Free Time

I don't know what I was thinking.

I thought that, by moving my family to The Farmer's farm, I would have some more time on my hands. I could see myself with a cup of coffee and my Bible out on the deck having a leisurely morning before I got into my work. I could see myself taking long walks around the fields, getting in lots of exercise. I could see myself catching up on this little ol' blog.

Boy, was I wrong.

We can all laugh at me now.

I am absolutely crazy busy all the time these days. I seem to live in my car whether I am commuting back to my farm two days a week or staying around here driving the kids to and from school -- a total of three round-trips (that take about an hour each!) a day. When I'm not driving, I'm cooking, or helping with homework, or working, or fixing lunches, or cleaning, or doing something that takes up all. of. my. time. I have seriously not had a free minute to myself in weeks.

I mean, I'm not complaining (okay, I am) -- I know there are plenty of moms out there who are running around like crazy people and don't have free moments to themselves. I just wasn't prepared to be one of them, and I have to find a little bit of a happier medium before I go crazy.

Or crazier, I should say.

Because I'm exhausted.

But, it's totally worth it to see The Farmer at lunchtime on the days when I'm here. And it's totally worth it to have plenty of room for the kids to run around and play without having to worry about them getting run over by some stranger flying down the street. And it's totally worth it to have The Farmer home at a decent hour at night.

It's totally worth it for us to be a family -- something that we've never truly been, or not a normal one, at least.

I've just got to figure out how to add some more hours to each day...

A Family Picture

I think I mentioned back in the spring that the people at BiLo sent a photographer down to The Farmer's farm to get some advertising pictures of the family. We posed for pictures, and then I never heard anything else about them. When The Farmer's blueberries were in BiLo I looked around to see if maybe a picture happened to be up in the store, but I never saw one.

So, I have no idea what BiLo ever did with the pictures.

But, I did finally get to see one the other day:

Do you notice who didn't get the memo about wearing khaki on the bottom?

I don't even own any khaki, so I guess I wouldn't have been able to wear any even if I had gotten the memo...

All in all I think it is a pretty cute picture. My face (and the rest of me) is a lot rounder in the picture than it is now, but you probably can't tell that unless you blow the picture up -- which I am sure you won't do unless you have tons of time on your hands.

Anywho, that is The Farmer's family picture, courtesy of BiLo...

Three!

As I mentioned in my last post, Bubba also celebrated a birthday this summer. He turned three on the 13th of August.

Last year when Bubba turned two, I went into a deep depression (okay, not really, just saying...) because it was the first time that I had a baby turn two without another one on the way. Something about not having another baby on the way just made me feel like my baby was growing up too fast, and I just wanted time to quit it already!

So you can imagine how I felt when he turned three. I mean, look -- he doesn't even look like a baby anymore:

But, we are happy to be celebrating another birthday with our sweet little boy. For the most part he is a joy to have around. He is, after all, three -- and whoever dubbed them the Terrible Twos hadn't gotten to the Threes yet...

But, honestly, I wouldn't trade him for the world! I love you, Bubba!

Five!

We celebrated a couple of birthdays over my summer blogging hiatus, starting with Sassy's fifth birthday on August 2nd! We were in St. Simon's on vacation on her actual birthday, so we had a little celebration for her there. We got these three adorable cakes from the St. Simon's Sweet Shop:

However, this was how Sassy was feeling on her birthday:

She just didn't have the best day, poor thing. She got a rash from her bathing suit. She got a fat lip from I-can't-remember-what. And she ended the day with a tummy ache, and that was before the cake! Last year she was sick on her birthday, so she is on a roll for not-so-great birthdays...

Because of our vacation and move we didn't have an actual birthday party for Sassy this year, but we had a family celebration when we got back. Luckily Sassy was feeling better for that little shindig:

I can't believe that my Sassy girl is 5 -- she is just growing up too fast! She is a big Kindergarten girl now and learning and growing more and more every day, and she is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. My sweet, sassy girl...

We also celebrated Bubba's birthday, but I will share those pictures tomorrow and my depression over my baby being a big boy!

These Things Happen....Right?!?!

So, I was driving home the other day, minding my own business, when out of nowhere, I got this terrible, nasty, horrible surprise.

What happened?

Well, I surprised this really big bird as I came around a corner. The Farmer thinks it must have been a buzzard, but said bird dropped a bunch of dead animal guts all over my car -- I would liken it to having chum, just in this case it wasn't fish, dropped all over your car!

That's right. All over the top of my car. All down the windshield. Chunks in the windshield wipers. All over the hood. On my driver's-side window. In the air intake right under my windshield wipers.

All over the car.

My car immediately filled with the smell of dead, rotting flesh, and I had to cover my mouth and nose with my hand to make it the rest of the way home so that I could escape the smelly inside. I kept thanking God that I am not particularly squeamish so that I didn't have the smell of barf to add to the smell of dead animal in the car...

I pulled up to the house, and ran out of the car as fast as I could to get some fresh air and find a hose. Only, no hose. So, I ran inside and called The Farmer. Only I couldn't get him. So I found a pitcher in the kitchen and went outside and turned on the spigot and went to work going back and forth between the car and the spigot trying to get the chunks of dead animal off the car. Only it wasn't really working because the chunks were too big. And it was really starting to stink in the hot August sun.

