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!