An Unexpected Gift

Made a nice dinner tonight and Himself opened a good bottle of wine.  After dinner, with the kids upstairs playing video games, we poured a second glass and settled at the kitchen table, Dave Matthews playing in the background and the dog curled on her bed at my feet.  After a few minutes, I sat down on the floor by the dog to pet her.  Thing One walked back into the kitchen, and to my complete surprise, plopped himself down on the floor next to me and put his head in my lap, quietly listening to the music as his father and I chatted.

He's eleven now, and I know my days of this are numbered.  I'll take it while I can get it and be grateful.

Too Much Going On

There is actually visible grass in my front yard!  The birds are singing, the small earthbound critters are scampering about unimpeded by snow, and there is mud from one end of the earth to the other courtesy of all the snowmelt.  Spring has sprung and all that happy crap, as my college roommate used to say.   About damned time too, it being almost the solstice and all, although I'll be surprised if we've seen the last of winter just yet.

Been really busy lately, hence my absence from the blog.  No major accomplishments to report for it, though...been thinking for the past few days about the difference between what's urgent and important.  I've been chasing the urgent, and generally getting those tasks crossed off the list, but I can't say that looking at the list gives me much of a sense of accomplishment after the fact.  Time to reprioritize, I suspect.  I just wish some of the urgent but trivial would go away for a while.  

Standardized test drama (this relating to my Board of Education hat.)  Kid drama, scheduling/logistics and otherwise.  Normal household-running stuff.  Oh, and coordinating and hosting a St. Patrick's Day party for 50 over the weekend with a sick kid in the house!  Party went well, anyway.    

Love this image.  Going to print it out and pin it above my desk as a reminder to focus more on the upper right quadrant.

  

Grand Cosmic Question

Why, oh WHY, must children who are going to barf only do so after eating or drinking something brightly colored??  My upstairs hall rug may never be the same.

Add in the 50 or so people coming over for a St. Patrick's Day party tomorrow night, plus the barfing episode the dog had last night, and this is really starting to look like Murphy's effing Law in action.  Lovely.

Heartsick

Was going to blog about the crazy weekend of sports--all day Saturday basketball, all day Sunday soccer.  Or maybe the upcoming St. Patrick's Day party.  Or whatever else about my small relatively insular life popped into my head.  But then the news came in yesterday and rocked my world.

Kid went missing from my general geographic area last Wednesday night.  Kid stayed missing for days despite all efforts to find him, and there were many.  All over the news in a multi-state area.  Kid left home with no money, no phone: just took off on impulse.  No word at all about what happened to him till we heard yesterday that he'd been found dead very close to home.  Hoped he'd fallen and hit his head or something, but nope.  Gunshot wound to the head.  Self-inflicted.  Apparently triggered by an email from his school about homework, of all things.  Did I mention that the kid was an eighth grader?  Only two years older than Thing One.  Can't even BEGIN to process this.  Going back to my recent theme of poor decision making while young, what kind of skewed perspective or brain chemistry would result in a young man thinking that death was the only option because of 8th grade homework???  And don't even get me started on how the young man in question was able to get his hands on a gun because that would probably make me apoplectic with rage if I knew the details.

Waste.  What a massive, massive waste.



    

The Aftermath

Another storm rolled through yesterday; another day off school for the kids.
Woke up to this.

 

Winter wonderland yet *again*, but at least the sun is shining and the birds were singing their little hearts out when I stuck my head out the front door to take these pictures.  And the kids have a delayed opening, but are actually going to school!  Hallelujah.

Whiplash

Remember the kid of mine I wrote about a couple of days ago?  The one who did something so colossally boneheaded that I still can't believe it??  Well, said child just got some test results back yesterday and will be the sole representative of his school district in a state-level competition very much involving raw brainpower at the end of the month.  Either intelligence and common sense really don't have to coexist in the same person or this kid is living proof of the delayed-temporal-lobe-development thing.

Regardless, proud mom here.  :)

Greater Love Hath No Mother

Yesterday morning, Petunia came to me all weepy-eyed because she saw two rabbits out in the front yard that looked cold and hungry.  Granted, it has been a miserable winter, frigid enough that whatever snow fell has pretty much remained...haven't seen grass in about six weeks.  They probably are cold and hungry.

Under normal circumstances, I wage a never-ending battle with the rabbits (and deer) in my yard, since they seem hell-bent on eating everything I plant.  My gardens have to be fenced and/or sprayed with rotten-egg based repellent spray to give them even the tiniest chance of surviving.

But because I love my daughter, there is currently a small pile of baby carrots sitting in the snow right where she saw the rabbits.  Now I'm actually *feeding* them!!