Okay, I know know it has been something like four months since I have posted anything. And I'm not moonlighting over on Facebook, either. I'm AWOL there as well.

I'm lost in the land of homeschooling four children. Boy oh boy is it still crazy!

This is such a different year from our past ones, and there are great points and transition points. I'm finally in a place where I am not worrying that we are not covering what we should be covering or where I am solemnly swearing that this is the year that I will not neglect Frances. The pace of what we are doing has picked up tremendously, and our discipline is also at an all time high. Well, okay, the discipline of actually keeping up with an outside workload and staying on schedule. I am writing this while Jane Eyre sits by my bed with the bookmark only at page 101 when I need to get to 383 by Monday. I suppose in a way I'm procrastinating.

My own workload is what has gone through the roof. I am tutoring and directing a program for 10th grade students, and the philosophy of the program is that a single tutor who engages students in every subject can create an integration of topics and subjects in a way that separate classes taught by master teachers in their own individual subjects cannot. It's a fascinatingly different take on how to manage education in the upper grades, and sometimes there is a part of me that thinks, "Really? You think I ought to be tutoring Algebra II to anyone?" But there it is. I sub out my Algebra II tutoring to Kerry, who comes in and handles that hour of class, but then I work through Latin II, British Literature, Western Cultural History including art history and music history as well as an overview of philosophy and cultural periods and trends over the past 2000 years, traditional Aristotelian logic, and biology. It is a handful! Last week was the first time that my time management choices left me scrambling in the dust to complete what I needed to for the week. I won't do that again!

We tend to run in cycles of a heavy week with a lot of work and then a slightly lighter week. Actually, my weeks are lighter than those of my students because I do not have to write all of the papers they do (though I do research the topics and take pages and pages of notes on them so that I can effectively engage with what they do write) and I don't have to take and pass the tests they do (woe to me if I had to do the biology or logic exam!) and I don't have to do all of the math problems. But our workload is pretty intense. So far we have read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected Canterbury Tales, several books of Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and A Tale of Two Cities. There was a time when I had a lot more time to inhale a heavy reading load, but that time is...kind of past. Now I'm shoving it in after 11 p.m., trying to sneak away on campouts to get a chunk of pages down, and tucking my novels into my purse no matter where I am going, since you never know when you might have a spare three minutes, and three minutes might be three pages....

I am totally loving what I am doing, though. I have learned more than I ever thought I could in a short time, and I have to say that it is much more pleasurable to be doing school again when I don't have to worry about grades and a transcript. Now I'm just along for the ride and for the enrichment of my life. I can't wait until my own kids are doing this work because it is truly the good stuff.

Meanwhile, I do have to keep up with my own children and their work, which can be daunting for their level. In some ways it has been a rude awakening to them to have deadlines and a week's worth of work to accomplish in, well, a week. There's not a lot of self-pacing possible. There is enough work that it is hard to get ahead. And the expectations are very high. Two to three page essays when they aren't always quite ready for that. Interpretation of the passages they are reading before they are writing about them, rather than just reporting or expressing an opinion. Having to use multiple sources for almost everything that they write now. The IEW book we are using this year is, in my opinion, well beyond what they should be expected to do right now. It is better suited for high school students, and writing is not my children's precocious area. They are still struggling with basic structure and consistently having all of the parts of a sentence in place. So adding in Bible interpretation and an increasingly complex checklist of stylistic devices (dual adverbs, adjectival teeter-totters, invisible who/which clauses, rhetorical questions) has really pushed our limits. But during this time, I have seen them go from needing a hand held while writing to now being able to take their weekly science topic, research it themselves from several sources, and write a pretty respectable report to read aloud to their class. They have also come along in Latin and math, conquering some of their previous difficulties with poor handwriting and sloppy organizational skills. It's not that we don't have our challenge areas with it, but they are really starting to be more meticulous and to see the value of taking things step by step.

Probably the most growth has been with Frances. She is really astounding me with what she has managed to learn and retain this year. In 9 short weeks, she has learned all of the multiplication table through 14x12, has learned squares and cubes through 10, and can skip count any numbers 1 through 15. Constant repetition and some strategic songs have really made these things stick. She has also improved a great deal in writing, going from not knowing what a sentence is to writing one or two paragraph essays, with help of course. And she can do her chart with the four types of sentences, four purposes of sentences, five parts of a sentence, eight parts of speech, and seven sentence structures in under two minutes. She complains that she is still the slowest in her class, but I have seen her go from never having done any grammar at all to mastering concepts and memorizing information that probably most adults do not know. Each week she has material in six subject areas (history, math, science, Latin, English grammar, geography) as well as music theory information and Bible verses to memorize. In addition, we are learning a 200 point timeline 8 cards at a time. So now we are up to 64 points on the timeline, and even Rutledge can sing most of them, though there are some words that he either ignores or says as one droning syllable ("unification," "monotheism," "Phoenician"). In a perfect world I would be keeping up better with having her go deeper into what some of these things are, but right now, it feels most valuable just to get the exposure and have a sense of relative time. There is plenty of time for filling in the gaps later.

The beauty of all of it is that there isn't time to second guess whether one curriculum or another might be an improvement. We're just so darn busy with what we have there isn't room for much else. And yet they are all learning by leaps and bounds. In three more weeks we have a very big break--6 weeks. It is going to feel good, but we will also have enough work in there so that we don't get rusty.

I'll have to save our non-school life for another post. There is much to do and it is late, I have to read more Bronte, and tomorrow morning starts nice and early with Rutledge's speech therapy.

Isn't my cutie sweet? I'm so proud of him. He improved his time on freestyle by about 25 seconds last week. Alas, this week he was back to over a minute again because he had some kind of asthmatic fit on the way and he couldn't find his bathing suit and wore one of his brother's suits and it was falling off and he had to keep yanking it back up while he was going across the pool. But he's still a swimming superstar in my book!



And Frances qualified for Champs in another event this week. I've never had anyone qualify for Champs in swimming before, so this has been a fun surprise. She qualified in backstroke at the second meet and has continually improved her time since then, and now she has qualified in freestyle. She was lucky not to get DQ'd in butterfly this week, and her time went down by about a second and a half, but she is still fewer than two seconds from qualifying in that event as well. And she may be on a relay team, since her relay teams have done exceptionally well. Even last week, when she wasn't on the A team, her B team won second place. Considering the Blue times that several of the A team members have, it's a pretty good showing.

My boys are gone. I know they should be gone, and I'm excited they are gone, and I was the one who insisted that they should be gone. But I still miss them. It's just incredible how the dynamic of a place changes once you have even one fewer warm bodies.

I am continuing to do a bad job of my summer, and sadly there are only a few weeks left. I need a big, fat, honking vacation. Tropical island. No plans. Warm, sandy beach, hammock, gigantic frozen drink (or 12 of them), maybe a snorkel, just so I can say the word snorkel and laugh. Snorkel, snorkel, snorkel.

Instead, I'm still in my pajamas at 9:30 a.m., sitting in a very messy house with unpacked boxes from our carpet extravaganza, with a child in a dirty swimsuit playing Strawberry Shortcake on the Nintendo DS and with a dog who won't stop licking her foot.

Last night I spent most of the night playing cleanup from my computer disaster (inbox wiped out, anything left resorted into about fifteen different mini-mailboxes that had nothing to do with the sender) and trying to have a crash course in keeping up with my various commitments. I think the reason I'm not dressed right now is that I still have a zillion things to do to make right all the stuff I botched last week or should have done but didn't that I'm thinking if I just sit on my floor long enough with my computer I'll start to grow roots down into the subflooring and not have to actually face reality.

I also was supposed to break my Starbucks habit and I didn't. Heh.

Okay, I'm just such a sorry blogger lately. I have a whole pile of posts I started but never finished. I don't think I'm pushed "publish" in about two months.

So no matter how short or boring or pointless this is, I am going to upload it just so I can say I did it.

I just got back from the district championships with my tennis team. It was a fascinating experience. In many ways, I think I don't fit in especially well with my team, but I had a fun time nevertheless. We made it to the semi-finals, which is further than most Woodlake teams make it at these events, and we should be very proud. I lost my first singles match, and I lost it pretty badly (really bad first set, but almost a tiebreaker in the second), handily won my first doubles match, and then lost our final doubles match in tiebreakers for both the set and the match. It was heartbreaking, and I wish my record looked better. I should not care about these things, but I know that I am not going to be moved up to 3.5 this season, and the remaining bit of my friends will. Oh well. I am really into swimming these days, and I think I might just put my energy there and put tennis on a semi-permanent break.

This week I'm back to my overwhelmed self. I need to set up meetings for CC, I need to enter a bunch of stuff in the computer, and I need to handle a whole pile of dive and swim team things. If I'm honest, right not I want to waste away in Margaritaville about 800 miles from here. I'm just in a rough spot right now and doing a poor job of everything I do (except playing Yahtzee). I could be on the verge of the biggest change in my entire life, and I'm scared to death and also trying to just keep it on the DL. If I think about it too much, I'll both have no answers and will freak myself out. Game face is my phrase of the week. I'm just trying to perfect my game face while I quietly totally lose my mind ;)

Once again, it has been so long since I have posted that Blogger has forgotten me. It's not that hard to do.

It has been one of the hardest months ever. Physically it has seemed, from the outside, a little exhausting because there are so many things wrapping up. Softball season is winding to a close on Saturday. The dance recital and all its rehearsals are now behind us. Preschool graduation is tomorrow. Tennis is going full force. Swim and dive team have already started before other things have managed to finish up. The overlap in these few weeks is always unwieldy, and this year was no different in that regard. Everything wants to have some capstone event--an end of the year party, a ceremony, a big show. In some ways, I am happy letting the end of the routine be a punctuation mark in itself.

