Desire and Disappointment

Over the past few weeks, I've been learning a lesson, the hard way. I've been learning about contentment, and how I should be content as Paul says, "in any situation." You see, if you'd asked me back at Christmas, or even a month ago, if I was content with our car situation, the answer would have been a big NO! I've been itching for a mini-van for the last year. In fact, last summer, right about this time of year, I was starting to pester my dear Hubster about our inadequate vehicle situation.

Our tiny two seater pick-up truck won't hold both of us and the baby. And our Ford Focus, was a tight squeeze when we put the infant carrier inside. In my mind, it was obvious that we needed an SUV or a mini-van.

Things just never seemed to work out, so we waited on the Lord to provide us with a new vehicle in His timing. His timing came out of nowhere, from behind and without any warning we were left without a family car. We went through all of the stages of grief quickly and then again slowly. The past two weeks have been more stressful and more draining than anything else I can remember. But all of a sudden, I find myself perfectly content with the Focus. It was a great little car and I miss it terribly. I feel so bad for all the times that I complained about its flaws.

I miss the fabulous gas mileage that it had, and the cheapness of the windshield when it had a crack in it. I miss the way it vibrated like a Japanese massage chair when I drove around town. I miss the pre-set radio stations that were carefully programmed for both trips and day to day driving. I miss the security of knowing that it was a reliable vehicle that wouldn't leave us hanging out in the wind.

As a teacher, however, I can tell that I haven't fully brought this lesson home, yet. We purchased a mini-van yesterday. And now, with my desire fulfilled, I find myself still yearning for the car that I had. I know that if I had sold the Focus, instead of having it snatched out from under me, I would be in the same situation, but I would have a different attitude. It's sort of like the difference between getting knocked up by accident and finding out you are pregnant when you were trying to have a baby.

I have to say, that I don't like the accidental version very much at all!

count your blessings

About this time a week ago, we were still reeling over the sudden death of our little family car. Since then, I've been stressed, moody and having some pretty bad luck. My poor Hubby has taken more than his fair share of my meltdowns. It has been a rough week all the way around. So I thought it would be nice to list a few things that have brought me joy this week. In dark times, even small glimmers of light shine brightly. And on a normal week, I might take these things for granted, but this week, they made me really thankful.

70. Cold leftover steak, eaten straight out of the fridge, with bare hands. It sounds gross, but it is so good! Almost as good as chocolate cheesecake straight out of the fridge with bare hands.

71. My wonderful mother-in-law who took care of Bri today, while I attended a teaching class. (I'm not nearly as thankful, though, for the time spent in said teaching class.)

72. I was very thankful when the claims agent FINALLY told me that the teenager's insurance would be held fully responsible for the damages to our car, and that they would start the process immediately. (And I will be very thankful when we eventually get a check.)

73. On Friday, we dissected starfish in my Biology classes, and the kids loved it. I was thankful for the opportunity to let kids explore life in a way that most people never see. They were full of wonder and awe as they dissected their specimens. It was one of those days that just felt like a gift.

74. After a day spent with formaldehyde, I was very thankful for the hot shower that awaited me at home. It brought back memories of anatomy lab and the long hours spent exploring our cadavers. Yum!

75. All week long, I have been ever so grateful for my Daddy. He has been just a phone call away. Whenever I needed information about dealing with insurance stuff, he always had a patient reassuring answer or some really helpful advice. His expertise has been a life saver through all of this. He's coached us through the whole thing.

76. I've been really thankful for sleep this week, too. Mostly because I'm not getting much. The other night I had a horrific nightmare that ended with me watching Officer Hubster get shot by a bad guy. Still shaky when I think about it. But the little bit of sleep I have been getting has been precious. Hopefully, tomorrow will include a nice long Sunday afternoon nap.

77. Did I mention that I'm thankful for my Hubster? He's wonderful. He drove halfway across the county today just to kiss me! Isn't he great? Not only did he kiss me, but he sang silly songs to the baby, and all of this took place right in front of two of the other officers on his shift. He really loves his family!

