Faith, Rewarded

Those guys who took my family room apart on Monday to put the new floor in?  They were done (trim work and all) by Tuesday evening.  Three full days before they needed to be.  Gotta love them.  There's a reason why I don't call anyone else now when I need work done on my house--that was their fourth job for me and they've come through like this every time.

Lots still to do in that room, to be sure--get a new TV, area rug and entertainment center, also take out the fireplace insert and put in a Franklin stove (eventually)--but the construction part of the job is over and that room will be functional for Saturday's houseful of guests.  Whew!

Only downside of putting hardwood floors in is that my dog hates, and I mean HATES, the compressor and nail gun needed to install it.  Think they are just too loud for her, so I had to get her out of the house Monday and Tuesday.  Spring finally having arrived in these parts, we did some hiking (me) and crashing around in the woods chasing squirrels (her) and it was all good.

These are two different lakes--actually, one is a lake and one a reservoir.  And the first pic was taken from almost a thousand feet straight up a rocky hill!  May have had to miss the first couple of days of TKD class this week, but I sure got my exercise.

Leap Of Faith (No Pun Intended)

Petunia makes her First Communion this Saturday.  There will be 18 people in my house for her celebration that afternoon.  And THIS is what my family room looks like right now:

It's hard to get a good shot of that room because of the angles involved, but suffice it to say that it has only 2/3 of a floor right now and is missing most of its furniture.  We've been on an ongoing mission to reduce the number of flooring types on the first floor of our house (when we bought the house, there were six; we are currently at three, soon to be two) and the family room project has been in the works for a while now.  I love my contractor.  This is the fourth big job he's done for me, and I trust him implicitly.  When we scheduled this job, I told him that Friday was the hard deadline and that the new floor and trim HAD to be installed by then, no matter what.  He promised that it would be.

What you see above is one day's work for two guys (removal of old grubby carpet plus installation of new hardwood.)  They should be well into the trimwork by tonight.  So far, so good, but please keep your fingers crossed for me!  The room won't be completely done by Sat (Himself has grand plans relating to a new and bigger TV and different entertainment unit) but as long as we have a complete floor and someplace for people to sit comfortably that is not a construction zone, I will be happy!



 

Funny But Also Sort Of Sad

Today is Opening Day for Thing Two's baseball season.  He's had practices, but no games yet.   He's still pretty new to the sport, as well...he played two years ago for the first time as a first grader and then not again until this season, so he's a little shaky on the fundamentals.  Including the parts of a baseball uniform, as it turns out.

Not that the last part is really his fault, mind you.  Due to the jam-packedness of our after school schedule this spring, every time this child has had a baseball practice, it has been immediately after a soccer practice.  As in, the eat-your-dinner-in-the car-on-the-way-to-baseball, play-baseball-in-your-soccer-cleats kind of immediately after.  So, when the boy was getting dressed in his baseball uniform this morning (NOT after soccer, for once), I shouldn't have been surprised that he asked me where his shinguards were!  The poor kid has still been wearing his soccer shinguards for every baseball practice because there wasn't time to take them off in between (and, in truth, because I figured that they might help keep him from taking a line drive to the shins, as long as we were making a virtue of necessity) so he legitimately had no idea that shinguards are not normally worn while playing baseball!!

Why Mothers Drink

Take a look at the picture below.  There's a whiteboard in the kitchen on which I keep track of the kids' weekday activities, and this is a shot of the Tuesday schedule.  Observe that there are three activities, one for each kid, all of which start at 6PM.

Of these three, one is at a park in our township, one is at a park toward the near edge of the next township over, and the aikido class is at the far end of the next township over.  That is to say, there is no possible way of getting all three of them to where they need to be on time on Tuesdays short of cloning not only myself, but also my car.

GROWL.

 

Yes, I Am Old, But I Am Not *THAT* Old

Yesterday was a beautiful day, and I took the two younger kids to the playground. At one point I was on the swings with them, all three of us in a row.  My otherwise beloved daughter asked me--in all seriousness, mind you--if swings had been invented yet when I was a kid. 

Good thing she's cute!  No danger of my ego getting out of hand with her around.  :)

A Long Time Coming

Thing Two went to a friend's birthday party last night.  By the time I got him to the friend's house, a number of little boys were already running around the yard yelling and chasing each other and generally having a grand old time.  The second Thing Two got out of the car, one of the other boys yelled, [Thing Two], you're on our team.  Come on!" and he was off to join the fun just like that.

No delay in pulling him into the game.  No "you're on the other team."   For a kid who has always had significant social delays that are secondary to his language processing issues, this was so huge I wanted to cry right there.  The other kids are used to his idiosyncrasies, no doubt, but the social differences that mark him as separate from the "normal" kids are getting smaller and smaller as he grows and clearly he has friends in spite of them, thanks be to all the angels.  

And So It Begins

Read an interesting article the other day called "Dear Well-Meaning (But Ignorant) Parents: This What Your Teens Are Really Doing On The Internet."  Written by a young high school teacher, it lists a bunch of apps and services that many of her teenaged students are using and goes on to say that she'd almost guarantee most parents haven't even heard of one or more of them.  Granted, my eldest is 11, but she's right...a couple of them were news to me entirely and most are only peripherally on my radar.

It's unrealistic to expect even preteens like Thing One to be completely off social media these days, so we're easing him in.  He has an email account (linked to my iPad so I can monitor all messages) and the ability to text (but we have the passcode for his phone and the right to inspect his texts at any time.)  Most of his friends use Instagram, but I think I inadvertently put the fear of God into him with the discussion about pictures lasting forever in cyberspace and he decided on his own that he doesn't want that responsibility yet.  Fair enough.  So, I thought we were doing okay with the first tentative forays into social media...all text and email monitoring was coming up clear except that I lose brain cells every time I look at his text messages with his buddies, all of which are dingbat boy stuff and full of emojis.  But then I happened to look at his email inbox last night and saw five messages in a row from an app called Kamcord, which I'd never heard of and wasn't mentioned in that article, either.  Most disturbingly, every one of the five was an email informing him that somebody else whose name I didn't recognize was now following him on an account I didn't know he had.

As you might expect, we had a conversation first thing this morning.  There is a game he loves playing called Goat Simulator (yes, you get to go around the world controlling a goat--don't ask, just see above regarding dingbat boy stuff.)  Apparently you have the ability to record the things that your goat does in this game and post videos of this (Kamcord is the service) for the amusement of other people whose idea of fun is watching animated goats wreak havoc online.  We clarified that none of these videos are inappropriate and that none of his personal or identifiable information is available on this service.  We also had a long chat about the need to talk to a parent before establishing accounts of this sort.  This particular one seems harmless enough, but my radar is now *really* up, and my resolve to continue all monitoring is redoubled.  I'm glad that this stuff wasn't even around when I was a kid, but protecting mine while they develop good judgment of their own is clearly going to be a big job.