But what is really different is the attitude. My attitude, which is inflected so heavily by the attitude of burden all around me. Doing these things is "bad" because I'm being told that they are bad and too much. And what has made it so difficult is the realization that my fundamental beliefs and motivations are, at their very root, so terribly flawed. And that I am the one who must change.

The first thing that I have been having to come to terms with is that although I desperately wanted each of my children, to the point I was willing to subject myself to physical pain, an emotional rollercoaster, financial stress, I suppose I just have too many and I needed to heed my partner's desire to stop. It is, as they say, water under the bridge at this point, but the fact is, I should be feeling remorse for my desire for children, and I do not. I honestly don't know what to do with this set of information. How can you want something so very much, love people so very much, and yet have to acknowledge that they were, in fact, a bad idea? How can something so bliss-inducing, so sweet to you, be wrong?

The second issue deep on me is how I have chosen to help them grow. So much of our own attitudes come from our own upbringing, and most especially our overcompensations. As a child, I was exposed to fairly little. I had a happy, comfortable life, but we were so simple, so narrow in what we did. I always felt different, somehow inferior to the other people around me in the gifted program or at camp or in my academic high school classes. I never had the opportunity to play a sport as a child. I took piano lessons, but I did not do any other activities. I did not travel much. I did not spend time outdoors other than in my own small, suburban neighborhood. I went to college having never seen an animal in the wild other than a squirrel. I had never even seen roadkill other than a duck that has been hit by a car near the small borrow pit near our house. I had never seen a deer cross the road, never seen a raccoon, never even seen a woodchuck. I had never been hiking. Never been camping. Had never been off the East Coast until I was 14 and my Dad had been given a comp ticket after giving up a seat on a plane on the only business trip I ever remember him taking in my entire life. Even though my grandparents lived in Myrtle Beach during my early years and my other grandparents had moved to Florida right after I was born, I seldom even got to play in the waves at the beach because my parents couldn't walk on sand.

So I have tended to overcorrect. I have wanted my children to have the chances and experiences I didn't have. People often ask me if I did gymnastics as a child. Nope. But I wish I had. I wish I had played softball. I wish I had been on a team. I wish I had taken art classes. I wish I had been more places. Wish people had recommended more good books.

Now what I'm having to come to terms with is this: we're just as poor as my parents. Maybe a little more able-bodied, but we're still poor. If we want to retire, if we want to have savings, if we want to be responsible, we must pull it all back. I made the painful decision to give notice to Frances' piano teacher this week. We also will not be renewing the various classes and activities we have just finished. The music lessons will be something that we can perhaps continue with me as a teacher at home. I get tears in my eyes when I think about how I must do this in order to appease the person who is supposed to be my partner. Sometimes I wish that I could expect as little out of life as he does. To treat it simply as something to be endured until the day you die (alone).

Kerry and I have been seeing a marriage counselor, and the one thing that has become clear from the experience is that everything about me is wrong. Unfortunately, so far there hasn't been much focus on how I am supposed to grow and change, so I am still stuck in my old ways and feel unrepentant. I'm just not sorry for who I am, only for the fact that I am likely losing my children and a warm roof over my head. What I have learned is that the things I stand for: family, time together, adventures, trying to live in the now, are not what work. At least not for me in this relationshp. My greatest wish in the world is to feel that I have a place to call home, a place where I feel safe and loved and know that I can return even when I'm not perfect. I'm terrified of being alone in the world with no friends and no family. Right now I feel very much like I'm in that place. I don't have any close friends. I had unrealistic expectations of what marriage would be like. I don't know what I've done to cause not only myself but my whole family to be rejected by our families of origin. So, well, I'm a little scared. And also rather defensive. I feel like I should wish that I would just die, but that's the last thing I want to do. What I really want to do is survive despite the contempt and indifference around me because there's a big part of me that feels like it isn't wrong to want to build a family where one is lacking. I want to be somewhere where people are not afraid of my children, where they aren't seen as a burden or a mere financial liability or something so out of control that no one would want them to be where they are.

I actually have had bags packed for several days to set out on a totally crazy adventure. It would be considered kidnapping or legal abandonment, and the responsible streak in me knows that I would risk losing my children forever if I acted on my desires, but I'd love to just get in the car and keep driving until I get to California or Canada. Alas, it's a little hard to do with no money at all in my pocket (to make matters worse, I lost my ATM card and my credit card this weekend).

In the midst of my contemplation of my future, in our present we have been doing a lot of reading:

* My Louisiana Sky, which is probably the best book I've read in the past several months
* Be the Pack Leader, which we listened to in the car
* The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* Berries in the Scoop, a sweet story about a family from Cape Cod
* The Mystery in Old Quebec, which has me wanting to leave it all behind and run to a little piece of Europe in North America
* a book about a family that travels to see the Sphinx in 1898
* a book about two children who are trapped on an ice floe near Greenland
* The Breadwinner, a young adult book about a young girl in Kabul when the Taliban took over
* Milagros, the story written by local author Meg Medina, and the story behind this year's dance recital
* The Glass House, a book I unfortunately identified too much with right now in my life; I kept feeling horrified that I may not be very different than the mother and father in that book and that my children's lives are equally chaotic
* The Art of Racing in the Rain, very sad and also sweet in the way only dog books can be
* Ali and the Golden Eagle--just started today
* Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest, about a boy who searches out the truth about his father, who died in Vietnam

Tennis, tennis everywhere. This week I have five matches, thanks to a rainout last week. For that one, I now have a 6-0, 6-0 win thanks to a line on the other team defaulting. But I am on for the other four days. So far I have a 4-6, 6-1, 10-4 win from Monday, and tomorrow I have a 3.5 match at ACAC playing at #3 doubles with a partner I've never played with before. Thursday Michele and I are playing at #1 singles, or at least I hope we are. I'm not in the mood for singles right now--too much pressure when my rating is on the line, and I'm not psychologically stable enough to ignore my feeling that if I blow it, I'm going to be a 3.0 for the rest of my natural born existence.

Right now I am taking a reading break to watch a show on the National Geographic Channel about human feet, with no legs, washing up in shoes in British Columbia and northern Washington. I really cannot imagine a more disgusting topic, but I'm strangely drawn to it despite the nastiness. Today was a fairly productive day, about which I will post pictures tomorrow, so I'll save the information about Shalom Farms for that. Last night I went to a used curriculum sale that typically nets me much of my material for the following year, and though it was not as good as I remember past ones to be, I did come home with a few gems. I bought two IEW products--The Elegant Essay, which is aimed at high school students, and Teaching the Classics, a DVD set that sets out a procedure for analyzing literature. I don't particularly need that, but I am fascinated by procedural methods of teaching skills, so I look forward to watching it and using the materials with my boys. My understanding is that the techniques and charts can be used with any age student. I also got some very entertaining SAT prep books (I especially like the vocabulary one, which has extremely funny sentences), the next Wordly Wise for Ollie, and a used copy of Algebra 1/2 by Saxon. But the best find was a little group of older books from the 1950s that are just delightful. One is by Elizabeth Coatsworth, who I really like, and the other was a mystery story by Mary C. Jane called Mystery in Old Quebec. We read it all today as a read aloud, and everyone loved it. It is well written, well paced, just the right length (123 pages with some illustrations here and there), and quaint enough to make us all smile at its language and what the children were allowed to do--10 year olds left on their own all day long in an unfamiliar city in another country while their father is in business meetings. I'll be looking for more books by her, though I suspect they have probably lost popularity and may be out of print because they are no longer "current."

And speaking of the library, I paid a $60 fine today. Yes. I'm embarrassed. But it's still cheaper, I suppose, than buying all those items I didn't return in a timely fashion. I figured the best response to that would be to turn right around and check out fifteen new items, including three movies (movies are what get me into trouble most of the time).

Meanwhile, we are still reading My Louisiana Sky and we just finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. As luck would have it, the movie of that appeared on the Disney Channel yesterday, and despite our tight schedule, we saw all of it by watching the end earlier in the day and then the rest of it later, since there was a reshowing (no, I don't really know how to use our DVR, and we happened upon the movie halfway through in the first place).

Now I'm obsessed with the idea of a spontaneous trip to Quebec. I've never been to Canada, and I'd like to go. Of course, I have no time whatsoever for something like that in the foreseeable future, but that, in my opinion, is what is wrong with my life right now. Details, details, but we also don't have money for it, and I'm not brave enough to camp solo outside a major city so far from home when I know nothing about the place.

Overcorrection is a word that has become a bit prominent in my mental life lately. I spent a few hours with a new friend before I left for camping on Friday, and we were discussing some of our "overcorrections" in our life. Like having four kids and wishing for more when I was an only child. Or making camping a priority in our family when I never once went camping or hiking or even really into the woods when I was a child. Or wanting to take on a lot of volunteer responsibilities when I don't have a significant paying job that makes me feel competent and useful and contributory to society. Now, I'm not sure that this overcorrection is "bad," so to speak, but perhaps it is explanatory, or perhaps it is a clue to what is wrong with how I conduct relationships. I make no bones about the fact that I am to blame for my awry relationships, and any clues about what drives my selfish single-mindedness are, well, clues. It doesn't mean I have the faintest clue about what to do about these clues or, blush, that I feel especially ready to renounce what I want (you're probably not going to get me to stop camping, for instance, though I suppose I could be flexible and not involve other members of my family in my own passions). Counseling will probably never be particularly helpful to me until I decide that I am ready to change. So far, I'm just not sure. I'm sort of sad to say that, but it's hard to let go of my own hopes and dreams with a clear heart and conscience, even if my own hopes and dreams are seriously flawed and self-destructive. I guess I cling to my right to self-destroy in the name of dreams. At least it sounds kind of romantic, right? I promise I will grow up and be mature some day, so perhaps I'm in the adolescent phase right now and harmony is yet to come as I develop.