78. This week was the first week of the new marching band season. We had a week of fundamental practice and then a parent show. I missed most of the practices because I had to deal with the car stuff after school, but I came to the parent show and the girls were amazing! I think the overall effect was much improved by missing all the in-between practice. It made me so thankful for my responsible captains and my fabulous girls.

There were many more happy moments over the course of this week. And they each stood in stark contrast to the stress that loomed like a dark cloud over me. Now that the cloud seems to be lifting, I felt the need to capture the memories. I'm looking forward to taking things for granted again!

Worn Slap Out

My to-do list this morning had four categories which each contained five to six different items. The categories were personal, teaching, flagline and end of the year. I'm still amazed at how many boxes I got to check off. But I didn't save much brain room for blogging. I think I have just enough to watch TV.

Check (the chess kind)

Today has been a real Jonah day. Things have gone from bad to worse. We'll start with the worst part. When I arrived to pick up Bri from daycare, the lady told me that she has not been herself today. She didn't laugh or play like she usually does. Her cough is much deeper and she has red bags under her eyes. I took her home with a promise to get her checked out by the doctor tomorrow. And when I was feeding her dinner I realized that she has a rash under her arms.
There are other things that are bothering me too, but we'll stop there. I don't want to whine here. I'll save it for the Hubster! Your prayers are appreciated. Sigh.

PS- The reason I call this post "Check," is because I feel like there are lots of antagonistic forces surrounding me and forcing me to either do something against my will or give up altogether. Sort of like the king must feel when he's checked in chess.

Frazzled

There are too many things to do and not nearly enough time. Sigh. I think I will ignore them all and do nothing rather than play favorites. Where's the remote?

Vanishing Bookmarks

Our computer is trying to give me a heart attack. Yesterday every single one of our bookmarks disappeared. And the whole reason I even HAVE bookmarks is so I don't have to remember how to find those pages. Grrrr! Not to mention the fact that I can't even remember half of them.

Reverse thankful list...

This morning I am really thankful that most days are not like today. I'm thankful that on most days...

34. We do not wake up 6 times in the middle of the night.
35. The Brimeister does not puke all over herself and the carseat requiring a bath at 7:30 am.
36. I don't have to figure out how to take a drippy puky carseat apart and wash the puky drippy padding.
37. The electricity does not go out.
38. The cable TV does not go out.
39. The internet works.
40. I don't have to call the cable company and wait on hold with a fussy baby.
41. I don't have to call the pediatrician's office about a sick child.
42. We don't have to make an emergency run to Wal-Mart for Pedialyte.

But most of all I'm thankful for the fact that until today ...

43. I've never had to take a rectal temperature!

Being a mom is quite an experience. Whew! Is this day over yet?!?!

Busy Day

Our dinner smells delicious! I'm putting together a vegetable beef stew this morning because we have a busy day ahead of us. This morning I have my six week check-up with my OB/Gyn. My how time flies when you're not allowed to excercise! Tomorrow I'll have to start putting that gym membership to good use. In the past my OB visits have lasted for 2-3 hours on a regular basis. During that 2-3 hours, I spent 7 minutes in the lab, 10 minutes in the exam room and 2 and 1/2 hours sitting in the waiting room before that. My doctor has excellent communication skills and she is way too patient with her other patients. (Of course I love the fact that she spends lots of time answering all of my questions.) So, I'm not sure how I will feed Bri while we are there. I think it's going to depend on who's around when she gets hungry. She really needs more practice with the bottle anyway, but knowing that daycare is looming ahead I really want to nurse her as much as possible. So I guess we'll see how many people are in the waiting room.
Then this afternoon we have an appointment to draft up our will. It's a very morbid idea, but we want to make sure that Bri would be taken care of if the worst should happen. We've been meaning to get around to this for months. We actually intended to write one before her birth, but we are procrastinators. And in this case the deadline is a big question mark. So we're finally getting around to it. To give us some credit, we attempted to do one of those free online wills. My dear husband was in a sit-down-and-get-it-done mood that day and it had been on the to do list for weeks. We had filled out almost 30 pages before we got to the confusing stuff. "In the event that the beneficiary and the second alternate are killed in the same accident then the beneficiary will be pronounced dead first so that the inheritance will pass according to their arrangements"... Crazy stuff! We were so confused that we had to stop, much to my hubby's dismay. And begrudgingly he admitted that it was worth it to hire a professional to draft our will so that we could feel secure in the knowledge that our baby would be taken care of according to our wishes. sigh. I bet we'll be listening to lots of explanations at this appointment!

