Or not. We left the Halloween party prior to the great unveiling of winners, but not being the optimistic sort thought nothing of it. Until the day my mother-in-law arrived home to find a $500 check. She was the grand prize winner!

Now, long time readers of the blog will know that one of my mother-in-law’s favorite hobbies is home renovation. Namely: our home. It started with painting the basement floor the week we moved in. Then we had Thane’s prenatal bedroom renovation (she painted), our bedroom repainting (while I was gone one day), the kitchen repainting, the hallway repainting (she’s a genius with paint), the entry-way transformation early one post-Piemas morning, and the infamous “I’m sure the tile under the carpet is in fine shape” bathroom renovation just this September. All this she has accomplished despite living 1000 miles away and weighing 90 pounds wet. (To be fair, my parents helped demo Thane’s room and repainted the living room 3 years ago this week. But they don’t daydream about our attic the same way Laureen does.) And I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two more minor renovations she instigated or executed. So she decided what she wanted to do with her money was to “update” something in our house – generously leaving the choice of what up to me.

"Before" picture... from before we painted the living room

Watching how hard it was to use the XBox Kinect in our smallish living room as currently configured, I finally decided it was time to pull the trigger and get rid of the ancient CRT media center we had gotten for free because they didn’t want to move it when we moved into our last rented house. So Thursday was planned as a trip to IKEA.

Both boys are now old enough to go to “Smaland” – which was great. It gave us just enough time to scope out the available options, attempt to decide if glass shelves were advantageous or disadvantageous, and put together A Plan. We blessed our larger vehicle with the roof-rack as we vibrated home up I93. Then we had dinner with friends, put the kids to bed, and sat down with massive amounts of cardboard, Swedish instructions, hex wrenches and the Mythbusters. Half an hour past midnight, the pieces were all assembled, but we were too tired to put them in place. So this afternoon, we attached, wired, organized and otherwise prepared for our new configuration.

I confess I’m pleased as punch about just how nice it looks. Here it is in daylight:

Daylight demonstration

I just took this one, so the light’s different but you can see more:

I can hardly express how much BIGGER the room seems!

And as a bonus, here’s my husband hard at work:

He actually has a hex bit for his drill

Sure is, doctor.

Last week I was sure I had a sinus infection (when your molars hurt, that’s the hint). I did get a prescription for antibiotics, but an infection I might have had just laughed them off. HAHAHAH!

This week I had a doozy of a week. Monday was a work from home day due to having no power, followed by Halloween. Tuesday, I was at work at 7:15 am and returned home from work at 10:30 pm or so. Wednesday was another all day, intense meeting with no time for even checking my private email. Thursday at work was an attempt to catch up from all that, but when I got home, I couldn’t handle even gaming. I went to bed at 8, right after dinner. I woke up at 7 this morning not much improved.

It seemed like, maybe, it was time to go to the doctor’s. I made an appointment for 2:30.

At 12:45 I got a phone call from my son’s school nurse. He’d bumped his head during recess and needed to be picked up. I made the pffft sound in my head, believing that they were overreacting, and moved even more meetings in order to go pick him up, knowing I’d have to drag him to my appointment.

Yeah, maybe that's legit

So now I have a note from the doctor saying “Brenda is really sick”, a rescue inhaler (yes, it is that bad), some high power antibiotics, and a weekend to recover.

Here’s hoping that works!

My six year old

Autumn is my favorite season. The crispness and crackle in the air makes life feel more vibrant and immediate. I love the start of school and the apples and colors on the trees. Autumn is a time of itchy feet and revealed horizons and sparkling skies.

It is also, without a doubt, my busiest time of year. And I have a hunch that this will only get worse as time goes on. The busy season really starts with my birthday on September 23rd, which almost always coincides with Must Watch Baseball. Then in the first week of October, my eldest has his birthday. I get a week’s reprieve in which to go apple picking and make apple butter before my husband’s natal day arrives, followed a week later by my youngest son’s. And two out of seven years, the child’s birthday does not fall on a weekend. This means that I really have to do things on two days that week, because how lame is it to have your birthday and no cake? Almost as lame as having your birthday party and no cake, that’s how lame. So…. two cakes.