Since this is a place I can put my own personal feelings, I'm going to talk about this spring of my discontent, but with a disclaimer that I really do think I'm becoming one of those cantankerous, impossible to please old ladies. I'm starting to wonder if I'm just determined to be displeased no matter what is going on and if I'm just well, kind of getting off on being crochety. So there. Now I'm going to talk about my carpet.

I had been looking forward to getting new carpet in our house as the event that would Change My Life Forever. Now we got it, and from the minute I first walked on it before it was even installed everywhere, I was not happy with it. It's too thin. It doesn't feel soft and wonderful and luxurious. It feels kind of chintzy. It feels too thin. It isn't cushy. Though it looks loads better than our old carpet (hey, mulch would have looked better than our old carpet!), it doesn't feel as good. The padding is too thin. You can feel where the staples are when you walk barefoot. You can feel seams. You can feel where the padding ends. It looks funny on the stairs. And in some places it isn't tacked down properly. That is something that we can get redressed, but what do you do when you aren't happy with the...whole thing?

I went to a major local flooring retailer with a good reputation because I didn't want to fall into the cheap trap we typically fall into by using someone that a friend recommended who was "cheaper" and who then vanishes off to the Philippines by the time you discover that the hardwoods were improperly sealed or the granite wasn't measured and cut to the right length. I also wanted a full service experience--wanted to come in and say, "I have four kids, two dogs, and we're slobs with poor bladder control. We want the best carpet for our situation that we can afford," and to have them direct me to just the right product. I felt like this is what I did. I had three estimates from three different places, I went with the middle one for a variety of reasons--price, full-service (furniture moving and replacement, not sub-contracted, etc.), reputation if anything went wrong. And I took home carpet samples and chose the better of the ones I brought home. I asked several times if this was a good carpet choice for fairly active people who are fairly rough on things, and I was told yes. Maybe they just don't make things like they used to.

But what is a person to do? Sure, we can get "I feel carpet staples" addressed, and we can get "this stuff on the stairs doesn't seem tacked down well enough" addressed. But let's just say you ordered a sleeping bag from LL Bean for your Boy Scout son. It came, and you felt it and decided that this bag you ordered isn't going to cut it for that Northern Tier trip, that you really were thinking that the 15 degree bag would be fine with a liner, but after feeling it, you just *know* that you need that -15 degree bag that weighs a little more but that will serve for years to come. Obviously, you send it back and get what fits your needs. Now imagine that you just spent $7k on carpet that is going to put you in debt, that you really didn't have, and that took some sacrifice on everyone's part. You bought it as an investment that you expect to have for the next 15 years or so and that will improve the value of your home if you find you have to sell it in three months. The company custom orders it, custom cuts it, and sends out two people to spend nearly nine hours moving your furniture and installing it. You removed every single thing that you own out of your upstairs. You risked your already risky marriage over this thing. And it comes in, and from the second you step on it, you know that it isn't "right." What do you do? And quite seriously, I don't want representatives of a flooring place either suing me or killing me in my sleep if I say this isn't what I was looking for and isn't up to my expectations.

After all, I picked it, right? I asked for help with the choice because I didn't know how to pick, but in the end, I picked it. I feel like a total dunce. And you know what? Nothing's going to change because (a) my husband thinks I'm insane and imagining things (even though I invited two friends over to corroborate my suspicions that it isn't "right") and (b) we're wimps and even if we do feel deeply disappointed, we'll never do anything because we're too afraid. And I'd add a (c) I'm afraid I'm a whiner, so I don't want to do something that will prove it.

I really hoped for a carpet that felt so clean, plush, and wonderful that I would want to invite everyone I know over to have a sleepover on the floor. When I've bought a bound remnant as a rug for downstairs sometimes, I've had that *awesome, cushy, can't keep my body off the carpet* feel. I don't feel that up here.

So enough about the carpet. Carpet is probably the least of my troubles. So I'm going to focus on the positive things in my life right now. My boys are Boy Scouts now and are having a great time. At least I assume they are having a great time--they are gone camping at Dutch Gap this weekend, a two night campout. Unfortunately, last night there was one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory, featuring driving rain, intense lightning, and pounding hail. And they neglected to take along the suggested synthetic fiber clothing that would dry easily and had only a change of cotton clothes. But I'll bet it was a grand adventure. I had two friends and their husbands over for dinner tonight, partly with that ulterior motive of making them opine on my new carpet situation, and partly because now that my floor won't entirely nauseate people, I'm eager to let people in my house now. We also had some new friends, Rutledge's speech therapy buddy and his family, over for several hours yesterday. It was a lot of fun to spend time with them, and the dogs got a lot of good exercise. We have an excellent dog trainer and had our first dog training session this week. I can already see a difference, if not in behavior, at least in response to us. Right now we are working on "loading" them on the clicker, making sure that they know that the click means a treat is coming. We are going room to room and making sure that they are associating the click with the treat no matter where they are. And we are working on getting them to respond by looking at us when we call their names. Poor Helen is still very nervous--she cried all through class because she was across the room with Ollie when she wanted to be with me and Bilbo. She also was too anxious to turn over to be cradled and massaged, though I think she'll be fine doing it at home. Our other task is to make sure that we are supervising them 24/7 for the next 8 weeks while they are in class. I have to admit, I've already screwed up a few times. I have lost track, forgotten to watch, and one of those times, Bilbo swiped a plate of potato skins off the table on our screened porch. And Helen worked a little more on the hole she is digging in the middle of the yard. But we're all kinds of works in progress, so I suppose we can cut ourselves a little slack.

Otherwise, I'm sort of drowning. Falling apart, really. I am wondering if I'm finally just losing it. I am not keeping up well at all with my various volunteer and supposedly paid responsibilities. I literally just cannot get my act together. I am getting resentful of people who ask me questions or put demands on me. I want to slink away in a hole and disappear. I am privately very snappish and snotty ("Find the damn swimsuit order information yourself--you can check the website or ask someone as well as I can, for God's sake!"), but unfortunately, when actually asked, I sound all contrite and willing to serve ("Sure, I'll find it for you and get back to you."). I'm about at the cracking point. I wish I had nothing to do with swim or dive team. Wish my kids weren't even on them. Wish we were doing nothing at all this summer and all of our time is our own. Now that I'm in charge of all volunteers for dive team, etc., I have to be at all the meets, I have to be at all the meetings, I have to be available.

I currently believe that the only way out of this is to move. Pronto. Like in the next month.

So I'm left just feeling really, really resentful, especially of myself. I can't believe I put myself in a position where I'm stuck, alone, and barely have my head above water (truth be told, I think everyone can see that at this point, my nose and mouth are clearly submerged and I'm circling the drain). I hate failing. But I'm also thinking I really wouldn't mind a selfish phase where I don't commit to doing anything for anyone but myself and my immediate family.

Then I have this situation at church where I've been asked to teach Sunday School, my visceral response was, "No! I love going to a Sunday School class myself and it's a high point in my week getting to see these women, and no way do I want to take myself out of that to take on more commitment." Next I'll think, "But gosh, that's selfish." And then I'll remember, "Didn't my last therapist keep telling me that I needed to be selfish, that my problem was that I wasn't selfish enough?" (Now my husband would be guffawing and rolling on the floor if he heard someone say that about me, but whatever...). I actually led that class on boundaries a few weeks ago and mustered up some courage from that and said No, I can't, it would be irresponsible of me at this time to take on any further responsibility and I need to be in this other place and helping there. But now I've been asked again--a kind of pretty please, everyone else is chipping in, can't you just do one or two weeks. And my gut response is No! No! I want to be selfish! I want to go to the adult class! I want to get support for myself rather than teach others! I don't want to commit to being in town those weeks! And then, being me, I feel guilty for feeling that. And then justified, and then guilty, and then justified. And around and around it goes. So guess how I actually respond...by avoiding it altogether, not answering email, and thinking, "Hmmm, maybe I'll just find myself a new church or become an atheist or something."

Why is life so complicated!

You know what isn't complicated? Sitting here typing on the bed across the room from my daughter, who is feeling a little lonely in the house without her older brothers, the same older brothers who she normally feels are tormenting her. Having her tell me, as she is drifting off to sleep, that the book she is reading, "The Care and Keeping of You" by the American Girl company, has the word "vagina" in it and that she just flipped ahead, but she isn't really sure she wants to read the part about periods yet because that is gross. I agree. Periods are gross. I remember my own shock when I first heard that this was not just going to happen to me, but would happen for *decades*! And knowing that my warm, sweaty, curled-up sleeping little boy in his Mario Kart Wii pajamas is going to be carried upstairs in a few minutes to cuddle next to his big sister. And that tomorrow we will all be happy to see Walter and Ollie come back all dirty and smelly and with lots of wet things that will need to be hung all over the yard, even though Friday before they left may have been full of screaming because he spit on me or he touched my ears or he's telling on me. Then there are my roses blooming so perfectly in the front yard, next to my indulgent yellow perennials (we only trampled two playing softball). And my two trying-their-hardest doggies, including dear Helen, who is probably just really happy that she is no longer living in a concrete and chain-link run and has a soft bed and den of her own and a family who loves her and feeds her treats continuously for ten minutes at a time three times a day in the name of "training." Deep down, I know that there's really a lot more to life than thick carpet or even analyzing your many deficiencies to death.

