What a week!!

So let's rewind... because as usual I have not been keeping up with my Blog. My bad, y'all.

Not this weekend, but the weekend before, I was supposed to perform all day at a show with the new clogging group I have joined, the Renegade Cloggers in New Jersey. I killed myself for two weeks trying to learn their routines. I loved every minute of it. I began to get to know the other dancers, and I was feeling like I was getting back into the swing of things. Then, we got a torrential downpour and the show got canceled. I was beyond bummed. The real kicker is, it wasn't THAT rainy on the day of the show! (The event had been canceled the day before, based on the weather forecast.). However, we went to the pumpkin patch instead and came home with like 70 pounds of pumpkin, which I need to get my butt in gear and cook and puree.

This past week was going along nicely until Friday. I figured I'd take the day to myself, sleep in a little, get up, go shopping for supplies for Coffee Hour (we take turns hosting the after church refreshment hour at our church, and it was my weekend to host. ) After that, we were going to the annual church Auction Dinner.

At noon Friday, the phone rang. My mom was calling to tell me my father was in the hospital. He has been wheelchair bound for a couple of years and seems to keep getting worse. It reached the point where he could not transfer his weight to even get out of the chair to go to the bathroom or get into bed. My mother, who has health problems and a bad back, realized she could not help him, and he was taken to the hospital for tests. The good news? They know what it probably is.... Normal Pressure Hydralocephalus The bad news is, there's nothing they can do about it. So he is now on his way to a Rehabilitation Facility. From there he will either go home or to a nursing home. I have a sinking feeling it will be the latter.

I spent all day Friday on the phone, calling back and forth to my Mom and my siblings. I got off the phone right before the church dinner. The church dinner itself was fun but I was feeling out of it. We got home to a hysterical phone message from our neighbor 3 doors down, whose father in California was being put into hospice. Her adult son was out of town for the weekend and she had nobody to come feed and walk her dog. So I wound up running over there to see how I could help. I agreed to walk the dog in the morning, and also to drive my neighbor to the train station at 4 AM so she could catch the train for the airport. I could not fall asleep and was up until 4 AM, then finally fell asleep about 5:30 AM. I had to be up at 8:30 to walk the dog, and go to Austin's soccer game.

The plan after this was to go to the Renaissance Faire, but then Jeff got a migraine during the game. Junk that plan. Austin asked if I would take him and a friend to the movie theatre and I agreed. However, for the third time this week he was over 2o minutes late coming home from a friends and I'd had it, so I told him no movie. He proceeded to have a fit, which (I should be honest) was not THAT bad of a fit. He's done much worse. He attempted to hit his head on the wall but when I kissed him on the head and gently said "No", he stopped. He stomped up to his room and started throwing things until I walked to his doorway, picked up the things he had thrown and said "I'm going to need you to stop throwing stuff.". I was freaking AMAZED when he actually stopped!! He went to his room and did a lot of loud fake-crying, and then came down and asked if we could go get his Halloween costume. I reluctantly agreed.

Having a special needs child means that some things are not easy for them. Halloween is a hard one in our house. My son is obsessed with, but TRIGGERED by violent or scary movies. So usually there's a lot of obsessing over Freddy Kreuger and wanting to tell me what happened in the movie he saw when he was six. He then keeps whining that he wants to be Freddy Kreuger/Jason/Scream/ The blood and guts zombie. It leads to an emotional breakdown, a full blown tantrum, and occasionally an attempt to hurt me. This year he did okay. He selected one of the costumes I deemed "okay". (Some skeleton dude) and took it with good grace when I told him no weapons. (He CANNOT handle toy weapons.)

Saturday night I had a ton of stuff to do. And as always, when Jeff is recovering from a migraine he becomes extremely talkative and makes it very hard for me to get things done. It was probably 3:30 before I fell asleep.

Got up at 8:15, walked the dog, took Austin to church for the field trip, came home, got the coffee hour stuff, and spend the next 2 hours in the church kitchen preparing for coffee hour. After that I cleaned up, and by the time we got home it was almost 1:30 in the afternoon. By about 3, I could tell I was headed for an emotional crash and burn if I didn't stop running like this. Jeff saw it too and insisted I sit down. He also insisted we had enough leftovers in the house that I didn't need to make dinner. Thank goodness for him sometimes!

To top it off, I have someone in my life who is pulling a lot of passive/agressive bullcrap and I have made the decision that I am not playing the game anymore. It's a hard decision to make, but I have to do it.

Well okay, I missed the mark

I am still here!!

Sorry my blogging sort of fell off the radar there for a bit!

So let's recap....

It's summer, and the summer of the PRETEEN ATTITUDE. I am not dealing with it as well as I should be. I am trying hard to be loving, therapeutic parent, and there are just days it does NOT happen for me. 

Austin just got new pets. A pair of guinea pigs. Peter and Oliver, who are one 1 year old. Their owner had to give them up because of allergies. 

Austin turns 12 next week and will celebrate with a sleepover and pizza/movie/swimming party.  He doesn't know it yet, but he's getting a wii that won't really be HIS but a family gift, so he cannot just trade it into Gamestop like he did with his DS. The Wii is for everyone but he'll get games for the Wii for his bday. 

Anyone still reading this? 

Reflections on 3 years....

In 15 minutes it will be midnight. That will signify our 3 year adoption anniversary, and almost 4 years of having Austin in our lives.

Sitting back and thinking about it, I cannot believe how far he's come. I can't believe how far we've ALL come. 