So I ran back in and called The Farmer's office and begged them to call him on the radio and have him call me immediately -- at this point I had to leave to pick up Miss Priss from school in fifteen minutes. Luckily they got him, he called me right away, and was not far from our house. I got back in the car -- dry heaving the entire way -- and drove over to the shed where The Farmer was working. He used this big, powerful hose to blast as much of the guts off the car as he could, but he ended up having to pick some of it out of the windshield wipers and air intake with his hands (bless his heart, but better him than me).

The car smelled better -- though not normal (I was trying to take very shallow breaths -- and when Sassy got in the car later, she said "Eew, disgusting, what is that smell?") -- and I was on my way. But, every time I see a big bird now, I sure cringe!

To make matters worse, that night The Farmer and I woke up to BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!! Once we turned on the lights, we realized that our ceiling fan had fallen out of the ceiling and was whacking the post on our rice bed! Thankfully it woke us up when it was hitting the bed and not hitting us...

Like I said, these things happen...right? I feel like I'm on some kind of hidden camera show...

Drop-Off Blues

Bubba hates to be dropped off anywhere. School, the church nursery, anywhere. This is more than the normal separation anxiety, and, really, he is too old to be going through separation anxiety anyway.

This is because he is a big, fat Mama's boy.

He cried every single day I dropped him off last school year, and that was at our church -- a place where he should be completely comfortable, because he is there all the time. In fact, halfway through the year, I made the nanny start to take him to school because I couldn't handle all the screaming and crying at drop-off, and he started to go in just fine.

So I know the problem is me.

He does the same thing when he is dropped off at the church nursery. It is a fight every Sunday. He knows everyone in there, and he is fine 2 seconds after I leave him, but he has to make this huge scene every single week like I am abandoning him.

So, this year, the kids are at a new school. Parents drive up to the side door of the school, and a teacher comes up to the car and gets the kids out in the mornings. The first week went fine -- or, at least, it went fine as far as the car part was concerned. I pulled up, Bubba and the girls hopped out, walked in, and then Bubba would stop in the doorway of his classroom and refuse to go in. His teacher would have to literally pick him up and make him come in the class. The tears would start, and he would cry for a bit. After a while he would calm down and start his day with the rest of the class, and he would have a great time.

This week, however, has been a totally different story.

Monday, the teacher came to get the kids out of the car, and Bubba jumped up and hid in the back so that she couldn't reach him. I opened the back gate, and he ran up and jumped in my lap, so the teacher had to come up to the driver's door and pry Bubba's hands off the steering wheel as I pushed him out to get him out of the car. Meanwhile the line of parents waiting to drop kids off is getting longer and longer...

Tuesday I didn't let him unbuckle until the teacher came to the door, and Bubba started screaming and swatting at her hand as she tried to get him out of his car seat. She had to force him out of his seat because he was hanging onto it for dear life. That afternoon I got him a big fire station for his Thomas set, and I took it home and made this huge deal out of it and told him that he could have it as soon as he could start going into school "like a big boy." I made it clear to him that he couldn't get it after just one day; he had to act like a big boy going into school and church several days in a row before the fire station was his.

Bubba was so excited, and promised that he was going to be a big boy. I just knew that this plan would work!

Wednesday came around, and we headed to school. Bubba was in a great mood on the way there, and he talked about being a big boy. Everything was going great until Miss Jessica came to get him out of the car. Then he started swatting her hand and saying "No!" and crying all over again. I tried to remind him about his fire station, so he kept telling me "I'm not going to cry!" as he screamed and cried.

I talked to my friend, Margaret, after that failure, and she suggested that we role-play so that Bubba could practice how he was supposed to act at drop-off. So, yesterday afternoon we practiced and practiced. And we practiced again this morning before we left for school. Bubba was ready to try again to be a big boy.

We were on the way to school, and right before we got there, Bubba started screaming. My heart sank. But then he said "I've got to POOP!!!!!" I told him that we would be at school in just a minute, and he could go as soon as we got there, but he said "No, I've got to go NOW!" However, there was no place for me to stop; the school is in the middle of cotton fields. So we kept on, and we got in line behind 2 other cars. Bubba was in the back seat screaming and crying, but for a different reason this time. I reached into the back and unbuckled him and told him to take some deep breaths. When it was our turn to get out, Bubba was standing at the car door waiting for Miss Jessica to get him out. She opened the door, and he yelled "I gotta go POTTY!!!!" She grabbed him out of the car, and shut the door -- she didn't even let the girls out!! (Luckily another teacher was there to let them out).

So, I have no idea if our role-play helped Bubba at all, but our drop-off blues were at least solved for today; Bubba didn't have time to think about whether he wanted to get out of the car or not! Maybe I just need to pray for a potty emergency every day...

Normal...Or Something Like It

Wow, it has almost been a full month since I have posted!

I keep thinking that, at some point, my life is going to return to normal.

When we were packing up our house, I thought that life would return to normal once we got everything all finished up.

During packing season, I thought life would return to normal when I got out of the packing house and back to my normal office and normal hours.

However, life never seemed to get back to normal. There always seemed to be some new, crazy thing going on this summer.

And then it finally hit me -- there is no normal for me anymore. I have taken everything that was normal and changed it. We have sold our house, decided to move to a new town, put our kids in a new school -- nothing is the same, so I have to learn a new normal. I'm just having a little bit of a hard time putting it into practice!

The kids started school yesterday, and we finally have gotten ourselves (mostly) settled in the new (temporary) house. We have also finally gotten phone, tv, and internet -- we were living without all of those things for a while, and I felt like I was cut off from civilization. Even my cell phone was (is) useless in our house in the middle of a field!

So, I hope I have at least a reader or two to stick with me through my absence -- hopefully I will be back to normal soon!