Can't get pictures uploaded.
New dog=Helen=perfect
Starting dog training classes with both dogs on Thursday
Carpet going in Thursday
Freshly painted upstairs hallway, stairwell, trim, doors
Painted Frances' bedroom, but not done
Need to recoat Ollie's room
Still need to bail out upstairs
Lots of boxes of miscellaneous items needing sorting
6 trips to Goodwill
Trash can overflowing, pickup three days away
Lots and lots and lots to do

Facebook has been spying on my mind. I must have posted something, because now it is setting ads in my right margin about moving back to Blacksburg, job listings there, and solicitations from moving companies. I swear I do have one foot already out the door.

My carpet moment coming is the perfect time for me to reassess whether I need certain things. We are already starting the process of getting books and things from dressers and shelves downstairs so the rooms are empty. I have a feeling I'm going to like the sparse look, so maybe some of the stuff won't go back up!

We are in the midst of looking for a new dog. It's hard to be emotional about the process. Right now we have in an application with Richmond Animal League, but they are pretty tight about who they will adopt to, and we may not make the cut. Because our cat is an indoor/outdoor cat, it might be a problem for an adoption through them. We also had been not entirely up to date (based on traditional, not holistic schedules) with vaccines for Bilbo. He has been extremely healthy and also doesn't have much of a social life--up until recently he rarely left the backyard or our house. We also don't board him or send to him any kind of daycare. So Friday I took him in to make sure he had had his yearly exam and everything recommended. I hope it wasn't too little too late.

The dog we would like to adopt is a 3 year old black lab who we have called Helen (she's Jamie at RAL). She seems relaxed, happy, smart, and plays very well with Bilbo. Bilbo, we have noted since Hokie has been gone, is a pretty laid back dog for someone so young. He is pretty much a couch potato. It's a sad commentary on one's activity level if I run faster than they do! But I have been walking him 2 or so miles a day for the past two weeks, and he is getting faster, if not thinner. I'm still having trouble figuring out how to keep the cat food in a place where the cat can get it, but he can't. My latest attempt was to put up a gate in my walk-in closet door, which sort of worked with Bilbo (until he knocked it out), but for some reason was higher than the cat was willing to jump. So the next step was on the counter. This works fine unless he stands on his hind legs and pulls it. Now I'm on to trying the washing machine. So anyway, sweet Helen would probably fit well for us because she seems calm, friendly with us, and would be a good companion to Bilbo. She looks like a classic man's best friend. I suppose we shall just wait and see if we are approved, and move on from there.

Fish tank remains. Now that I don't care, it doesn't seem to cost quite as much or be so unstable. We just replaced one of our T5 lights, but otherwise, things seem stable and uneventful. Hopefully they stay that way!

The last thing I should be doing at nearly 1 a.m. is writing here, but I'm not tired yet, I have a bed full of kids next to me, and I don't really need to leave the house until 8:45 tomorrow, I think. That means I can sleep until 8:25!

Rutledge just got bumped into a "reading group" at preschool. In some ways, this feels like a ridiculous and American concept. He's not yet in kindergarten, and yet it felt like he was "delayed" and therefore somehow deficient because he was one of the last holdouts in a class where he is definitely not the youngest. I tend to be of the philosophy "better late than early" when it comes to this kind of thing. Of course, saying that, I'd really appreciate having just, say, one "early" in a sea of lates so that my heart would beat a little more regularly. If he was in a Waldorf school or a European-inspired environment or even a little more hardline NAEYC preschool, this wouldn't be an issue at all, but I can't help having my brain wander over and think about how other kids seem to get this whole reading thing at all the "wrong" time so why won't mine?

But now Rutledge is making progress in that area. He knows all the letters and their various sounds. He can read the words "see" and "I" and has memorized the text in his little book he brought home. He is working through Headsprout reading (www.headsprout.com) and getting 96% or more correct in each lesson. This is the program that moved Frances from a low 1st grade level to beyond a 3rd grade level in reading in about three months. I don't expect he's going to be truly reading at the end of it, but he perhaps will have some ideas planted in his head that he will find useful at a later time. What I can say is that he is proud of his ability to sound out some words, he is pleased to be in a reading group, finally, and he does have that doofy Hooked on Phonics tape memorized.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this Vitamin D thing, and I've determined that my official feeling, at this point, is that sure, it may be a problem, but it is a red herring. It's not the REAL problem behind why Walter is of short stature. There seems to be little causal relationship, barring a more severe situation like rickets, between small size and low vitamin D. We're forging ahead with him taking about 15 times the RDA of it anyway, but the jury is kind of still out. Meanwhile, I've been continuing to make a serious effort to improve our family's mealtimes and nutrition. In particular, this has meant seriously limiting the treats and sugary food that, unfortunately, I crave with unstoppable fervor. It is revealing to me yet again, as if I need more revelation, that it is just really darn expensive to eat the right foods. Fifteen cups of fruit a day, which is what we need to cover everyone in the family, is just, well, a lot, and it costs a lot. And it takes a lot of cutting and processing and creativity. And a lot of trips to the store. If we all drank as much milk as we should, we would be going through a gallon and a quarter a day (we're not all doing this, though; I'd be truly ill if I drank 24 ounces a day without consuming half a bottle of Lactaid). I also still don't believe anyone who claims that those baby carrots taste like candy. No they don't! They taste like carrots! I really like my chocolate, thank you very much. But I have been good.

My mini-goal lately has been to move Bilbo closer to being accident-free in the house, and I cautiously can say that there has been small progress. We have been taking him for walks 3-5 times a day, and we have been making an effort to have him walking about 2-2.5 miles a day in an effort to help him lose weight that he has gained this winter lounging around the house and stealing food from the cat. I have sliced his calories way down by making one simple change (I should sell this secret on the Internet!). He is no longer getting any cat food. I put up a gate in my closet door that is so tall that even the cat can't get over it! I also switched him over to "weight control" dog food, now that I'm not having to balance needs with a dog who was too skinny. His multi-mile walks are also mine, and my goal is to move us both up to running the whole way in the near future. I'd settle for just having a walk without a thunderstorm in the middle of it, though.

This week we also seem to have gotten back into our routine of reading and getting regular schoolwork done. All of the appointments and labwork and morning engagements last week really cut into our time, but this week we've hit all major subjects, and we are making good progress in Walk Two Moons, a book that could not be further from what I thought it would be about. Somehow I thought it was going to be about a Native American girl, but instead it's a pure example of the "trailer park" genre of Newberry winners--right in there with The Higher Power of Lucky and Because of Winn-Dixie. They can get to be a little formulaic. Some themes that are really a bit much for the intended age group (8-12), quirky characters with a mysterious pseudo-profound air about them, mothers who leave their own children because of their complicated issues, children who blame themselves and try to understand the coping of imperfect adults. I am kind of anxious for it to end, just because it isn't engaging me all that much. But I'm going to stick with it. We're also reading Island of the Blue Dolphins at the same time. And I honestly do want to finish Heidi and Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It's kind of interesting reading several things at once and also revisiting books that I've read with one or more children over the past few years. I had wondered how I would handle it when Frances and then Rutledge got older and I had already read everything, but I guess the answer is, it's never a bad idea to reread aloud something that you already know. The ones who have already heard it are free to leave, but they are liking hearing about Ramona or Fudge again.

I still feel so fortunate to have the time to spend in copious amounts with my children. It is becoming more clear each day that the older ones are truly going to grow up. They aren't going to be sitting around listening to me read forever, and I can see that these really are the wonder years, the ones that I'll miss deeply when they are gone. It's good to keep that in perspective on the frustrating days and to really treasure the days that we have.

Hokie Clendenon
1994-2010

Today was one of the hardest days. We have known for a while that Hokie was not going to live forever, and over the past few months, he has lost an incredible amount of weight and had become emaciated. He was blinder, deafer, and didn't always have his balance about him. But he still was living a decent beagle life--dumping our kitchen trash can, valiantly defending his food dish, checking out the back yard, roo-rooing at other dogs. For the past two weeks, I actually believed that he might be putting on weight again (he had a voracious appetite, and we were feeding him 3-4 times a day trying to add anything back to his frame), but on Friday, he started to look very, very gaunt. Friday night I found him hiding underneath some blankets and clothes on the floor of our laundry room. Saturday morning, before I left for my Dad's house in Pulaski, I had to guide him into his crate because he was wandering aimlessly, and he felt like he was hollow when I picked him up. Then Kerry called to say that he knew why Hokie was looking so skinny again--he wasn't eating or drinking. He had been given food several times, and he just walked away. Anyone who has beagles knows this is a sign of serious trouble.

Last night was rough. Hokie went outside and went under the house and wouldn't come back out. I was out of town, but Kerry was afraid that he was going to have to send a child under to get his body. But he lived until morning. And then he started vomiting, and it was deep, smelly vomit coming from his intestines. He went to the emergency vet, who concurred with what our vet has suspected, that he has liver or stomach cancer. We could have taken him to a veterinary oncologist tomorrow, but chances are, his condition couldn't be fixed anyway, and the treatment would just be further trauma. And then, when I saw him when they brought him in from the back of the office, it was clear that he was not likely to live until morning anyway. Poor boy was actively vomiting while they gave him the injection, but now I know he is out of his pain and he will not have to starve or dehydrate to death, nor would he have to die without us if he had to stay for treatment. We were able to be there with him in his final moments and to pet him afterwards. We were given some clay pawprints from him.