Three days after Mr. Thane’s birthday is Halloween, aka my worst holiday. (I am totally a “Let’s go to a store and buy you a costume” kind of Halloweener.) Of course, if the Sox are in the playoffs, my evening schedule also involves finding ways to sneak in the game because (as Sox fans are so keenly aware this year) we don’t make the playoffs every year. (This year the complicating role of baseball has been played instead by knee surgery and twice-weekly physical therapy.) Less than two weeks after Halloween, I host a Thanksgiving type meal for around 30 people – all sitting down to eat simultaneously.

Immediately after Mocksgiving (or preferably prior), it’s time to start with the Christmas cards. I usually do about 80. I almost always write a personal note. It is meaningful and important to me and takes nearly two months.

Did I mention I have a full time (plus) job, and two small children and a house to keep and (now) cookies to bake for the PTO bake sale at the Halloween xtravaganza that happens a week before Halloween, thereby narrowing my window for successful creation of costumes? Also, are any of you dying to buy raffle tickets to the cash raffle at said Halloween party?

Also, the inexorable exhortations of my soul require autumnal reading of ghost stories and preferably a good spooky game of Cthulu.

So if I’m running around like a one-legged mother of a six year old (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!?!) on a hamster wheel until New Year’s…. well, you know why.

We’re back to our life. But with some changes. (NOTE: One being that I’ve been picking at this post on and off in 5 minute increments for about 4 days now…)

Last night, after Thane’s bed time, my husband, eldest and I laid on a blanket in the backyard, vainly fighting the full moon and suburban light pollution for a shooting glimpse of majestic fire. We laughed, joked, poked each other, and listened to the symphony of insects performing every summer evening. This was a moment that probably would have been an option in our pre-vacation world, but that we would have been to stressed, blind or busy to see. In the lassitude of people whose emotional needs have been met, though, we had a really joyous hour together.

In other urgently important news, Grey does not have a loose tooth. No he does not. He has TWO loose teeth. His bottom two center teeth are extremely wiggly. One has an imminent departure date. I was sniffling a little at dinner about him losing his teeth. He got very sad and tried to assure me that he’d done his very best to take good care of his teeth – brushing and flossing them! Factual analysis of his actual oral hygiene practices aside, I had to rush to reassure him that losing teeth was perfectly normal and expected – but that I like him the way he is and it’s hard to watch him growing up so fast. He gave me some big hugs, that made me feel better about it. (At least until I consider that I should be banking them against the inevitable teenage hug-drought, but that’s just borrowing trouble.)

And then there’s my knee thing. I believe I’ve agonized at length over here about my KNEE and how I’ll have to actually have surgery. I feel like a total wimp. I’ve always seen myself as a strong stoic person (hey! Stop laughing!) In fact if you’d asked me why I chose to give birth – TWICE – without drugs I’d say something about how it wasn’t actually that hard after you got over the screaming bit, and the toughest part was that your jokes just weren’t that funny between pushes. (Ah, hormones! How easy you make it seem in retrospect.) I begin to suspect, however, that I’m actually a wimp about medical procedures. You see, I have no problem with needles. I’ve given about five gallons of blood. No problem! And I’ve never caviled at the procedures I’ve needed. But, uh, I haven’t needed any. Or at least many. This will be my first time unconscious. Not asleep, but knocked out. I’ve never fainted, blanked out, passed out, gone unconscious or had general anesthesia before. This will also be the first time anyone has ever cut me open in any way. And it will definitely be the first time someone has inserted a cadaver tendon threaded through my knee, after trimming off ragged bits of meniscus.

And the more people I talk to, the more this surgery sounds like a big deal. I mean, weeks and weeks of badness. Probably two weeks of incapacitation, followed by a long period of limping. I don’t do well with incapacitation. I prefer to tough my way through the pain and do stuff anyway. In this case, doing so will be stupid and irresponsible. I have no coping skills for when I’m not allowed to tough it out.

