I finally convinced my bosses that I need to leave at the end of this month. They are not happy, but then, neither am I. They changed our working hours and mandated that no one could come in before 8 a.m. due to safety reasons with all the construction going on. Of course I understand that, but suddenly I’m driving in rush hour instead of before it, and getting home quite late. After an hour of battling traffic and getting home and having to rush-rush to get dinner on because my kids are hungry, I’m fairly cranky and resentful of all the time lost.
And frankly it was heading there anyway, so this was a nice additional reason to give.
So that 10 pounds I’ve gained? It’s gonna come off. I ordered a TrekDesk yesterday and plan to use it in addition to my regular desk. I couldn’t bear the thought of coming back home to work again and continuing the same bad habits of being parked in a chair all day. It’s stagnating. Despite Lauren’s dire warnings from the Wall Street Journal, the reviews on Amazon are quite inspiring. I’m super excited to try it out and hope it works with the treadmill we’ve got. We’ve figured out a way to crowd both desks into my office so I can switch off, and Derek can have some extra space to work, too.
I’m working hard on the new business. It’s exciting and terrifying, and I oscillate between feeling convinced I’m out of my league and feeling convinced that a little stretching will feel good. If it sounds like I’m being coy, well, I don’t like to talk much about work in progress. When I was a writer, I never talked about my stories while I was working on them, because when it came time to put the words on the page, they’d fall flat if I’d formulated the language verbally. Now, I don’t want to say much until this whole thing is a little more polished and I’m ready to launch. At this point there are so many unknowns that I’ll look flaky if I announce I’m doing X and X morphs into Z half a dozen times.
In other exciting news, Kate made the Honors Choir at school. More than a hundred kids tried out, 60 got callbacks, and 30 were chosen. We are incredibly proud of her, and more than that, thrilled that she’ll be in a position to learn how to really sing. She’s been participating in the church choir as well (another funny story: as Derek and I also sing, that leaves Sophia to babysit Jonathan during rehearsal, and those of you who know Sophia will be chuckling right now and wondering what kind of trouble they get into; the answer, since this aside is already ridiculously long, is that he ate four desserts last Wednesday, but Sophia felt bad about it and said, “I’m a terrible babysitter!” to which I reassured her that she was doing fine, because in my book if she’s making an attempt she’s doing better than expected).
Both girls are at the top of their classes for AR (Accelerated Reader) points. It’s so lovely to have kids who like to read as much as I do, who get carried away before bed and accidentally stay up late because they couldn’t bear to put the story down, who write their own books with plots and storylines that are better than some of the published stuff I’ve seen. Jonathan still hasn’t figured out how nice it is to take books to bed. I’ve offered, but he says no, though he reads with me and Sophia before bed each night. When the girls were little, they’d take piles of books to the crib and drop them out one by one when they were finished. Jonathan tried once but insisted on getting out of the crib and taking it all the way back to the bookshelf in the playroom.
And speaking of crib, I’ve been talking to him about his “big boy bed” but when we have the conversation, he says, “I want to go in there,” and points to the crib. He’s 2 1/2 now, the same age the girls were when they potty-trained and switched to a bed, but only the potty-training is going for him. He loves getting on the potty, and I broke down on the THIRD kid and bought a second litle potty seat so we wouldn’t have to run up and down the stairs to grab it every time he wanted to go. We got him a Cars seat, and it backfired, because now he will ONLY use the Cars seat and not the old one, so I’m $14 poorer and still have to run up and down to get the right seat.
He’s not seriously training, but he likes it, so we encourage him. Until I’m home again and can really devote time and energy to it, we’re sort of humoring him for now. I think the window will close soon and he’ll be over 3 before we get it done, but he’s my baby and that’s okay.
Sophia lost–or should I say, yanked–another tooth last night, so she’s got her two front and one right next to them gone, all in a row. Her front teeth have been out for months, with no sign of growing in. She’s beginning to look like a toothless old man, but soon those front teeth will be in and I’ll be sad at how she’s growing up.
Last week, pre-tooth-loss, but isn’t she cute?
Kate’s growing up, too. She and her friends are obsessed with the band One Direction, and particularly Harry Styles, who turns 19 today. It takes me right back to seventh grade, when my friends and I were crazy over New Kids on the Block. I cringe thinking about how we pored over magazines and crooned to their songs and argued over who was cuter (Joey, duh).
Derek doesn’t have his own exciting news, but he’s excited about happenings at church. The men of the church have been working hard the last few weeks to build interior walls for our sanctuary. They put up wood frames and insulation and drywall, are leaving space for two high windows in the back, and it’s going to be lovely when they finish. We’re also getting a ceiling (you have NO IDEA how hard it is to hear anything in there when it’s raining hard) and new chairs. Part of this is from internal fundraising, but a large portion came from a generous donation from First Lutheran. What a lovely gift. The men at our church are all extremely handy–so much so that my father-in-law joked that they had all chiefs and only one Indian. Ha!
Well, if you’ve made it to the end of this wordy post, congratulations. I understand the value in writing short, but I can’t always do it, especially when I’m bursting with happiness at all the lovely things ahead.