Hokie was my baby long before I had human babies. I got him from the Rio Hill pet shop back in my last week of my first year of graduate school. I know better now than to buy a dog from a pet store, but in his defense, he was from a local breeder who was not a puppy mill, and though he may not have necessarily been bred with the utmost care for health and conformation, he was a gorgeous, healthy, perfect-tempered beagle, and we had been to shelters all over the state looking for the right dog, and he was it. I hid him in my apartment and slept with him in the tiny bathroom there so that he would not howl at night or pee on my floor that week. When I took him for walks on Montebello Circle, I would have to carry him home because his tender pink pads on his feet weren't callused yet and the road was too rough for him. He lived with me on 14th Street, and he worked with me every day of his first summer, when I was helping to edit Piers Plowman for an electronic edition. We went up to Shenandoah National Park several times a week for most of his first year and a half and hiked every hike under seven miles. He had many good buddies at the dog park and at the park down the street from us.

During later years, after the Shenandoah Era, which ended with Tucker, who wasn't very reliable off lead and who got carsick, he shuttled back and forth between Charlottesville and Craig County, where he had the opportunity to chase horses, romp in fields, and play with our kitten. He was always gentle, tolerant to a fault, and affectionate. His only vice as an adult dog was that he could be aggressive toward puppies. As a family dog, he put up with all kinds of pulling and dragging and falling on top of him. Like most beagles, he was a couch potato, but if called to action, he was more than ready to leap up and stay with you as long as you needed him to be rugged and athletic. During his prime years, he was the kind of beagle that people who stop us on the street to walk to because he had such a beautiful coat and square muzzle.

It feels odd to be in a house that doesn't have Hokie in it. The picture above was from just last year, when he still had a healthy looking body. At 14.5, our vet called him "The best looking fourteen year old beagle I've ever seen." Bilbo is pretty subdued tonight.

I am putting my energy now into helping Bilbo become the dog he should be. I have not been a good pet owner with him. I have done a very poor job of training him. He's a sweet, affectionate, calm, tolerant beagle as well. But after the previous owners' dogs marked the carpet and floors and then Tucker had trouble in his old age and then Hokie backslid when Tucker did, he isn't the best housebroken dog. I recognize that this is my fault. We have a crate, and to some degree we have "crate trained," but I know I haven't done it by the book, and I've let him out unsupervised too often and we have also slacked off because we have a fenced back yard that he can go in while we aren't home or while we aren't watching. Just because he goes outside doesn't mean he's not going to go in the house, also. In the past few weeks I have started regularly walking him for a mile or two a day, trying to get in a short morning walk and a longer evening walk at the least. I've never had to walk a dog in order to housebreak before, but this is a new dog, and we're always being asked to adapt and learn, aren't we? I'm also being meticulous about having him in the crate when we are not able to active watch him. So far I haven't seen any accidents, but then again, I may be missing some of what happens upstairs. Since we are getting new carpet in three weeks, even though we will gate the stairs so that he can't go up, I would still like to feel like I have not been a complete dog failure. Over the past few weeks I've been researching dog breeds and thinking about what our next dog might be, and it has really hurt me that even close friends have said that I should absolutely not get any more dogs because I have been such a bad owner of the ones I have. The immature side of myself wants to get one just to spite them (not that they care...I'm the one cleaning up the messes), sort of a "ha, I'll do what I want." I'm not the best human parent, and I'm not the best dog parent, and it is perhaps selfish of me to want living things as a comfort and companion for myself, but I can say with all honesty that my life has been much, much better for having had Hokie in it, and the sixteen years I spent with him not only would not have been the same without him, but have given me so much love and so many wonderful memories that I wouldn't trade them for clean carpets or even an intact sense of accomplishment as a trainer or person. Hokie, may you find much peace and happiness over the Rainbow Bridge, and I hope the bunnies are plentiful there.

My garden is gorgeous. In fact, my lettuces are ready for harvest and taste scrumptious. However, I have a confession to make. I AM the biggest loser. Excited by my lovely bounty and the tender crispness of the salad blend up front, I bought Kerry a few leaves and forced him to eat them. The next thing I knew, he was vigorously spitting them into the sink! I was offended! He said it was "dry." Hmm?

So I went out to get a few leaves for myself, and soon I found myself spitting into the kitchen sink.

When I went to the garden and picked up the marker, what did I find but "Petunia!"

Now he is so angry and terrified that he is going to die of petunia poisoning that he is not speaking to me. Now he is sick. I'm afraid. And it's all my fault.

Which is kind of a shame because this is the first time we have been home with no children (they are watching a movie with a neighbor) in probably, well, ever.

I have researched the toxicity of petunias, and the flowers are not toxic. What's less clear is whether the leaves are; no one touches this subject to my satisfaction. They do seem to be okay for turtles and deer and dogs and cats, but I don't know much about people. Plus I noticed that the pictures of petunias didn't look at all like my leaves. My leaves looked like crinkle-edged lettuce, and online petunia leaves are small teardrops. I fear that I have no idea what I ate! But it is sticking in my throat and still feels like it is there.

Who said gardening is for wimps?

And who has been moving my garden markers?!

Anyone who has seen me in the past three weeks has the same question. "What were you painting?"

I can't seem to paint the walls without painting myself, too. But the answer to the question is, "I'm painting my family room." And I'm painting it turquoise. The tank is dirty in the front (overflows of salt water leave behind a lot of salt!), but you're really supposed to be looking at the amazing color behind it.

I also painted my stairwell, upstairs hallway, and the area below the chair rail and breakfast counter in my kitchen, as well as the super-high wall where I can't reach the top angle.



Nobody in my house sleeps alone. And who can resist a guy in candy striped jammies?


I hope that my prominent memory of these years will be how there were always lots of extra people in my bed. This is what every morning is like--everyone makes their way to my room and we all watch Spongebob or Toot and Puddle together. Now it's still kind of true that some of these cuddlers in my bed are still doing things like lying there, lazily peeing in a pull-up instead of hauling their little butts out of bed and going to the bathroom. But this is still may favorite moment of each day, and we are fortunate to have the luxury of time to wake up slowly before heading out into the busyness of the rest of the day.

I just cannot finish one of these entries lately to save my life! I sit down to write, and the next thing I know I'm distracted and never return, and when I do, my whole Firefox session is over and I don't think about blogging, and the cycle continues.

There are so many things going on, both good and bad.

The bad: hanging out today with a friend, and Frances comes to me with a half gallon of ice cream and tells me that it is a liquid. Suddenly, the information I forgot from earlier-- the ice and water dispenser were not functioning when I went to fill Rutledge's school water bottle, after we spent about $350 in December getting them fixed--had a bearing on the ice cream situation. A major reason that the ice and water cease to work is that the temperature gets too high. So we threw away a lot of food, and really, we should throw away more. I'm willing to pay a pretty high price not to get food poisoning. We made the best of it--made a huge amount of baked chicken with the stuff thawing in the freezer, reacquainted ourselves with the blackeyed peas that were frozen, are finally going to eat the chili we had canned and that now needs to be consumed ASAP. Still, to pay several hundred more for a new computer for the fridge really wasn't something we needed to do when we just put down a 50% deposit on the carpeting that is supposed to go in three weeks from now. The fridge problem was the computer board that governs the cooling system and its readouts. Who knows why it spontaneously decides to go on the fritz, but I estimate the unit could have been failing to cool from sometime during last night or during the night to 3:15 when I discovered the problem.

The other bad news is that Walter may have some deficiency disease. Like rickets or a vitamin D deficiency. I feel just terrible, like I should have put more effort into feeding and supplementing. We all know the ruckus about breastfed babies and vitamin D these days, and Walter was lucky enough to be breastfed for about 27 months. He has always spent a lot of time outside...probably more than some of my other children, and definitely more than the average child who is in school all day. And I'm not a big user of sunscreen, I blush (burn?) a bit to admit. I definitely have never used it in any season other than summer, and I have been guilty of not using enough of it and having my children get tan. And, ironically, I do give him a specific calcium and vitamin D supplement, but apparently not enough (I just follow package labeling, but I now know that there really isn't believed to be a toxic level that is easily reached). What I don't do is give him a lot of milk. Milk is something that we use in fits, rather than on a daily basis every single day of the year. This is my fault. During my entire childhood, I was forced to drink a small glass of milk every morning and every evening, probably only about 6 ounces each time, and I'm fascinated by Walter having an issue like I did with the last half inch or so of milk in a glass--it just tastes yucky for some reason. For me, the forced milk was difficult. I thought it tasted bad, no matter how it was presented (chocolate, etc., though most of the time it was just white) and no matter how local and high quality the milk (we had it delivered to a little insulated metal milk box on our porch by Yoder Dairies, a super company that left the business in 2008). And worse yet, it made me feel sick a lot of the time after. It made it hard to eat the rest of my breakfast because my stomach would be upset, and I left for school with an upset stomach many, many, many days. Of course, being a girl, I believed that it was "stress" or something like that. But in adulthood, I've realized that no, it wasn't stress, it was lactose intolerance. The only time I've really been able to tolerate milk and ice cream well, without Lact-Aid, was during my pregnancies, where I drank prodigious (to me) amounts of milk. Now that I know how much milk many nutritionists and the food pyramid currently recommend, I was really not drinking too much more than what is recommended for everyone, but I thought a half-gallon a day was kind of over the top. Surprise, surprise, I ended up with four children who were then sensitive to dairy while I was nursing in the early months. Going off dairy was a fundamental remedy for Ollie's chronic ear infections; it was my last ditch effort after seeing the ENT and getting scheduled for ear tubes, and it worked--he has probably had four ear infections, if that, since we did that (and yes, he drinks incredible amounts of milk now...). At any rate, I have been guilty of not pushing large amounts of milk on children who express extreme dislike of it. Right now, only Ollie and Rutledge drink high amounts of regular milk, and Rutledge is still kind of sporadic. Ollie drinks what seems like his body weight in milk...whole milk...and he's still shorter than most of his friends. Who knows what his Vitamin D is like. And yeah, I'm very familiar with websites like www.nomilk.com, which on some level I can deeply identify with.