It probably means I will have to (gulp) ask for help. So my husband will be with me the day of the surgery. My MIL (who is a saint) is flying down for that week. But that second week? I’m hoping I will be able to limp to the bathroom and get lunch for myself by that second week. But no way can I take care of my children, do the laundry or dishes or make dinner. And our household generates enough work to keep TWO people busy full time doing it. I’m terrible at asking people for help. I’ve had so many kind friends volunteer, and I don’t know how to graciously and gratefully accept.

I guess this whole surgery thing will teach me many things.

But first! We have a first day of kindergarten approaching. I’m hoping to sneak in a camping trip over Labor Day. I have two neat kids who are a ton of fun. My husband brought home about 20 boardgames from Gencon. We’ve had fun playing them together, and with friends. (And hey! We’ve been married for eleven years now!) And all my counters are completely covered in the bounty of my CSA. (Seriously, two watermelons and two cantaloupes!)

And of course, my usual sporadic once-a-week-a-third-of-what-I-want-to-tell-you postings will now resume. At least that should improve with surgery!

My plan is to not bend the knee for more than it takes to walk up the stairs until I get an MRI done. At the time I ate that fateful (tasty tasty) dinner, I could do pretty much anything knee-wise.

It was a catching up weekend. Catching up on laundry, dishes (oh, the dishes), grocery shopping, house cleaning, toy removing, church stuff (including writing a sermon and finishing off the membership wall pictures) and keeping our children from killing each other. Yes, they’re at that phase of brotherhood. The catching up might have been easier if my husband hadn’t had to work a full 8 hour day on Saturday. But now we’re caught up. And we we to our church picnic and had a blast today, and I took a nap, and had a nice walk so I’m feeling cheerful. And I’m mostly all caught up!

Tomorrow is “Library Pizza night” – one of my favorite nights! It’s also farm share day, so wish me luck finding room in our fridge for the abundance. (NOTE: I have long thought of buying a new, larger fridge. However, doing so would require altering a load-bearing wall and completely refinishing the pantry. For SOME reason I haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

Then, she aspirated my leg. NOTE: If you have problems with needles, do us all a favor and stop reading now.

They could've at least given me a Spiderman bandaid....

OMG.

For those of you not following along closely with my entire life story, I have what we like to call a “high pain tolerance”. I gave birth without drugs – without so much as tylenol – TWICE. But I’m really kind of personally struggling right now. There’s this long-going knee thing and the back thing and the two-year-old-asserting-himself thing, and the constant feeling that I’ve completely fallen down on everything I need to do. I’m having a hard time. This, I truly believe, has an impact on one’s ability to tolerate pain.

First the PA pulled out a bottle of licodaine. This is a sign you will not enjoy your next 15 minutes or so. Then she pulled out two hugely ginormous needles with veritable vats of suction capacity. My confidence in my buffosity began to wane. The licodaine burned. Then the big needle. I won’t go into exactly what she did with it. Let’s just say that the licodaine was insufficient, I screamed several times, and at the end there was 30 ccs of clear yellow fluid in the syringe.

She’s sending the fluid into the lab to check for things I hadn’t thought to worry about (infection, lyme disease, gout). I’m also to be scheduled for an MRI so we can get to the bottom of this mysterious swelling. (She seemed skeptical that sitting with my knee bent had cause it, but by gum the correlation was so unmistakable!) She says my knee should feel better now that it doesn’t have 30 ccs of extraneous fluid in it. I’m still waiting for that.

But boy, am I out of cope. I hope the boys are superlatively behaved tonight, or they may find themselves headed to bed at 6:15.

Easter was lovely. The weather was superb. The kids were incredibly cute and well behaved. I was in some of my finest trumpet form in years, and played some of the hardest repertoire I’ve attempted in quite some time. We went out to dinner tonight at a local restaurant, and then wandered around our local town square in the warm twilight. There was tag, the scent of magnolias, holding sticky sweet little hands, and an evening ending in ice cream. It was a delight.

I’m figuring this is the last time Grey will believe in the bringers of gifts: Santa, Easter Bunny. He wrote the Easter Bunny a note, “How do bunnies go across water?” he asked in it. He asked me if the Easter Bunny was real. I asked him what he thought. He pondered, and said that maybe it wasn’t a bunny, but a person who sneaks into our house to leave the gifts. I don’t invest a tremendous amount of my personal credibility in these myths, nor do I have them well constructed. I’m pretty sure Grey is at the “trying hard not to notice” stage.

