Back to It

Now that I looped the coop, I wonder, will my neighbor Jessica and I really install a chicken coop? Will we give the chickens names? If they freeze to death or get sick, will we eat them or take them to the vet?

Sam, Snoopy & Soccer

Me (tucking the blanket around him and kissing his forehead): Sam ,why is your soccer ball in the bed and Snoopy is on the floor?

Sam (spooning the soccer ball): I dunno.

Me: Goodnight.

Sam: Goodnight.

10 Famous People I Admire

(1) Frederick Douglass - escaped slavery, learned to read and much, much more

(2) Caroline Ingalls - followed that crazy man everywhere and still found time to tint the butter

(3) Nelson Mandela - works for peace even after decades in prison

(4) Dalai Lama - works for peace even after decades of exile

(5) Helen Keller - learned to read and much, much more

(6) Rusty Schumacher - best seventh grade English teacher ever

(7) Abe Lincoln - learned to read and much, much more

(8) Jane Austen - figured out human nature from the parlour

(9) Beethoven - composed masterpieces even after going deaf

(10) Uh...

Lucky

"Mom, whenever I get sick, you start saying how lucky we are!"

Sam, the kid who never gets sick, has been through it these last few weeks. First, difficulty breathing at night; now he takes allergy meds every night. Next, his eyes become so inflamed he looks like Linda Blair; weeks of antihistime eyedrops followed by steroids finally clear it up. The final straw, severe abdominal pain in the middle of the night, the on-call nurse mentions surgery and suddenly everything is scary ... until we find out it's "only" constipation caused by dehydration. Five days later, he's fine.

So why are we lucky? We're lucky my sister could come over in the middle of the night so I didn't have to wake Emma Jane to go to the hospital. We're lucky to have health insurance to pay for the thousands of dollars in medical treatments we've received. We're lucky Rich was planning to take this week off anyway to spend with the kids. We're lucky to have jobs where we can legitimately take sick time to care for a child. We're lucky Sam wasn't born 150 years ago, in which case he would likely be blind or dead by now. And, we're lucky not to be among the several families we saw in the emergency room, whose babies are in surgery or receiving morphine drips at 1 a.m. on a Thursday night.

So no, Sam, I'm not glad you haven't been feeling so great lately. I'm sorry about that. But yes, I do feel lucky.

Emma Jane Did Me Proud

At the plant sale last weekend.

69, Dudes!

Remember when Bill and Ted run into copies of each other in the time loop? One set says "Hey, dudes, how do we know it's really us? What number are we thinking of?" and the other set says "69 Dudes!" Well, we watched it the other night and the kids loved it.

At their age, they only get part of the joke. So, night after night at the dinner table, with much hilarity, we hear, over and over, "69, Dudes!"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

The Price of Underpants

Somehow it doesn't seem right that our all-new closet cost the same as the eight pairs of underpants I bought at JC Penneys on the "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" rack. I'm turning into a walking advertisement for ClosetMaid.

The whole point of the project is to turn Sam's room from a 9x9 large closet to a 9x12 normal kid's room. To do this, I need to tear out the add-on closet in our room, build a new wall where the closet door used to be, and convert the strange small room that leads to our bedroom into a closet. Plus a lot of little details, like shoe molding and wall painting, along the way.

So far, so good. I've removed the carpet and carpet tack from Sam's room, removed the closet hardware from the old closet, and installed new closet hardware in the new closet room. The wrinkles:

(1) the linoleum glue (possibly containing asbestos) that is all over Sam's floor, underneath the wall-to-wall carpet;

(2) the giant holes in the plaster I created when I tried to use molly bolts in lathe (wish I had pictures)

See my entry from August 5 of last year to make your judgment as to the wisdom of this project.