So we had this bone age scan last week that showed Walter has a nearly 3 year delay in bone age. This is a semi-subjective test, so I have to have it re-read by the endocrinologist, but 2 years difference from the chronological age is what is considered within the "normal" range. Tuesday we saw the endocrinologist, which was a humbling experience. I felt like a really bad parent. And I told lies. Lies that made me appear worse than I really am. For some unknown reason, I said that Walter drinks soft drinks 5 times a week, which really isn't true at all. I'm sure there has been a week sometime--like when we visited my Dad and were traveling, when this was true, but I'm not sure why this number came out of my mouth. I'm awaiting CPS with bated breath. He also had eaten primarily a lot of Canadian bacon and eggs in the two meals prior to our visit. Now to be fair, the Canadian bacon is really just what we'd call ham, and it was very lean ham at that, with only 1.5 grams of fat per serving (though I didn't know that until I looked at the package at home). What we didn't have in those meals was fruit or vegetables. Now don't get me wrong--this doesn't mean that none were consumed, just not at these meals. And he asked what Walter had for lunch the day before, and it was really embarrassing: the hot dog and drink deal at Costco. I don't shy away from hot dogs altogether, and this was a very blessed hotdog, which I think adds a little bit of nutritional value to a "bad" food, but I truly don't think I've ever had lunch at Costco before with them. I was kind of representing us on our worst kind of day. Sigh....

The good news: My garden is totally rocking. We have incredible looking lettuce and cabbage and broccoli growing. My spinach is trying. But my one 4x4 garden is producing beyond my expectations. I can't wait to start harvesting, which we should be able to do soon. The rain today can only improve it.

Frances is loving playing softball, and she's really good at it. She has a very good eye, has far, far better hand-eye coordination than the rest of the family (though Rutledge might well be our best...), and she has a strong throwing arm. Tonight was her second game, and it had a lot of drama. Crying girls, gloves thrown down, Frances getting hit in the eye with an errant pitch. I wish that I wasn't always having to ferry people to other activities instead of watching her games.

Walter and Ollie went on their first Boy Scout camping trip this past weekend. The campout was, ironically, held at my friend Amber's former house. Actually, the house was one she rented, and it was on kind of a family compound, but it is a beautiful setting, and thankfully was very close to home. Their next campout is going to be at Dutch Gap, near the Citie of Henricus, and this is a longer one and they'll be able to take the kayak and canoe (note to self: get kayak out of impoundment and figure out how to remove spraypainted graffiti). I'm ready to not attend these weekly Boy Scout meetings. They are enormously boring (sorry to those who are volunteering--I just have a lazy attitude and want to be consumers here rather than attending 1.5 hour meetings every Wednesday). But I think that they will have a lot of opportunities here, especially if they can find some friends and stick with it for a while. Last weekend was cold and wet at the beginning. We definitely need an equipment upgrade as far as their tent and sleeping bags go. I don't know if I should get them an adult-sized sleeping bag or not. Who knows...they just might grow some day soon, and a child's bag will be outgrown. Or they could be half a decade away from puberty and never fill a big bag. Right now I have 2 man Eureka tent that Kerry and I bought at an outdoor store in Afton fifteen years ago. It's not the most rugged tent, but it packs up nice and small. But I think I'm going to replace it with a different Eureka tent, the Apex, which gets great reviews and is pretty affordable from Amazon.

I spent part of the weekend in one of the most beautiful places I know--Front Royal, VA. Alas, I spent the very vast majority of the day-8:20-4:30 indoors with no windows at a business training session, but the drive was breathtaking. Front Royal lies at the gateway to Shenandoah National Park at the north end, and there is just something that absolutely stirs me about getting that first glimpse of the Blue Ridge as you are driving down a road from the eastern part of the state. I get tears in my eyes and feel like I am home when I see Shenandoah or any mountain looming ahead of me. The town itself is not an affluent one, but it is cozy, and there is still a bit of the flavor of the more upscale areas right to the east--Middleburg, The Plains, etc. I love the little stone walls near fields, the rustic homes, the rolling meadows. The training itself was also very inspiring. It's just so different from what I have been used to either in previous training for various jobs and in teaching. I have kind of set myself apart from Christian organizations in the past, partly because I've always felt like maybe I just don't fit in, but I met such wonderful people who really have such a strong belief that we were led to this particular job and that we won't be doing it alone. Classical Conversations is a very organized organization, and this is just what I need at this point. I've had some understandable qualms about what I've taken on, and this really put my mind at rest and has me eager to be engaged and be part of the community that I hope we will find. Still, it was a tiring, very long day, leaving at slightly after 5 and then turning around and driving back again right away.

The so-so, neither good nor bad: I'm really interested in getting another dog. The breed I have identified as a good fit for us is the German Shorthaired Pointer. This dog seems to have little drawback, other than a high activity level, which isn't a drawback, I suppose, if you have one yourself. But they seem to point, retrieve, like water, like people, be intelligent, learn quickly, enjoy challenges, get along well with children and dogs. Plus they look cool. Unless you are my husband, who thinks they look like two or three different dogs put together like Legos. I think partly he has to not like them because I found them, and there's always a power play going on. He can't like them. I wish I had played my own cards a little differently (or that I wasn't playing cards at all...), so it might be a little too late. I'm just feeling lately like I'd rather go for more of an A student dog than a C student. Beagles--gotta love them. But they're a C student. It's not that they aren't smart, they just, well, have some other priorities. And boy are they fun to party with! You can't help but want to just hang out at their place all day and night! But having cleaned up at least 2 major shits in the house today (the latest party involved eating about 2 pounds of peanut and raisin trail mix), I'm just kind of thinking that I'd like a dog with a little more passion about trying to please and be obedient. Maybe even to have some self-control. Of course, the RIGHT answer is that I shouldn't have a dog at all because I don't deserve one. And because it is sure to create more and more and more tension in an already screwed up relationship. But there's a space in my life begging to be filled by something fuzzy and cute that I could hang with. Whoever told me that you could have three dogs in Chesterfield County now should have kept her mouth shut!

It's official. I really want to move. I practically need to move.

I need the mountains. I need a smaller town. I need a landscape to connect with.

For whatever reason, and I'm not defending it, Richmond doesn't do it for me. It lacks an ocean. It lacks a mountain. And the James River, well, it's just not my type. When I drive west of here and hit that first moment when you see the Blue Ridge rising up in front of you, my overwhelming feeling is, "Ahh, I am home!" It happens on Route 17 as you head through western Stafford and into Fauquier. It happens on Route 460 a bit past Lynchburg. It happens on Route 29 just north of Charlottesville. Even when I lived in some of these places, every time I would see that first real glimpse of the stacks of blue, one one top of another, my breath would catch.

I should be content where I am. I have friends here. I know the lay of the land, where things are, where to go. We have amenities. We have proximity to the kinds of places I dream of actually living--we're just about two hours from them wherever you head. And yet I still miss what I don't have.

This weekend, I drove up to Front Royal for a training session and it was honestly all I could do to turn the car around to take it home. I promise myself, solemnly, that I am going to get back to mountains some day.

Keva blocks are a constant favorite item in our house. Tonight, while I was reading _Heidi_ to the kids, Walter built "the wolf" above. This was just one of many fabulous representative and architectural wonders that I saw. Our reading has been slower than usual lately. Walter, Ollie, and I just finished reading _The Sacrifice_, a book about the Salem witch trials, and all four of us have been reading _Heidi_, a very slow book, and _Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing_. The boys and I also are working on _Carry On, Mr. Bowditch_, a book that didn't really take off with them when we started it a few weeks ago, but that I'd like to finish. Before that we read _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Misty of Chincoteague_. Next on my docket is _A Wizard of Earthsea_, which I'll admit is outside of my favored genres and outside those of my children. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised.


When I'm not reading, I really feel like the worst parent in the world.

I am seriously beginning to question my most basic parenting abilities. I was mentioning to someone this week that I still feel like I'm faking it. That I'm not really a mother of these people, but that I'm just someone bumbling her way through a role and not convincing anyone, least of all herself. "Legitimacy" is the word that came to my mind--I just don't feel legitimate. The deeper I get into trying to figure out if Walter has a growth issue of some kind, the more guilty I feel. I am a veritable cesspool of guilt. I feel like me, the mother-faker, have either zoned out so severely that I've starved my child into some nutritional stunting out of sheer inattention or divided attention or something like that OR that I've somehow failed to notice warning signs of something over the years.