Desperate Haircut

Before

My last professional haircut was a very expensive mistake in a series of similarly expensive mistakes. I had hoped to change stylists sometime between that haircut in July and my due date. However the stylist that I wanted to go to is no longer accepting new clients. Plus I now have a baby to add to the equation which will be tricky. Anyway, I've really been dying to get my hair cut so I researched how to do it myself online. After reading about different techniques, I grabbed my kitchen shears and pulled my hair up into a pony tail and started hacking. When the hair settled on the floor I looked in the mirror and was really pleased. Then I saw the back and I was HORRIFIED. Ooops! So I tried to trim the chunky funky layers and ended up with a giant hole in the middle. At this point I was afraid to continue so I called my fabulous sister. She dropped whatever it was that she was doing and showed up at my doorstep 20 minutes later. After about thirty minutes of snipping and fixing, this was the final result. I think it turned out pretty nicely although much shorter than I originally planned!

After:

Mom Advice Wanted

It's a lot harder to get Bri into the crib than I thought it would be. She seems to wake up the second I put her down. How did you transition your kids into the crib? What tricks do you have up your sleeve? I've tried letting her cry and checking on her every ten minutes. But she just gets more and more worked up. I can't stand it more than thirty minutes. Help!

Thank you note

To Whom it May Concern:
Thank you so much for the gazillions of gifts you've given us. I haven't had time to open them because our darling little girl is constantly eating and my hands are never free. I'm typing this now with my left hand. It was so thoughtful of you to bring us a gift. I am sure it will be lovely on her assuming she doesn't outgrow it before I get around to washing it!
Lots of love,
me

(sigh)

Contractions

For my non-pregnant friends I wanted to enlighten you on the joys of contractions. I'm doing this partly because they're not at all what I expected them to be like and partly because every time I mention that we're inducing a week early, I get the "Why on earth would you want to do that?" response. Well the answer in short is that my contractions started this time last week. No joke. We were at my in-laws house last Saturday night when I felt the first one. It was like having an invisible corset cinched tight around my big belly. At first they were about 30 minutes apart and easy to time. I was actually excited to feel them. Yay! Here comes the baby! But I didn't tell anyone yet because I knew we were still a long way from going to the hospital. The corset will tighten and then slowly release over and over. Sometimes it doesn't release all the way and then it feels kind of like your abdomen does when you're doing the type of crunches where you're just holding your head up for a long time.
Things started getting painful three days later. On top of the corset-tightening pain there was a muscle cramping type pain. This most likely had to do with the fact that my uterine muscles had been contracting non-stop since Saturday night. That corset-type pain has been non-stop even in my sleep since last week. But thankfully the muscle pain comes and goes. I've even had a few days since then where I didn't have the muscle pain at all during the day. Today we've added a third type of pain on top of those two. The muscles in my back are really tight and they seem to tighten when a contraction is really strong. It makes you want to bend over and hold your belly so that the weight isn't on your back anymore.

And I almost forgot - there's another component to all of this too. In order for Bri to come out she has to "engage" which means she has to fit her head between the bones of my pelvis. That's a very strange sensation too. It sort of makes you jump and it feels uncomfortable but it's exciting because that means she's close to being ready. I haven't had her stay engaged for longer than 5 minutes at a time so far though. At least, not that I could feel. So basically, all this discomfort has made me very willing to go ahead and induce labor. I know that active labor (the next stage - the part they always show on "The Birth Story") will be loads more painful but at least it will have a definitive ending point and an epidural and more importantly a BABY on the other side!! :o)

Swollen and Stressed

This is the "to do" list that never ends... So all week I've been working on my new classroom and I thought I'd be finished by Wednesday so that I could start planning for my substitute in September. HA! I was soooo naive. I've been staying late every day. I even canceled my 34 week check up with my OB to keep working at school and still my room isn't the way I want it to look. I have one more fake bulletin board to put up Monday before school starts and about 8 more posters. (I ran out of double sided tape).
Last night I went home at 6:30pm and put in another 3 hours of work at home. Today I stayed until 5 pm and my feet were the size of footballs when I left (only a slight exaggeration - they're so swollen). The school is going to be open tomorrow but I have a PLU class all day and we have a test in the morning (that I haven't really studied for). I'm stressing big time!! Whew! Most of all I need to put my feet up and take a nap.

