catching up..

It has been a while since I have written, and so everything that I want to write about is a bit jumbled up now. The holidays have been so busy this year that it seems like I didn't get the chance to enjoy them until they were over. ( I originally wrote that they had been 'busty' and hesitated a little bit before correcting it.)

The week before Christmas was one of the craziest ever, I think I like to see how much I can handle by by packing as many things as I can into a short period of time, and seeing if I crack. Now that I have survived, I have proof that I am strong, and getting an 'A' in physics, I also have proof that I am smart. If anyone for the rest of my life calls me stupid (not that it happens much), I can say, "No I'm not, I got an 'A' in physics."

Christmas eve we spent at my mother-in-laws' house, as we do every year, and it was great. I love getting to see the kids play with all of their cousins, maybe because I know what a luxury my cousins have been to me, I even have one or two that are more like brothers and sisters than cousins.

My mother in law is the best gift getter that I have ever met, she buys gifts for my kids that it would never occur to me to pick, and they are without fail a hit every time. She asked me the other night if I would go shopping with her next year to help her pick gifts for the kids, because she doesn't think she knows well enough what they might want, but watching Jack play with his magic set, I would beg to differ.

My favorite part of the year was on the way home that night. There is a neighborhood near where Mike grew up (by the Mormon church, for those in San Diego) that puts on a huge lights display, a few blocks worth of houses participate. We drove through on our way home Christmas eve, and the kids were 'oohing and ahhing' in the backseat, and towards the end, Billy, my precious 4 year old says, "Wow, our house is boring."

Well, this has gotten kind of long, or I would tell you all about the cousin that I'm feeling not very loving to this year, but I guess it's time to let bygones be bygones.

So a late Merry Christmas to all, I hope you had something in the day that you'll remember.

slumber party

Tonight my daughter had a slumber party for her 10th birthday, and it wasn't bad, aside from one obnoxious kid. The above picture was from a previous slumber party, this one was much louder, but I don't know that I have ever seen Emma have so much fun, so it was worth the noise. It is almost 1am and I can still hear them in the other room talking and watching High School Musical. This stuff is new territory for me, I wasn't a sleepover type of kid.

I really don't have anything to say about it, but I feel like at least one of them should be asleep before me, and I need to kill a little time. The nicest part of the night for me was sitting on the couch with Katie (she actually snuggled) and watching The Princess Diaries. Jack got so tired that he put himself to bed. Billy wanted to sleep out with the girls, and was upset when his dad wouldn't let him, so I took him upstairs and laid a sleeping bag on the floor of his bedroom, and read him Curious George books until he fell asleep.

I liked being a parent tonight, sometimes I forget to like it. I always love my kids, but sometimes I get so wrapped up in the daily grind that I forget to enjoy it. At the beginning of the night it was looking pretty grim, Mike actually managed to have three out of four kids crying a half an hour before the party started (that's got to be some kind of a record), but we pulled it out.

All in all it was a good night, I even managed to write and submit a really half-assed paper, while a houseful of kids ran around burning off their sugar buzz. Tonight I feel blessed.

low standards

The other day I went to a meeting at my daughter's school to discuss science fair projects, and left perturbed (I'm starting to notice a pattern with this). The woman at this meeting was a first grade teacher and regular judge at the science fair, and the entire time I was there I had to fight back the urge to correct her English.
English was not a second language to this woman, she has clearly spoken it her entire life, only with very little care. She interjected the word "like" into just about every sentence, along with frequent "you know's" and "stuff's." At one point she ansered a question with the response, "That don't work."

How does someone get a job as a teacher wihtout ever bothering to get an education?

There is a one in four chance that this woman will become my son's first grade teacher next year (or at least a one in four chance that I will have to go to the school and tell them I don't want her to be my son's teacher). I am sure this woman is very nice, but I don't think that it's a good idea for the person that is supposed to teach our kids the ins and outs of the English language not to have a very good grasp of it.

The system just don't work! (Yes, I know it's doesn't, but it was for effect.)

old friends

Tonight I had dinner with an old friend that I hadn't seen (or spoken to until recently) in about 15 years, and it got my mind racing on the way home. I am amazed that the conversation after so many years would come so easily, and that although there was a great deal of catching up it was as comfortable as if I was filling her in on the week that had just passed.
This friend was a very central person in my life once upon a time, and until our recent conversations I never realized that I was for her too.
It seems the right people just so happen to get put in our lives at exactly the right time, she was the person that taught me how to be a friend (a skill that I lacked at the time), simply by being one to me, and for that I will always be grateful.

I don't know where else to go with that so I will move on, and poke a little fun at my husband. Mike has been sick this weekend, and I don't mean he's had the flu, or bronchitis, or anything of any kind of serious nature, he simply has a cold. I realize that colds suck and nobody wants one, but he has laid in bed for pretty much the entire weekend moaning, "Oh god, Oh Jesus". Apparently head colds give him religion. I think he should actually be moaning "thank you god, thank you Jesus" because when he is sick he gets to stay home in bed, and moan. I cannot remember the last time that I got sick and got to spend the day in bed resting (it might have been when Billy was born), maybe I'm a little bit jealous. (You think?) Well, I will still make him chicken soup to speed up his recovery, and hope that he doesn't get a hangnail blowing his nose because then he might become completely unbearable.

shark

This is like the picture that Katie has put up as a background on my computer. It is very cool and very big, and scares me every time I close a page and it pops up. It is not the actual picture (it is REALLY scary) because the actual picture was too big to display here on this blog, and I am not computer savvy enough to figure out how to shrink it.
I don't like scary things, I seldom watch a scary movie and if someone were to jump out at me from behind a corner, I would probably hit them out of pure reflex, and then go change my pants. Now this picture in and of itself is not that scary, I know that it is just a picture, it just makes me jump a little becasue it takes me by surprise. It's not scary like birds are scary (birds freak me out).
It has just got me wondering about when I became such a chicken (eeek! that's a bird). I used to be tougher than this. My grandmother was afraid of heights, she would freak out crossing a bridge, even a little bridge, she spent most of her life not going anywhere because she was too scared. Speaking of being scared, she used scare me when I was a kid by taking her teeth out, she thought it was hilarious. I don't know if she was always scared, my knowledge of her life is limited to seventeen years, but I am starting to think that fears grow if we give into them, and that's when they become phobias. I am the only person I know that is afraid of birds, and I also know that it is an irrational fear, but still they make me very uneasy. I am also the only one I know that was attacked by geese and rescued by little girls with backpacks.
Fear is not always a bad thing, it keeps me out of bad neighborhoods, and prevents me from jumping out of perfectly good airplanes (that part might just be common sense), but I would like to be able to control it enough to not embarrass my daughter as I run across her school parking lot, screaming with my arms flailing about, trying (and failing) to escape a bird attack.