It's been a heck of a ride, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Austin came into our lives for a reason. And better or worse, we are blessed to know him. 

Happy Halloween!

A few Halloween Photos for your enjoyment.

Also? If you read my blog, leave me a comment... because I am pretty much convinced that absolutely nobody is reading this....

Church Troubles

Today I am tired and angry and frustrated with my son. He is 11 years old and for the most part is generally a polite and well behaved young man. He has a few weaknesses, though. One is the grocery store (I will blog about that later). The other is church.  He CANNOT seem to behave at church.

Let's see... there was the time he decided to light at match and set off the smoke detector (He wasn't intending for the smoke detector to go off, it just happened). There was the time he and his buddy were bouncing superballs in the sanctuary after the service. There was the time at my mother's church in Florida, when he attempted to kick me and run away and I had to perform a takedown on the front lawn of Mom's church. (Yes. I was so proud. I'm glad my mother was spared this spectacle, as she was in the building, and I had taken Austin outside because of his behavior. ) There have been many, many mornings where he has come down incorrectly dressed for church and we've had to make him change 2 and 3 times (We have very few rules on church clothing, so he has to really WORK to break them) He's tried to make me late to church. When the RE Program does not meet, he acts up during the service.

Today, we had a meeting after church that both Jeff and I needed to attend. Austin was given explicit instructions to either sit with one of us, play quietly, or go sit in the library (next to where the meeting was, so we could see him) and read a book.  It started off badly at coffee hour, prior to the meeting. He was running wild, crawling under things, chasing other kids. He has a pack of boys he hangs out with. They were throwing apples in the hall. They were wrestling (Which we have explained is not okay at church). The other boys left and we told Austin it was time to settle down. First he tried crawling under tables and chairs. I asked him to stop being disruptive. Then he just started wandering around messing with stuff. At which point I told him to please go play or read quietly in the library (I felt I was not able to concentrate on the meeting with him wandering all over where I had to keep track of him, and Jeff was actively participating in the meeting at that point.)

So he sulked over to the library. I look up and what is he doing? GLUING THE PAGES OF A COLORING BOOK TOGETHER!! Yes, that's what my intelligent, creative bookworm of a son found to do. IT's not even OUR coloring book. So he now owes the church his weekly allowance since he took something that belonged to the entire youth group and rendered it unusable. He also has to pay me back inconvenience time for his behavior. He's darned lucky I still took him to his friend's birthday party today. (Jeff thinks I shouldn't have, but I had to leave to take him while the meeting was still happening, so there was no time for us to discuss what happened. Jeff didn't even know he'd glued the pages of the coloring book together until he arrived home from the meeting) 

We're going to have to do something serious here because this is a consistient problem, and he is 11 years old. He can do better at this. 

Harvest Stomp 2008

Yesterday, my friend Megan and I headed off to New Jersey for the Harvest Stomp Clogging Workshop. Although I was excited to go, those of you who know me know that I am very much NOT a morning person. Needless to say, the alarm going off at 5:45 in the morning failed to excite me.  Megan didn't look much happier when I picked her up at 6:30, but we needed to be registered before the 9 AM class and we had two hours of driving ahead of us. 

Thankfully, we had good directions. We only got lost at the very end, when we had to make 3 turns within a quarter mile, but even that just took us a block out of our way. 

The workshop itself was a blast. The National Instructor routines had a little more hip hop in them than I'd have liked.... just because I feel it's not appropriate for a 33 year old, overweight white woman to be trying to do hip hop moves. However, all the classes we attended were very interesting. Probably my favorite was a dance to music that the instructor had learned in her Belly Dance class.  There was also an awesome routine to 1,2 Step that had some cool non clogging moved that I didn't feel ridiculous doing. And a banjo version of the William Tell Overture.

We demoed one of our routines at the fun dance, and it got a little messed up, but by the time demo dances roll around, everyone's been dancing for 7 hours so nobody's expecting perfection I don't think. 

All in all we were gone about 16 and a half hours. It was 11 PM before I got home and I still had to wash my hair and all that stuff. 

You can bet I slept well last night!

It was bound to happen one day....

By my reckoning I have been cooking on a regular basis for 17 years.  Since I was in high school, I was responsible for getting dinner on the table several nights a week. In this time, I have met with a few kitchen mishaps, but never a kitchen disaster.  I guess I was due.

To set this up, our dining area/computer area, kitchen and basement are closed off from the rest of the house by a set of french doors with glass panes. The reason for this is one of our cats, Mistie, has litterbox issues and we can't let her on the carpet. Also important to this, is she has such bad stomach problems she can not eat straight cat food, and I mix hers with cooked chicken so it's easier for her to digest.

After dinner on Saturday, I realized the cat was out of chicken. I threw some into a pot with water, intending to reduce the heat on the burner once the water began boiling.  While I was waiting for it to boil, I began cleaning the kitchen. Five minutes later, Austin came in and said we were starting our weekend Family Movie, but we needed to start it now, because he had to be to bed in less than 2 hours. So I ran out the door after him, completely forgetting the chicken.

An hour into Tarzan, Jeff says "what's that smell"? You guessed it, the entire kitchen and dining/computer area are FULL OF SMOKE. We're not sure if the chicken actually caught fire, but it burned really badly. Jeff ran in, threw the pot in the sink under running water, opened the windows, turned on the fans, grabbed Mistie and threw her out the doors to me. 

There was no damage, except to my pride, and it took a couple days to rid the house of the smoke smell. And Mistie had turkey lunch meat with her cat food that night, because I decided I was done in the kitchen for the night.