Today we got back the results of his bone age hand and wrist scan that he had done yesterday, and it wasn't surprising that his "bone age" is considered significantly delayed. I have been reading around about what the possibilities are. Obviously one of them is a growth hormone deficiency. In this case, often the child has a face that looks young for his chronological age, but they tend to carry more weight and appear cherubic. Walter doesn't fit that particular morphographic or whatever you'd call it. Another option is what is referred to as "constitutional short stature," which would leave a child with a delayed bone age, but they will catch up to their expected adult height in a longer amount of time than the typical child. They tend to reach puberty later than their peers, and they tend to grow for a few years beyond the time their peers stop growing, but they eventually get there. They primarily need emotional support as they may be teased, self-conscious, or treated differently because they do not physically mature in the range of others their age. Then there seem to be a couple of conditions that we can rule out right away because some bloodwork has been done in the past few years or because he truly doesn't fit the profile at all. And then there's a very outer edge possibility that it's malnutrition.

I think I feel so guilty about his nutrition because I don't micromanage his intake. I know he doesn't always finish what's on his plate, and I haven't made a big fat hairy deal out of it. I don't always pay attention at lunchtime because we are often out and about and busy. He may not get a full and varied lunch with a variety of high calorie foods if I leave him to fend for himself in the kitchen. My others can be relied upon to make themselves a sandwich, microwave a corndog, or toast a bagel with cream cheese, but Walter currently can't eat those kinds of foods, at least not as easily as gluten-eaters do (gf bagels are really only a "bagel" because they are round and have a hole in the middle...). My calorie counts have been going fairly well--about 2000-3700 per day, depending on whether he encounters a calorie bonanza (did you know that a Cold Stone chocolate fudge shake, the small size, is 980 calories!). Still, I wonder, are there days when he hasn't had enough? And I feel awful that I've let him have some candy some days. I get lazy. A Snickers is something that we can buy when we're out somewhere that doesn't have much that is safe for him. It's not all that often, but there have been times, the type where the other kids might be eating doughnuts or cake at a party, when that's been the most readily available near-equivalent. I could just about kick myself to death for letting him have something with no nutritional value and all kinds of bad things. I am so very bad at bringing along fruit or even keeping a constant stock of GF bars, which tend to come in packs of 4 or 5, cost 4 or 5 dollars, and are gone in less than 4 or 5 bites. No sooner do we buy some of these than we have none left. Meanwhile, I can buy a pack of 48 or 64 chewy granola bars at Costco for less than $9. This same amount would be close to $60 in GF bars! I'm not stingy, and we must eat, but that's the cost of GF convenience!

At any rate, we will see an endocrinologist on Tuesday who will hopefully put our minds at rest. I am still waiting to get clapped right into prison for neglect. Benign neglect, but neglect.

We have lots of other things going on:

* camping this weekend--first Boy Scout outing

* I'm attending Director of Business Training in Northern Virginia for Classical Conversations

* We had to pay a *lot* of taxes this year, for the first time. Ouch.

* The aquarium remains. And note to self: prepare for oddity when you put something on Craigslist. I'm analyzing what the aquarium represents to me that I am holding on to. But I think the God's honest truth is that what I'm holding onto is something that no one has come to my house to take away.

* Frances started playing on a softball team this week. Didn't see that one coming. I should feel more terrible about not saying no, but she's having such a good time that it's hard to be too hard on myself.

* Tennis is in full swing, ha ha. I have a win and two losses so far. Kind of to be expected, since I'm still playing way above where I should be. I was proud of my 6-8 close lose yesterday, since I played fairly well and it was a good, competitive match.

* Kerry seems to not be going to India for six to nine months. Guilty, guilty, guilty. I feel so guilty about this. I have likely ruined his career. But I still feel like I would absolutely not have the support resources in place to handle something like this. I'd prefer to be a true single parent than to have this kind of upheaval. It highlights so much how I am in a severe friend deficit. I literally could not think of a single person I could even call to stay with my kids if I had to go to the E.R. in the middle of the night. It's hard to think of how they could pay him enough for that kind of a sacrifice.

* Swim and Dive team registrations this weekend. I think that Rutledge might be ready for swim team. He certainly would be adequate for most other clubs' swim teams, since he can swim a full lap without holding the lane lines. But our team might have higher standards. And it might require too much supervision to get him to practice. Still thinking about this one. We are already at the max family cost, so he would be free.

* Square foot garden is in and looking awesome. I could make myself a very sweet and small salad already. Of course I primarily have cold weather vegetables like lettuce. But lettuce is a wonderful thing. Frances wanted us to also plant a number of flowers, so we have a much more varied garden than I typically do. I wish I had planted some root vegetables, but it's probably too late. Nonetheless, I'm pleased with the new 4x8 bed that I built a few weeks ago, and the Mel's mix that I put in should last quite a while. I'm super excited about all the plans I have for the next few weeks. We also did a little bit of landscaping in the front, and I planted a bunch of bulbs, annuals, and cleared out the unkempt looking bed in front of our dining room where I lopped out two entire bushes last fall.

* I am reading a book about improving marriage that has given me mind-blowing insights. Things that should have been so obvious but that I had never had words for before. Now don't get me wrong--I haven't the faintest clue what I'm to do with this information or how I'm supposed to act upon it, or even whether it means that there is hope, but I will say that I felt a total identification with what these authors are saying, and that I understand a large source of my own frustration and about what is wrong about me and how I have contributed to and created the strain in my relationship. I try to avoid self-help books as much as possible, so I don't know if this is just how people always feel when they read a book on this type of topic ("Wow, they really nailed it!"), or if I was perhaps led to this particular book by some higher power. But it is giving me a big wad to chew on.

* I am newly committed to walking Bilbo and eventually running with him. I will train him. I will not fail at housebreaking.

* Finally, it appears that we will get new carpet. I'm so excited I could bust out of my skin. Or invite people over for a party. I have been so terribly embarrassed by our disgusting, worn out carpet upstairs (and on the stairs) that I cannot have anyone over. If this home improvement project ruins us financially, I will still feel that it is some of the best money we have spent. Every time I look at our carpet I feel like I am a wretched housekeeper, a boundary-less parent who has out of control children, and just generally a person with low standards. New carpet may not make all of life into a bowl of cherries, but it certainly will be a glorious change.

I get in these crazy, time-consuming predicaments all the time. This one is about tires. I have completely bald tires--slick at something you'd find at a racetrack. The tread is so worn that it's amazing the tires haven't popped (especially given my predilection for hitting potholes and knocking big pieces of my car off). So earlier this week, I went to the Costco tire center to buy new tires. They were all out of the kind I needed, since they're having a sale where you get $70 off a set of four. So I came back a few days later, and I thought everything was fine. I went in the store, bought myself a book and a frozen yogurt, and kicked back in the cafeteria to wait. About 45 minutes into my escapade, the tire guy came in and told me that my tire locks are preventing them from getting my tires off. I have no idea where the key is. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I threw away the key when I threw away lugnuts, since I was routinely sweeping these things around the garage in a flurry of leaves and cat litter that hopped the box. All I can say is that I really and truly don't have the key.

What is a person to do? I actually asked if was going to have to get a new car! No, I don't need a new car. But I do have to sit out at the Honda dealership with four kids for probably an hour or two in the morning. And then at Costco with four kids for an hour or more. I am not thrilled. Woo-hooo spring break!

This morning was my second tennis match of the suburban season. It was a hard one. I played one of my former reproductive endocrinologist's wives, so it was very interesting to talk with her afterwards. My partner and I lost 10-5, which was not too bad. Last week Michele and I won, which felt awesome after my very bad suburban fall. The trouble is that we are really playing beyond our ability level. Poor Michele, a 3.0, lost this morning to a 4.5. It wasn't a very good matchup! But I look forward to more wins if I'm able to play some doubles. I have been typed as a singles player for so long that I had forgotten the many joys of playing with another person. It's more fun (singles is primarily intense), it's more relaxing (someone else gets the ball part of the time!), and there's someone else to share the responsibility for winning or losing a point or game. I like it not all being about me, even as I selfishly enjoy the fame that comes with doing it myself.

We have some kind of interesting news in the past two days. Kerry was asked how he might feel about starting up an office in Blacksburg. I can answer how Nancy would feel. She would feel awesome. It's kind of like going to Colorado but not leaving Virginia. It would honestly be a dream come true. I was so giddy and busting with excitement yesterday that I thought I would burst. I think it's a long shot, and because I'm so very super happy, I doubt it will happen at all, but I have never felt such a sense of something being the right thing to do. There are so many reasons I want this to work out. I would be about 30 minutes from my Dad, and I'd like to spend more time with him and see him with more frequency but not need to spend the night when I go. I'd like for us to be able to do things together without my whole family being a burden. I miss the mountains. It sounds weird even to me to write something like that, but when I'm in the mountains, I feel like I am home. I never took for granted how very lucky I was to live in such a gorgeous place when I lived in Roanoke and Blacksburg and Charlottesville--I want to be where there are waterfalls and rocky streams and mountains to climb. I love being near the A.T. I have many special places--Pandapas Pond, the Cascades. I would love to live in a college town again, especially one where you can get around so easily on a bike or on foot. There seems to be a highly competitive dive team at Blacksburg High School, there is an excellent dance studio right in town, and I think we would easily find Boy Scouts, music instructors (maybe Tech students), and pretty much anything else we might be looking for with activities. I'd look forward to, well, doing less. I'd like to just start over and rebuild what we do from the ground up. I love the compactness of a town like that, and yet with the university there are so many things that come in--concerts, plays, performances, lectures. I would consider going back to school to study speech or occupational therapy. We could get a place with several acres and have chickens. I'm so sold on the prospect of moving that I'm thinking that I'd almost be willing to let Kerry stay home with the kids and I'd work retail or wait tables or whatever I had to do to make this a reality!