Grey has been really awesome lately. I’ve had a lot of fun with him. The other night he decided to make a chocolate cake. He got out a recipe and all the ingredients. He needed some help with some techniques (greasing the pan, measuring fractions), but he did a remarkable amount of it himself. I was really proud of him. So I decided any kid working with flour regularly needs their own apron.

It’s surprisingly hard to find an apron for boys, but I managed:

Awesome apron

Don’t boys play chef anymore? Sheesh.

We also have had our last swimming lesson of the winter. Grey started them in fall, and ever single Saturday morning has been spent with swimming lessons, followed by lunch, followed by aikido. However, Grey is staring down his first ever graduation: preschool. In July he will go to summer camp instead of preschool. And part of the YMCA summer camp is swimming lessons! So although Grey is not yet 100% independent in water, I figure we might just be able to get our Saturday mornings back. That would rock. I think Thane may be sad, though. He really liked their babysitting. And he has to be potty trained in order to do swimming lessons which… well, we’re nowhere close to that.

This summer camp sounds awesome. They have weekly field trips, go to swimming lessons, go to the town pool on another day, and play play play. I’m totally jealous. I’m also totally ready for him to be starting Kindergarten in the fall. I think we’re all ready and excited.

Thane has a little less going on, being two and all. He’ll move to transitional preschool this summer (yes, the sound you’re hearing is the “kaching!” going off in my head as the boys move to less expensive forms of child care….) His language is totally exploding. He’s putting together complicated sentences with unusual verb forms and complex structures. “You would have done it, mommy.” He likes to mimic his brother, who is remarkably tolerant about it. He has a 24 piece dinosaur puzzle he puts together over and over again, with remarkable dexterity.

My sweet Thane is a natural singer. He sings ALL THE TIME. He sings nursery rhymes. He sings folk songs. He sings while he puts the puzzles together. He sings at night. He sings in the morning. He sings the doxology before dinner (which he will refuse to eat). He sings Ring Around the Rosy. He sings “Star of the County Down” and “These are My Mountains”. I love his singing.

Grey and Thane are the best brothers you could possibly expect them to be … which is to say, not perfect, but they have a lot of fun together.

Fort Fun!

So that’s what’s going on over here. Hopefully this week I’ll find some time to remember what I was going to write about and write about it… but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

PS – I do remember one bit. I was actually in California for two days this week. That’s really surprisingly disruptive.

Hmmmm… what’s my password? Maybe this one? Or that one? Or possibly the other one? And then I got a nasty note, “You’ve made 3 unsuccessful attempts to sign in. Your account has been locked for security reasons. Please try again in 20 minutes.”

Greeeeeaaaaaat.

So that’s what I’m doing right now. Burning 20 minutes (since I’ve already read all my websites) until I can try and log in again in order to have the fun! and excitement! of doing my taxes. You see where you rate.

Lessee… what’s up.

Well, today was the opening day for the Red Sox. I would probably be more ebullient about this, except they got creamed by the Rangers, which was not in our opening day plan. One game in, and Red Sox nation is already panicking because two of our best pitchers had bad outings. It’s great to be a Red Sox fan, when you can start whining while the winter snow is still on the ground!

Speaking of, we got real actual snow last night. I walked out and immediately experienced some nasty PTSD – Post-traumatic Snow Disorder. It’s widespread in New England this “spring”. I’m so ready for summer!

Still, it was beautiful coming home tonight. The snow reduces the visual noise, making heterogeneous locations momentarily homogeneous. The snow had melted on the branches of the trees, turning the trunks of winter-worn maples bright black against the white snow and steel sky. The tone of the light has changed from wan to bright, bringing a strange dissonance to the scene. And the trees are this wonderful pregnant grey, with a faint shimmer of red like a blush on a maiden’s cheek.

OK! Long enough! They let me log in! Now to really go do the taxes. Right after I check to see if any of my favorite blogs have updated in the last 10 minutes….