Shaun's blog

This week I did something very exciting -- I cut my Effexor dose in half again, and added a bit of Lexapro, in order to get off Effexor completely.

I love walking in the rain but have not done it for some time, since my regular walking program fell apart oh, say, 8 years ago.

One of the best new things I tried in my class was Tai Chi. I had never really thought much about tai chi -- I have done yoga, dance, all kinds of things, but tai chi just wasn't one of them.

I recently took a class called Resilience Training, and I am really hoping to put some of the things I learned to regular use, so I'm hoping that writing about them will help.

Following a conversation about why boys stand and girls sit to pee:

DD4: That's where we got our dinner.
Me: What?
DD4: Vagina Jen, where they have that soup I like.

Maybe it's the hangover, but this struck me as funny:

DD4 to Dad: is that a bowl of sugar?
Dad: no, that's salt
DD4: Oh, for making diarrhea?
Dad: (?!?) You mean "margaritas"?!

Here, finally, are two of the latests. I regret that I don't know how to do those fancy links that ya'll are using, so I am just sticking in the photos.

My friend at Wickentree Homeschool, a pagan mama with a profoundly gifted (and very sweet) daughter, shared this quiz on her personal blog. Here's my result.

Here's a tiny picture of what I'm knitting (from the pattern):

I'm knitting it in blue, and the yarn (Snuggly Bubbly) is very challenging for a novice knitter like me to work with, what with the lumps and bumps:

OK, I've been way out of touch -- that ol' Noonday Demon, depression, or whatever you want to call it, is making life hard lately. Plus my power supply kept dying and I had to go have the computer repaired.

OK, I'm experimenting with showing photos. Here we are living it up at the fair:

I think we have decided to slow down. I am just not ready to plunge ahead and move in the next couple of months. It's too soon. So we are slowing down, with the likelihood of going through this process in the spring.

The rush got to be too much, and I decided we were going about this all backwards.

We did go look at that house yesterday. It was cute, but the ceilings were very low and it felt a bit like a midget house inside. Also -- and this wasn't in the pictures! -- because it is in a "desireable" area, when you go out to the back half of the lot, you see a huge, ugly, suburban/exurban development on what was once a cornfield. It's your neighbor. Sooo . . . probably not.

Oh man. I think we've found the one!

I know, I know, it's too soon. But who's to say that if we waited longer we'd find something more perfect.

I don't know how we can actually pull this off time-wise -- I am not ready to sell and move house right away! -- but I see this house and I see us right there in it.

We've seen 2 houses so far, and tonight we're going to see another one.

Timeline:

Sunday: DH has epiphany that we must move to the country
Monday: DH and I e-mail lots, house plans, and hobby farms for sale back and forth all afternoon
Tuesday: We drive out to Western Wisc. to see a cute farmhouse with 20 acres (terrain not suited to horses though -- too much hill and woods) and a fabulous guest house. Tempting, but not quite right.

If you were around this year last time you may remember that we dealt with finding that our youngest (now 3) had ureteral reflux, meaning that urine backs up from the bladder into the kidneys. Whoops, wrong way!

Maybe it's the PMS talking, but it just takes about two clicks for me to link from something interesting to something mean-spirited in the blogosphere. Yesterday I happened across a reference to Naomi Wolf's conversion to Christianity (or whatever it was) and in trying to find the full story I found many threads opining that liberals and feminists could never be Christians except for opportunistic reasons -- in very nasty language that I don't care to repeat.

It's not a lie to say that I have a sore throat and I'm exhausted. So I seized on that to communicate primarily in writing with the school rather than face to face. (I am not the primary transporter -- DH and the carpool friends are.) Hey, I've never pretended to be an extrovert.

This is how I cope with stress: I read constantly in the hope that it will prepare me for whatever is coming up. Reading makes me feel competent -- deluded perhaps, but you gotta fake it til you make it. So for me Step One is buying books. I didn't have the patience to put in the requests at the library. Not cheap, but cheaper than therapy!

We all like to think we're pretty funny in this family. DH and I are always first to break the tension in a group, or deflect compliments, or otherwise cope with adversity, with a joke. But as I see our genetic material in action I am wondering if I have been deluded about the quality of my sense of humor.

Driving home from preschool today I noticed an unusual sign in the window of "Evenstar Books and Gifts":

Get Your Pagan Bling Here!

Gotta love it. I'm definitely going to start calling my collec

OK, I hope it's clear that title is tongue in cheek!

First grade continues to be a challenge. Our meeting with the teacher was not great -- despite all my efforts the teacher was mostly defensive, and told us "Sometimes kids say they are bored when it's hard for them."

That was the verdict after my exciting trip to the ER/stay at the hospital!

I had the unfortunate combo of chest and arm pain (and some fatigue to boot), and a nervous call to my health care nurse line got me sent directly to the ER.

Tonight's our last night in the hotel -- we're thrilled, the girls are disappointed. Swimming every night, breakfast buffet every morning -- these kids can't appreciate that my bed at home is older than they are and I am quite attached to it.

DD almost-2 is a big fan of the breast. She likes to nurse, of course, but she also likes to pretend to nurse, lick the nipple like a lollipop (which I don't always notice right away), and generally play around when mom is too sleepy to be no-nonsense.

New Mommy
New Mommy
Ha - Fa ma lee
Wi big hug
mm mm tiss me to you
wo say new mommy too

Can you guess what this is?

This is Iris's (22 mos) version of the Barney song! Maybe I should let her watch the show more often.