This World Calls Me Poor

Money ... money ... money... It seems like all week I've been dealing with balancing numbers and dollars. At home we're trying to adjust to the expenses of childcare so that we'll be ready when the baby comes. And at school I'm trying to decide what to do with my allotted amount of science supply funds while simultaneously trying to juggle the flagline uniform purchases from the band account. It's a mess! On top of all of this I've really been thinking about my approach towards my impoverished students. Last year I was mostly blind to the home lives of my kids. I was in survival mode. But this year I want to reach out to those kids and try to make a difference. Poverty's kids are at-risk of dropping out of high school and getting into lots of trouble when they do. The streets around our schools host lots of gang fights. This year we have more students coming in from surrounding school zones which means lots of opposing gang members under one roof. It will be interesting. My education classes this summer dealt extensively with the hidden rules of poverty and how these rules will affect the classroom.

So all of this has me thinking about what it means to be poor. One of my all-time favorite songs (by Caedmon's Call) is narrated by an Ecuadorian lady who is raising her sons alone in a hut with a dirt floor and meals of dried corn while her husband is fighting in a war. She says "This world calls me poor, I bore my babies on this floor, but [God] always provides sure as the sun will rise. So I sing Him songs of praise, cause I know He keeps me in His gaze. Jesus is all I need." It brings tears to my eyes to hear her because I know that I am so spoiled myself. If I don't get to go out to eat at least once a week then I'm complaining. And yet spiritually I know she is far richer than I am. There's a verse in Matthew that says "Where your treasure is there your heart will be also" (also found in Harry Potter 7 oddly enough). I'm afraid I care too much about being rich on Earth and not enough about being rich in my love for the Lord.

What a Rough Day

Well, when I set out at 8am this morning (actually 8:30 but I'm jumping ahead of myself). I had no idea that I wouldn't be getting home again until 9pm. It was a very trying day. To begin with I ran out the door late this morning and unlocked my car. Then, just like every day, I slung my heavy bag over into the passenger seat. Unlike every other day, though, my keys went flying into thin air! I looked high and low. Frantic digging under seats and through my bag ensued. I unzipped my purse just to make sure that they hadn't magically fallen in there and zipped themselves closed. Mind you the clock is ticking and I was late to start with. Finally after I had a fit of hysteria, the Hubster found them up underneath the driver's seat. I still don't see how they landed there. And that was the beginning of our rough day.
A little while later Hubs decided to leave early for work. He discovered that the battery in the truck had died. Luckily our neighbor across the street was home and willing to help jump my Hubby off. So he made it to work on time but frazzled.
After work he called me and I detoured from my route towards home so that we could take his car to the shop to get fixed. Somewhere in the conversation his phone cut out and refused to work for 15 very long minutes. We had to actually just meet in person and then of course it started working again. After we had a fresh new battery for the truck, we drove around in circles looking for a particular school supply store that was having a special on USB jump drives. We literally drove to the wrong place three times before we found the right store on the fourth try. Frustrations galore!
So since it had been such a tiring day we stopped in at one of our favorite restaurants to have dinner. We laughed about what a crazy day it had been and enjoyed just resting together. Then we went outside to go home and low and behold my car wouldn't start. It was unreal. I mean all of this in one day! We tried to jump it off but it refused. A few of the lights would flicker and the radio would come on but the car wouldn't start. It wouldn't even turn over. It just sort of gurgled at us. And then while we were standing there sweaty with our car hoods up and looking oh so redneck, I saw an old high school friend and her fiance! Have you ever noticed how you always see people that you've really wanted to see at the worst possible times? Anyway, the car refused to start. So we called a tow truck. We crashed my friend's date while we waited for the tow truck to come and we ordered dessert. I had a lot of fun catching up with her. Even still, I'm so tired. Whew! What a day!