Sunday Brain Dump

Just checkin' to see what The Neighbors are up to. Do you see how close they are outside that window? Yeesh! We realized from our land survey (which we looked up when we listed the house for sale) that we actually have .34 acres at our current location. That's better than the .28 I thought we had, but nowhere near as good as the 5 acres awaiting us. Unfortunately our current .34 acres are all on the OTHER side of the house where the marginally less annoying neighbors live.

It's been a long time since I spent so little time reading my handful of favorite blogs and posting so few of my own. Thanks to everyone who has checked in and left me a comment recently. It's nice to feel loved!

...So here's the scoop: in a nutshell, I'm too exhausted to have many creative writing juices flowing. You'll have to settle for a few mundane details sans creative spin.

I worked two extra days this week getting ready to launch my dual anger management therapy groups. I spent seven hours on Friday meeting with seven emotionally and behaviorally disturbed adolescent girls. I've rarely spent that many solid hours on this particular population. It's exhausting hearing so many stories of parents who couldn't get their stuff together well enough to keep from neglecting and abusing their children in so many creative ways. It's also amazing how much money the pharmaceutical companies must make off our society's ills. I happen to think 12 different meds for a single teenage girl is a little much. No wonder these girls need anger management help. I've a feeling that by the time I get partway though leading this particular endeavor, I will have to abandon the role of "Group Leader" and re-enroll as a member instead.

My second extra day of work was today. If you are not a health professional in today's society, you may have no idea just how much paperwork and CYA B.S. we have to do. It's a big fat double whammy when you have to satisfy both HIPAA AND state welfare requirements with your paperwork. Fortunately, after seven hours of paperwork today, the migraine I had coming on did not fully materialize.

Oh, I also forgot to mention that somewhere in there we pulled a spontaneous shopping outing and our intended budget for new furniture was totally blown. We found a good sale. We couldn't pass it up. Our three piece room plus ottoman became a five piece room with two rustic pine end tables and then became a seven piece room with two of those massively huge bean bag cushion thingies. I wanted to get bean bag chairs for the kids--maybe for Christmas this year. But...well, did I mention that we found a good sale? So we ignorantly thought we would be able to drag both those bean bag cushion thingies home together in the family mobile. Turns out they looked much smaller in the showroom. We could only fit one at a time in the back of the Odyssey. I'm serious. When we got the first one home, we had to wrestle it to get it forced through the front doorway. And that's when it was still wrapped tightly in plastic. It expanded a lot more when we cut the plastic off of it. I was having visions of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation when they cut the bands on their Christmas tree. (I just realized that this is the second time within a few weeks that I made reference to that movie. That's a little frightening!) Once the monster was unveiled, it competed in size with the overstuffed chair in the corner of the room. Really, I'm not exaggerating with this! We debated over the next 15 hours whether to even follow through with the purchase of the second one awaiting our pick up today. Or whether to nix the new overstuffed chair to go with the new downstairs family room ensemble in lieu of the massive chair bag we fell in love with. In the end, we decided that the dual massive bean bag "spring foam" chairs would be great pieces for the rec room/playroom. Good thing we've been saving our pennies for awhile!

Our kids were so well behaved on this shopping trip that I wish I could bottle and sell the experience. We'd be rich rich rich! We were being realistic when we spontaneously headed out as soon as Son awoke from his nape. We didn't even plan to buy anything. I've totally lowered my standards of expectations since adding children to our lives. We expected to visit one or two places before the kids started wailing and screaming and then give up for the night. The kids were doing so well that two places turned into four (with dinner at Fazoli's in between). Feeding your 3 yr old and almost-18-month old spaghetti in public is really not for the faint at heart, by the way. Not sure what we were thinking with that one. But it made them happy, so it was worth it, even though we were still trying to get the spaghetti sauce out from between Son's little fingers 24 hrs later. I'm not even sure the bath he got tonight got it all out.

At 8:40 pm last night we were just wrapping up our purchase, which wouldn't have taken quite as long if we hadn't found such a good sale. Did I mention that already? With a good 35 minute drive back home in front of us, we didn't get the munchkins to bed until 9:40 pm. They were happy anyway. They were busy robbing the showroom displays of their helium balloons while we shopped. They were pleased as punch holding their balloon collection all the way home. Are you picturing a Honda Odyssey stuffed to the brim with a massive spring foam bag chair and at least four helium balloons along with two wee ones and two adults?

In the end, we managed to get five and one half boxes packed this weekend. *sigh!* Two weeks and six days to go...and we have five and one half boxes packed.