Thankful I'm A Year Younger!

 Another week, another list of thankfuls! (Did you know if you accidentally type a "K" instead of an "L" in "thankful" that you end up with an entirely different word and what would be an entirely different blog hop?) Here are mine:

1. The College Boy who became the Med Student and is now the M.D. had a birthday this week! We jokingly called it his Emancipation Day, because he is now 26 and off our insurance, but he also started orientation for his residency and now has his very own big boy insurance! He's had quite a busy spring: Match Day, wedding, graduation, moving to a different state, and now his residency beginning. So proud of all he's accomplished!

2. Trader Joe's Cholatey Cats Cookies for People. Truthfully, I would eat them if they actually WERE marketed for cats, because they're pretty darn good.

3. Well, it wasn't the stomach flu.

4. When you have a known food allergy or sensitivity and you decide to eat said food because it looks really good and then you have gut-wrenching pain that somewhat mimics the stomach flu, be thankful you figured it out and have enough sense NEVER TO EAT A BITE OF CANTELOUPE AGAIN AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.

5. A friend had a birthday the other day, and as we were talking about our ages, I said I was 61, then stopped and said, no, wait, is that right? After much debate and some hard math, I figured out that I am actually 60 (for a couple of more months, anyway). Since I've been THINKING I was 61 for some time, I am thankful I was able to make myself younger FOR REAL. 

6. One of my little nugs was drawing on the sidewalk with chalk with his mom. He wanted her to draw a picture of me, so she asked if I had straight hair or curly hair. He told her I had CRAZY hair, and I couldn't love that more! In fairness, he ALSO has crazy hair (which, by the way, interprets to curly), but he got it cut recently and it's not AS crazy as mine is currently! I sure love that boy!

7. While we started the week with cool weather, we ended it with blistering heat, followed by severe thunderstorms. Friday afternoon, it was SOOOOO hot that I wasn't going to take my littles outside again. They were playing in centers when my student worker and I kept hearing sirens. We hear them quite often, as there is an assisted living center about half a mile away, and a fire truck and ambulance gets dispatched there nearly every day, but these sirens were loud and then stopping abruptly. Finally had the sense to look out the window, and there were five fire engines, an ambulance, and several police cars parked right across the street from the school! I gathered up my kiddos and took them out front, where we sat in the blazing sun and watched the firefighters put out a small attic fire at the apartment complex across the street. Emergency vehicles are DA BOMB when you are a preschooler, and this was a terrific teachable moment, especially since it was a small fire and no one was injured. 

8. As the firefighters began to disperse, one of them came over to his truck and called out my name. Surprise! It was a boy (okay, man) my daughter went to school with from kindergarten all the way through high school. I was touched that he recognized me in a situation in which he surely wasn't expecting to see me, and the kiddos enjoyed seeing a firefighter up close in full gear (if only he wasn't about to melt from the gear plus the heat).

9. My daughter and I drove through a severe thunderstorm on the way to Kansas City on Friday. Lots of lightning and blinding rain, but no hail and no tornadoes. I was able to keep another vehicle's taillights in sight, and that made me feel somewhat safer. 

10. Don't want to jinx anything, but it is POSSIBLE that we may have found an apartment for her for the upcoming school year.

Link up with us at the Ten Things of Thankful! You will grow from the simple act of compiling a weekly list of thankfuls and have fun at the same time!

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Really, The BEST Of Intentions

I had the best of intentions on Friday, really, I did. 

When I arrived at school that morning, I hit the ground running. Father's Day kind of slipped up on me, and I had been rushing all week to get the gifts made for my kids to give to their dads (or grandpas or other significant men in their lives). 

