Imagination - let it soar!

For about the past three or four months, we have enjoyed an ongoing story, told by Gabriel, during our dinner.  For the first couple of months it was called "Haunted House" and basically dealt with us first going to a fast food restaurant, usually Taco Bell, and then ending up at a haunted house searching for bad vampires/ghosts/witches/skeletons.  Gabriel had been watching alot of Scooby Doo at the time, and had just watched Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein.  He just started it one night, and wanted us to join in with plot turns and surprises.


Then it morphed into the "Haunted Train" where we got on a train, and each night found a different booklet to let us know what spooky place we were visiting.  We went to a haunted beach, baseball game, museum, grocery store, restaurant, school, amusement park, forest, and airplane.  The airplane story lasted at least 2 weeks.  During all of this time the story participants were the four of us, Gabriel's classmates, and his two imaginary friends,  Brocklin and Orcornelius.  Oh, and their 100 friends.  


Then all of a sudden the story morphed again into all of us up and moving to a hotel so that we could be near Wacky World, the name of the aforementioned haunted amusement park.  It wasn't really about the haunted anymore, though.  It was about the rides!  We've never taken Gabriel to Six Flags, but I keep describing the different rides and he is getting more and more excited about going one day. Last week he came up with a really funny turn, when he decided to use his President's placemat in the game.  We pair up different presidents and they ride rides and fight over which one to ride next. They sometimes want to change partners to have one more, or less, adventurous.  I try my best to do accurate voices for the ones I have heard, but I am at a loss when he picks James Monroe or someone like that. 


There are nights when I would just prefer to sit and eat my dinner, quietly and with nothing taxing my brain to try to come up with a new part of the story.   But after watching this video below, I am inspired by Gabriel's imagination and want to nurture and encourage it.  Now I can't wait to see what he dreams up next.


(Note:  This is long, but SO worth your time.  Mom, get Dad to watch it too.)

Crotchety before my time

We've had a hard couple of weeks, with first both boys getting upper respiratory and ear infections, then Jav getting bronchitis, then me having a sinus and double ear infections. Add to that all the extra hours Jav worked recently (until 10 or later for a week and a half) on a project, and you have one tired and burned out me.

I used to have so much energy. I was unstoppable in the yard, or for any kind of project around the house. I cleaned my house every week and always had time to exercise and walk the dogs.

Times have changed. I am so tired most of the time I got nothing these days. I tried to work out a schedule for cleaning my house so I could keep up better, but my play time with the boys always goes long, or I have to call someone that ends up taking awhile and my whole cleaning mojo just disappears for another day. I have NEVER let my house get this bad before, but it is really hard for me to tell the boys that they are on their own for awhile while I clean after I've been at work all day and have been missing them. I thought for awhile I might try to clean after they went to bed, but there's just no way.

Exercising, other than walking the dog with the boys, is out of the question. I can't get up any earlier than I do to go to work, I get up early to grocery shop on Saturdays, and if we don't have plans I look forward to sleeping in all the way to 7 on Sundays. Forget about doing anything like yoga.

We need to get Tucker to a once a week training class, but some classes are during the week and I just don't see where I'll have any time to fit it in.  So I just keep putting it off.

All of this leads to frustration and me in a generally bad mood all of the time. I feel like I should be getting more done.  Instead, I feel just like Loretta Lynn (as portrayed by Sissy Spacek), in Coal Miner's Daughter, just before she collapses and has a nervous breakdown,  "I'm not runnin my life anymore, my life's runnin' me."   Or something like that.  I think alot of the reason is my age and trying to keep up with little kids.  

And now, add work to the stress. Work was so easy, I didn't even realize how little I was using my brain. Now, though, my brain is trying to keep up. The girl who is our buyer will be leaving on maternity leave in mid to late August, and I was asked to replace her to "enter orders" while she's gone. I didn't think it would be a big deal so I accepted. Big mistake with this new, crotchety me. I've had five days of nonstop training and I am overwhelmed! Apparently they want me to basically do her job, entirely, while she's out.  There's so much to remember and it's all new and I frankly just want to either go back to my humdrum easy job or quit. Before this, even though I didn't relish having to work, it was a nice break from the boys and a chance to be around adults again and feel like I was contributing to something. Now I am dreading getting to work, totally burned out when I get home, and having dreams about part numbers and purchase orders.

I have to admit that part of my anger is at myself for not wanting to take on a challenge and learn something new.  I always thought I would look forward to learning things at any age.  But I guess I was thinking more about learning an instrument or sewing or something.  Not this.  Also, I don't want my boys to just think it's ok to quit at something that seems difficult at first.  I would want them to tough it out to see if it gets better after some time.  So I will do the same thing.  But I don't have to be happy about it.  

Spring project and yard pics

I guess this picture didn't turn out like I wanted, but there's a little bee pigging out on pollen from our holly bushes (the blur just to the left of the middle of the picture). That's the reason I worked so hard all summer to keep them healthy. He and his friends (probably 60 or so) show up about two weeks after the robins that show up each early spring to eat the ripe red berries. That tradition takes two afternoons. Then within a week or so the bushes start giving off this amazing scent. It smells as good as honeysuckle to me, but it much more subtle. And after that, here come the bees! It makes me feel SO good to contribute to the well being of our bees.

Our Bridal Wreath in full Spring bloom.

This picture makes me sad. This wisteria plant is actually in our neighbor Tim's yard, but it hangs over our fence. I never thought to water it all summer, and I don't think he's even aware it's back there (it's in his back corner behind his storage shed). I was surprised to see it blooming at all, but it was greatly diminished from years past. If we (God forbid) have another horrible summer I will try to remember to water it.

This is a weed, but I think it's kind of pretty. We had two or three of them, with more bees buzzing happily around them.

Here is a rare picture of Tucker. I need to devote a post about him soon. The crazy ball of brush behind him is the Asian Jasmine remains that I dug up. I discovered the reason it's called Asian Jasmine is because the roots go down to China!!!! It took me several different afternoons to get this far, only to discover that there are still tons of roots in the soil and I'm nowhere near being finished yet. I wanted to get it finished and plant some new perennials by our Easter get together this coming Saturday. But now I'm thinking I won't plant anything in it until next spring.

The afternoon I finally got that big ball detached from the earth was just after a day of heavy rains. I chopped and chopped at the roots with my shovel and was about to finished, when I realized I had chopped through a wire of some kind. Okay, several wires. Oops. I hoped that they were not still live, made a mental note that I needed to call my husband to ask, and kept chopping and hacking in a new area. Within seconds, I saw I had hit a snake. Well, that was when I called it a day, my friend. I hate killing things, and felt really bad, even though it was a snake. The next day I told my story to a girl on Facebook who was in homeroom with me in high school and is now an avid gardener. She told me to be careful because with the warm weather and it being Spring and all it's mate was probably not far away. I saw one in the same area a few days later when Jav and I went out to stuff that ball of Jasmine into our yard cart.

It sashayed into the huge remaining patch of Asian Jasmine that I will not be touching after this project.