Vindauga

Take some dramamine

If you get motion sickness, you might want to think twice about seeing Paranormal Activity. Lots of hand-held camera set Mal's stomach astray. Poor kid. However, Bert and I thought it was a pretty fun movie. No gore, just suspense. My kind of scary movie.

Holy Moly

I almost went to bed without posting.

Let's direct your attention to something worthy of reading. Eden Kennedy has always been one of my favorite bloggers. She is such a great storyteller. And I like her dogs. Read this.

See you tomorrow.

The Weirdness

Okay, this is the weird thing. The night Bert was sitting on the phone, talking to his boss, learning he was going to lose his job, I quietly said a little cheer because he would then get to see Lin play basketball the next week. Yeah, our lives are going to hell in a hand basket, but I'm thinking of the freedom.

He has been super busy the last 10 days. Looking for work, doing some part-time work for my boss, catching up on little stuff in our life, looking at grad school.

However, he has also volunteered in Mason's classroom, driven to soccer practice, and picked kids up from school. Everyday I troll every site that might possibly have a job opening but at the same time I think not only "please let him get the job" but "please let it start January 1st."

I'm loving having a stay-at-home parent again. The kids love it. Bert loves it. Now it's no longer an hour or two of interaction in a day, mostly in a hurry to make or clean up from a meal or get kids off to bed or school. There is time. He's reading more, playing games after dinner.

Time is a huge, huge gift. Unfortunately the price tag is too high to enjoy for very long.

Private Conversations

Today I had the chance to have three of those "big" conversations.

Lin is studying the human body and health this year. She started talking about HIV and AIDS, and was surprisingly well informed for an 11 year-old. I told her all about my best friends who died of AIDS and the impact their death head on my life and how ignorant the world was in 1986. She was stunned. She is still shocked to hear about discrimination and prejudice.

At dinner Mason asked about his birth. I gave a brief explanation of C-sections and thought we were done. Then he asked about when the girls came out of my legs, forgetting the previous conversations about childbirth. When I used the word "vagina" at the dinner table he told me felt queasy. I love 7 year-old boys.

In her further studies of the human body, Lin learned what a liver does. She can't believe that anyone would ever eat any kind of liver. She said "What's next? Pancreas?"  We then had a short conversation that when you really thought about it, all flesh and organs were gross to eat. Damn it, I may have another budding vegetarian.

NaBloPoMo

Oh hell, you know me. I've done this the last three or four years. Which in blogging years, means I'm 112.

I don't know if I'll keep this up. Maybe tomorrow you'll see a post that echoes Kramer in the Master of My Domain skit and I'll say "I'm out!"

I know I'm a downer lately, so here are some good things for today.

• Bert found a very part-time (10 hours a week) job to supplement unemployment.
• One of my children's first families offered to buy my kids a very nice family gift for Christmas so the holidays wouldn't seem so sparse. 
• Our van is fixed, and our insurance company thinks they will be able to recover the deductible from the driver's insurance company. Having this vehicle that holds all our family, and looks decent and runs, makes me feel a little less an object of pity. 
• It's Mallory's day at one of our favorite pizza places, so she gets to go make a free pizza with whatever she wants.
• We got health insurance today. It has a $10K deductible, but still, if someone is hit by a bus, we're covered.
• Bert, in addition to looking for work, looking at grad school, and working part-time is getting some things checked off our "to-do" list that have been there for months. 
• Daisy ate a whole sock on Friday, and tossed it up on Saturday. Thank god. We were terrified of surgery. Never so glad to see a slimy bunch of dog vomit in my life. Lin, the ingrate, now refuses to wear the sock, even after I washed it! Kids today.

I'm grateful for all the great people in our lives, and all the lucky breaks we've been given. I know this dark period will end.