Naturally, I had had technical difficulties with getting photos I needed printed in the size I needed (thank you, Annie and Addison, for getting me past THAT hump). I neglected to take a picture of the finished product (which wouldn't have been finished without Annie's help - darn her for getting a "real" job and leaving me at the end of the summer to teach first grade), but they were river rocks (thanks, Vandine, for purchasing them for both of our classes to use), painted with acrylic paint (another thanks to Vandine for buying paint; I thought I had some - and I DID, but it turns out I only had white, black, and springy, Easter egg shades). A half-dollar sized photo of the child was glued onto the rock, "My Pop Rocks" was written on them, and then they were painted with Mod Podge for protection and an aesthetically pleasing glossy look (four more thankfuls to Annie for the circle cutting, gluing, writing, and Mod Podging). End product is a paper weight, if that's not already obvious, and it was a project I used to do with preschoolers at my previous school; in fact, my husband still has the one my daughter made nearly 20 years ago ("I can't throw it away - it has her picture on it").

If you followed that whole paragraph of the making of the paper weights, go back in time with me to the portion that says I had to have photos printed. After much frustration, I was finally able to get an 8x10 photo printed at Walgreens that was a collage of individual photos of each child (correction: all but TWO children, because it appears I left two of them off; the only good news is those students weren't at school that day, so their gifts to their pops were going to be belated anyway). That's one thankful for getting the collage made and printed, minus a thankful for leaving two photos off. The thankful math is getting as convoluted as this story.

So I drive to Walgreens to pick up the photo while the kids were outside with Annie and Addison. It was boiling hot outside, already 90 degrees at 9:30, so I texted Annie and said I would bring back candy and Sonic drinks. I was super proud of myself for using the Sonic app for the first time, ordering three Route 44 drinks (if you aren't familiar with Sonic, they are 44 oz drinks) for half price (also paying for them through the app), pulling into a stall, and getting them delivered to the car in a flash. The car hop brought them out on a tray, then seeing I was alone, asked if I would like a drink carrier. Hmmm, I thought, as I had just planned to stick them in the car's cupholders (foreshadowing here), that would make them SO MUCH easier to carry into school, so I said yes, he put the drinks into the drink carrier (the flat kind that pops into a 4-hole box with handle), and I put the drinks on the floorboard of the passenger side of the front seat and headed back to campus. One Diet Coke, one Diet Dr Pepper, one Vanilla Dr Pepper. Several thankfuls there.

It was only about a mile or two, straight down the main drag, and all was well until a traffic light ahead of me suddenly turned yellow. I am a rule follower, so I hit the brakes to stop at it instead of blowing through it like most people in town would have, and CRASH - the carrier tipped over to the right, dumping the drinks onto the floorboards. I threw the car into park, took off my seatbelt, said ALLLLL the bad words, and set the drink holder upright, but not without one of the cups losing its lid and spilling its contents all over the floor of the car.. I texted Annie that, due to a rapid stop at a light, I was now one drink down.

I continued down the road, CAREFULLY turned onto the road leading to the campus while bent over, my finger hooked in the edge of the drink carrier as I did so. Whew! I waited for traffic to clear, slowly, S-L-O-W-L-Y made my next turn, and CRASH - over it went again. I whipped into the parking lot of the school, set the carrier upright again, aaaaaand, another drink down.

I parked the car, texted Annie that I had lost yet another one, picked up the soggy drink carrier with two empty cups, one mostly full but quite battered cup, the photo I had printed, and the candy and trudged, dripping, into the building. I set everything down in the room (Annie and Addison were trying not to laugh at my idiocy, but they were unable to hide it), told them I didn't know whose drink it was that actually survived, and went back outside to deal with the car.

As I approached my car from the passenger side, armed with a trash bag and a roll of industrial paper towels, I saw that a small stream of soda was actually running out the bottom of the passenger door onto the parking lot. Running. Out. The. Car. Door.

