It has been a crazy week of transitions: back to school, back to a full schedule of piano students, back to regular activities at church, back to getting up at a ridiculously early hour in the morning that totally wipes me out. It’s only an hour and a half earlier than when I naturally wake up, but that hour and a half of sleep makes me so much more productive. If I can sleep then, I can stay up super late and get all sorts of things done. When I have to get up super early, I literally fall asleep doing any kind of task after my kids go to bed. So frustrating! Yet, I still do enjoy the early morning when I’m up. It would just be better if no one else was up yet.
This week Mr. TOF has walked down to the sidewalk with YaYa every day to watch The Banana and Mr. SP get on their school bus. YaYa’s bus leaves an hour later, and those two are having a great time with their little morning “routine.” Mr. TOF tells everyone he meets about how he rides the “Mama bus” not the “yellow bus.” He then states that he will be getting bigger soon and ride the yellow bus.
Last Friday we went to open house at our elementary school to get The Banana and Mr. SP settled into their classrooms (they have terrific teachers again this year and I’m so thrilled about that). After we had gone to all the places in the building we stopped by the cafeteria and got a little ice cream treat. Actually I think it was an Italian Ice treat. Regardless, Mr. TOF relished the treat and got incredibly messy, and he’s convinced that whenever he visits the school from here on out there will be delicious treats for him.
Middle school is going really well for YaYa so far. I love all the responsibility the teachers give middle schoolers. I love how all the “mistakes” no longer subtly seem the fault of bad parenting. I love how everyone encourages sixth graders to step up to the plate. Best of all I love how my girl is owning up to all of these new responsibilities and is doing a tremendous job.
I wish there was a way to love Wednesdays, but I just don’t. Wednesdays are fine until 3:00 and then inevitably a terrible rat race for the rest of the day. When one little thing gets out of wack on a Wednesday, it just snowballs until midnight.
I’ve really given birth to library rats disguised as children. Trying to get those kidlets out of the library when a visit is ending is a preposterous task.
Brutus the cat had a little run in with a skunk last Saturday night. I don’t think he got sprayed directly, but I’m pretty sure he walked right through fresh skunk juice. The underside of his belly and his paws were remarkably odorous. I washed him with enzyme soap (he was not a fan of the shower) and then rubbed a paste of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide on his fur and rinsed that (not a happy cat). It helped slightly, and after Dr. Peds came home and said that we’d better take him out of the house before our kids picked up the odor and were rejected as “skunk kids” at school we relegated the cat to his leash outside and to a happy little home in the shed. OK, maybe it wasn’t a happy home in the shed, but it was a necessary place for the cat to hang out for a few days until the odor stopped wafting off his fur. Brutus is back in the house now, but if you sniff him closely, he still smells a bit skunky.
I say it every year in September, but I just love the week all my students who took a break from piano for the summer come back to their fall lessons! It is so good to see them again, and so amazing how they change and grow through the summer. They always seem to come back fresh and ready to make some amazing progress. In fact, I think that there are certain times of the year when students just make a bit more progress than other times, and September through November is a productive time for learning music.
Here’s reason number 8945 why I love being a piano teacher: during a lesson on Tuesday afternoon an animated second grade boy told me in great detail how the Pirate Blackbeard was beheaded, his skull drilled through, and then his head was hoisted up on the mast of a ship.
Around here I was and dry the laundry and and sort it into baskets for the kidlets to fold themselves. They usually just cram everything into their drawers, and I’m pretty much OK with that because it doesn’t make sense for me to fold the laundry and then have them unfold it and cram it into their dressers. No one folds and matches socks (except me . . . with my own socks) which contributes to the fact that my kids enjoy wearing unmatched socks. I don’t have a problem with that either. Last week Mr. TOF miraculously discovered two matching Thomas the Train socks, and he was crazily excited! Two of the same socks! He talked about it all day. Happiness all boils down to appreciating the little things.
We have new neighbors across the street! A family with a lot of kids moved in, much to the delight of my kids. Two of their kids are teenagers, and two match up with some of my kidlets. The Banana made friends fast. She’s so delighted with her new social situation. That girl loves people so much. When she scraped her knee big time on the sidewalk on Sunday, something that would normally send her into hysterics, she didn’t even cry because she was on SUCH a people high. Friends are better than painkillers! I didn’t even realize the scrape was so horrible until the next day.
It happened a few weeks ago, but after a trying day I heard Dr. Peds say to Mr. SP: “Do you hear that little voice in your head saying, ‘Dad would not like that?’ It’s the voice of God telling you to stop.” It made me giggle.
Wednesday night Mr. TOF and I were walking home from taking the big kids to church activities. A flock of urban deer were munching on vegetation in a yard just up the street from our house, and since they couldn’t care less that we were about three feet from them making a lot of noise, Mr. TOF and I stopped and enjoyed watching them. A little old lady came out of her house to take out the garbage and we had the best conversation with her. She was the kind of person that just exuded the Grace and peace of Christ, and it turns out that she married her second husband when she was 80 and now they are both 90 and still enjoying living in their home together. “God has been good to us!” She said to me. After we talked more and she learned the names of my kidlets and asked if they went to Sunday School. It turns out that she is the step mom to two of my favorite older ladies at my church. It was a really neat conversation, and she was the kind of old lady I hope I’ll be if I ever end up to be 90 years old.
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