearing contacts, shaving my legs, and even putting on makeup lately. Maybe the loss of vanity was just a temporary condition.
The lowlifes are gone, that's a happy thing! And only one person gave me dirty looks presumably to make me feel guilty for all the gun-shootin' I didn't do. Nobody's egged the minivan or left nastygrams taped to the door.
We are looking forward with even more excitement now that the closing date for the Laramie house has been set for November 16th! Words can't describe the relief...
I keep meaning to get copies of my CT & echo reports so I can obsess over them. As soon as I get them I'll post some details. My next pulm/rheum appointment is set for the 14th, just after R's 2nd birthday and the same day K leaves for a couple of weeks. I'm predicting the docs will be happy again.

To all the other people I know who are having health issues, I'm thinking about you and knowing you're strong enough to make it through.

So

I turned a year older. Still alive!
Halloween was fun of course. T's Hogwarts student costume was a lot of work but she was happy... LittleK was a beautiful princess and R was cute in his monkey "oot" because the elastic of the hood squished his face and made his cheeks pudgy. We went to a couple of big indoor events and ended the night with some door-to-door trick-or-treating in a nice neighborhood. K was out of commission the entire day because he ate something bad.
At 2am, the action started upstairs with loud thumps, screams and what I first thought was another glass bottle hitting the pavement outside... but it was a gunshot and there were a few more which followed. !!!! So I called 911, K went into lock-down mode, the troopers came, the people were arrested and now they're packing their things because they're being evicted. The shots were fired out the window, by the chick who lives up there, because they were being robbed.
The apartment manager said she'd let us out of our lease and refund our deposit if we want to leave. K didn't offer up his opinion but I said I don't want to look for another place, move all this stuff, and uproot the kids again. I'm also convinced the management will find decent people to move in upstairs, after all of this.
It sort of sounds like we're living in a slum but we're not, really! These buildings are practically new and only one lot away from the girls' school, we're minutes away from shopping, the commute is great from this side of Wasilla, and all the other neighbors are friendly. LittleK and I even said hi to the governor yesterday in the school parking lot - her daughter goes to our school.
Get this though - when I went to pay rent, the apartment manager said that the "rumor" is that I'M the one who freaked out and got out a gun!!!

Flixster - Share Movies

You know you've made an impression when your stranger neighbors tell the landlord you've been shootin' up the place. I go back and forth between cracking up about it and wondering why the hell would anyone pinpoint a mom of three kids for something like this... motherhood is really not that bad! I really didn't glare at anyone in the parking lot and I only yelled at smokers one time.
So,
February is not that far away, we'll get to the serious house-hunting soon.