Opening the door, I was greeted with about a half inch of soda with crushed ice swimming around in it; the rest of the soda (and let us remember that it was 88 OUNCES OF LIQUID) was both UNDER the floor mat or absorbed INTO the floor mat. I swear that floor mat weighed ten pounds when I pulled it out of the car and dropped it onto the parking lot. I used the paper towels to absorb all the liquid I could out of the floor board (turns out "all I could get" was less than a sufficient amount), then dragged the floor mat to the front steps of the building, leaving a trail of soda across the parking lot. I lifted the mat up by the corner to rinse it off, and soda continued to pour, POUR, out in a stream onto the ground, so much that I could have refilled one of the cups with it. I'm really thankful that we had hoses hooked up to the spigot in front of the building (thank you, Ceason, for buying new hoses to use for summer water play, watering the garden, and the occasional washing of car mats that have absorbed half a gallon of soda) and I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed and RINSED and was able to declare them relatively soda-free (and a lot cleaner than it was before). I laid it out to dry (didn't take long in that heat, by the way) and finally returned to my classroom.

By this time, my kids were already sitting down to lunch (thanks again, Addison and Annie). I walked into the room, sweaty and disheveled, feet sticky, hair wild, and asked which of the three different drinks survived the trip. In unison, they said, "Yours." Oops.

So, see? I really DID have the best of intentions by getting the drinks to offset leaving to get the photo while Annie and Addison supervised the little nugs on the playground. I tried, I really did. 

A swing and a miss.

Trail o' soda

This was a live photo and was easier 
to see that way, but you can see the
stream of soda pouring from the lower
right corner

I took this selfie as I was heading out
on my errand because I was having
a really good hair day. I did not take
an after photo, but I can assure you
it was the opposite of this....

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Lazy Hazy Crazy Thankfuls

It was a hot, hot, HOT week. And humid. Very humid. Think tropical rain forest. But I am not complaining. No, siree, Bob, and the reasons are my Ten Things of Thankful.

First and foremost, I hate being cold.

Pipes don't freeze when it's hot.

I don't have to scrape my car windows before going to work every morning.

Flip flops every day.

The days are looooong.

Watermelon is in season.

Popsicles just taste better when it's hot outside.

So do Sonic slushes.

Going to the pool feels awesome.

It's okay to be lazy, because it's the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

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The Week That Ended With Apartment Hunting

Apartment hunting today is not what it was when I was living the apartment life. Back then, you got the Sunday paper, opened it to the classified ads, and looked under "Apartments for Rent". You highlighted the ones you were interested it, gathered your street map, and off you went to check them out. 

IT IS NOT THAT EASY ANYMORE.

There is no longer one place to go to see all the apartment listings. Google has hundreds of listings. Hundreds. The algorithm or whatever it is brings up mostly the luxury places. It is terribly frustrating, and the end result is we have not found an apartment for my daughter to live in this August when law school begins. Correction: we have not found an AFFORDABLE apartment for my daughter to live in. 

The Country Club Plaza, Kansas City

Sigh. Moving on to the Ten Things of Thankful for this week: 

This week, I am thankful:

... for my brother and sister in law, who have given us an open invitation to stay with them whenever we are in KC.

... that the invitation was extended for this past weekend, even when my SIL was going into the hospital on Monday for knee replacement surgery.

... that I wasn't killed by their shower door when it fell off the track when I was trying to slide it open to turn on the water.

... that I wasn't killed OR injured by the shower door because my daughter laid in bed in the next room and didn't get up to check on me, waiting instead to see if she heard any noises from me after the initial crash and scream (she said she heard me talking to myself so she knew I was okay - smh!).

... for scoring some cute clothes and two Holly Hobbie items at a thrift store.

... for the Circle of (School) Life where older students move up and out of the room and younger ones move up and into their places. It's bittersweet when my loves go to Pre-K, but I still get to see them every day just by walking down the hallway.

... that my newest nugs are easing into the routine of a big (well, medium) kid class and are having fun.

... when someone brings donuts to work.

... for friends, old and new.

... for love and laughter.

Now if someone could come up with an on-line classified ad system of listing apartments THAT INCLUDED ALL OF THEM IN ONE PLACE, holler at me....

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