My Walter saga is still totally stressing me out, but he's doing the best he can eating. He is so petrified of the prospect of the feeding tube that he is complying with my force-feeding and food obsession. I have been meticulously tracking his food intake for five days now, and it's really quite encouraging. His intake has ranged from 2000 to about 3700 calories. He hasn't been doing much more than he typically does except for the milk, which adds quite a bit of calories. I also talked with a nutritionist to help me work on finding foods that are calorie-dense. Unfortunately, Walter and I both like calorie-less foods--things like fruits, vegetables, meats, water. I am optimistic that if our visit from CPS comes, my house may look messy, but we will still appear to have a most basic clue about nutrition and be able to demonstrate that we own and eat a balanced diet. Meanwhile, we have totally cleaned up on the gluten. No more McDonald's at all. No questionable foods outside the house. I hope that both of us will see more positive results.

Poor, poor Hokie is looking really bad lately. His weight loss continues, and he is terribly unhealthy looking. I am selfish because I am not ready to put him down. He was my baby before I had human babies. He was the most gorgeous beagle ever when he was younger. He was a brave explorer with tons of personality, even though it's hard to imagine that now. He had enormous energy, bold good looks, loved to play at the park with his doggie friends, was a tireless hiker, and was once a tiny, adorable puppy. Now he is a bag of bones, full of lumpy tumors, has trouble walking, and gets confused and will think a wall is a door or will have his lets fall out from under him. It breaks my heart. I am selfish. I want him to be with me forever. I want to make time go backwards and have him be who he once was. I want to have all the pictures I never took of him. I want to have an album of nothing but him and to tell the story of his life with us. I want to not look like an awful dog owner with an underfed dog. It is so hard to tell when it is time to let someone you love go. Is it when he can't walk at all? Is it when he finally dies on his own? Is it when he looks so bad that you know he will never get better? If he can still empty trashcans and rummage through the recycling and raid the cat litter box and pick a fight over food, does that mean he still has some quality of life? What I can say for sure is that my life has been better for knowing him and for getting to spend more than 16 years as one of his best friends.

I can't believe our spring break is almost over. These breaks make me realize how very, very lazy I really am. I want to do nothing. My lack of ambition really bothers Kerry, and on some very lost level, it bothers me as well. But the truth is, I'd love to spend a year just kind of coasting. Not working. Not helping out with a zillion things. Just taking care of my own family, having some time to read or watch TV or play board games or take walks, and getting my house in order so that I'm not always feeling like I can never have anyone over. We didn't do a lot this week, and that has been the best part of it.

Back on the Wall

Back on the Wall!

It felt awesome to be back climbing again. I hadn't been to Peak Experiences in a couple of months, so I was especially happy to be able to join some of my homeschooling parent friends and spend a couple of hours climbing. I thought I might have even forgotten how to tie my knots and thread my belay device, but it all came back very quickly. Some nights climbing are kind of so-so--I don't make it up everything, I don't make it up much of anything. But tonight, I started out with a confidence building 5.6, did a few more like that, did two 5.7s, and then finished with a really fun 5.8. What I love about Peak is the way that they make the routes special and with interesting features or skills required. One had a very cool corner to use and climb over. Another went around a corner and then across and back again. One had a very welcome smiley face hold at the very top. What's interesting is that the one I think I struggled most with was a 5.6, though it was a competition route, and we determined that these felt more difficult than their non-comp counterparts. What a nice time and a great group of women!

It was altogether a good, if unproductive day. I spent way too much at Costco, which isn't surprising since it would be a miracle to spend under $100. I was well beyond that, unfortunately. I failed to purchase the paint I need to finish my stairwell and kitchen project. I'm just not sure about the color, and at $47 a gallon, it feels like a commitment. I hate commitment! I priced tires, which I should plan to get tomorrow, since my front tires look like they're ready for the Indy 500 they're so slick and lacking tread. I busted up the front of my car two weeks ago when I hit a big pothole outside Latin Ballet, and when we had the Honda dealership price new tires while we were having my bumper and some giant plastic piece that goes around the wheelwell worked on or replaced, the estimate was staggering. I feel pretty good about the Costco price, it's just a matter of finding the time to sit there.



Rutledge had a swim lesson today. The big question is whether he will be ready to be on swim team this year. Our swim club has something called Tropical Storm, which is a development team for the swim team, but last year, the inaugural year, went really poorly. There were kids on this "team" who were afraid to even get into the water and who had to be carried by an instructor through every session. Most were clinging to lane lines for most of the season. Rutledge is able to meet the basic requirement and swim a length of the pool. I wouldn't exactly call it freestyle--he has a lot of trouble multi-tasking and using "big arms" while kicking--he can do one or the other. But he is able to do one or two laps at a time, and he can swim on his back, though one would be hard pressed to call it backstroke. Shannon, his favorite lifeguard and pool buddy, is working with him. He kind of has two weeks to get it together. I'm not sure it makes sense for him on be on the team anyway, since he would likely need to be supervised while at the practices, and I'm not sure I want to do that. His practicing would also kind of interfere with my tennis, which is annoying. But I guess I'll see what happens. It costs about $125 less for him to be on swim team than to be on the development team, so the decision is really between the real swim team or nothing. One thing I can say...he just loves to swim! We have been at the pool about 5 days a week for the past couple of weeks.

Ollie kind of has a girlfriend but doesn't know it. He now always goes early to dive practice so that he can practice with Alyssa, who is on the year-round clinic team with him. They are at fairly similar levels, so they can bring out the best in each other. Ollie is really getting older. Today he spent much of the afternoon bagging leaves with John, who lives next door. Then he went out to dinner with their family. I can tell that the days when he is going to do things with us are numbered. He really seems to have had a big maturity and attitude leap lately, and I suppose it's true that they don't stay little forever.

Frances worked on watering the garden, which is now almost completely done, preparing a space for the flower we need to plant, and coloring Easter eggs, since we forgot and had nothing but brown eggs until today. Her eggs have googly eyes and feathers for hair, which is sort of interesting when you open the refrigerator and see them all sitting there in an egg caddy.

Poor Walter can't seem to get a break. Today he has had a sore throat, and by tonight he had a small fever. This has affected the force-feeding thing. I hope I'm not really force-feeding him, but he is absolutely petrified by the idea of a feeding tube. I've been researching the options, and it's just all rather scary. Scary most of all because I'm not sure how I ended up with a child with a major medical problem. I have been reading a book called, "Confessions of a Mother Inferior" lately, and the primary message of it is that we are given our particular children, they were specially chosen for us, and so when we are feeling inadequate and wondering what to do, we can take heart that God selected us as the parents for a reason. Funny, because I often wonder whether some higher power is telling me to put my children in foster care so that they have a higher chance of making it to adulthood with a modicum of health and sanity. But I have been trying to meditate on this idea that we don't have the children we have by accident. At any rate, he still managed to eat 3580 calories before dinnertime tonight. I won't mention where some of them came from--and when I say some, I mean like half. I have been trying to understand how people can overeat and have too many calories when so many of the foods that we tend to eat seem so paltry in the calorie department. The answer, I'm convinced, must be that people eat many, many servings of some of these things, and they must eat things that are on the naughty list. While nuts, a calorie bonanza, are perhaps only on a questionable list for some people, I'd say that Cheetos and those delectable Kettle chips are probably not something we're really supposed to be having 5 servings of. I've determined that one way to boost calories is to do the opposite of what weight management websites tell you to do. So one key, I think, is to have food in front of the TV or computer. I hadn't given it much thought; I eat wherever I am most of the time, but I'm thinking I might encourage blind snacking in front of a screen. I also made an "underweight people" counter today--this contains a lineup of about 8 bags of things that people who need to eat more can eat without having to think. There are at least four kinds of trail mix. Nuts and nut clusters. Dried fruits. Trans-fat free chips. So guess what happened when I went out climbing tonight right after Kerry came home and before a family dinner? They didn't eat dinner! Well, Frances had a big dinner, but she never neglects to eat. We have no problems there. Ollie went to Johnny Rockets with a friend and ate an obscenely large brownie and three refills of fries and a giant burger. And Walter ate nothing but pistachios. Sigh. I suppose he gets a pass because he's sick. But it makes me hesitate to go out gain!

We got a last estimate on carpeting, and I think we have our source. I can't wait. I truly feel like it will be a new lease on life when it happens. I can scarcely believe it might be around the corner. Our carpeting upstairs is so gross that I don't even want to invite close friends over any more. The spots, the areas where it is down to bare backing, the glow in the dark silly putty, now black with dirt, . Eww. I started trying to move the furniture, but I'm going to have to wimp out here. I'm going to have to pay someone to do it. I hate not doing things ourselves, but there's just no way for me to do it alone. I wonder if I will stop wanting to move if we get carpet that makes things feel clean and sanitary.

Today's final dilemma is my "blocked" bank card. It's kind of unbelievable, but I've been without a bank card now for about 10 weeks. This is my 4th card, and the bank still can't figure out why it says it is activated, why they send me a pin over and over (now with a totally different card and different pin), but it is consistently declined. I went in person and had it dealt with, everything looked good. And then I tried using it in a store and it was rejected yet again. It's getting kind of embarrassing, even though I know that it's not because we have no funds. I'm ready to find a new bank.



Here's my Hokie. He may be 17 pounds and on his last legs, but he's still a beagle through and through. He will enter an entire empty bag of dog food if it means that he can get one more morsel. He still dumps trash cans, shreds peed-in Pull-Ups, and decimates my recycling. He picks fights, defends his food, and steals things out of children's hands. I think this means he has a little bit more life left!