My Name is Mommy

Things precious.

I haven't been posting much.  I feel a little as though my heart isn't in it anymore.  I can't just stop but at the same time, it's changed.  And I know these things often do.

I had a dream last night- I was with my Grandma Cecile.  I haven't dreamt of her in a long time so it was a welcome and comforting dream... until we were seperated.  I almost lost Avery in the dream, too. 

Upon waking, I had that unsettled feeling that dreams can leave you with when you wake up and they are unresolved.  In the dream I was supposed to have followed my Grandma.  From a figurative point of view, maybe it was good that I didn't since she's dead and all. 

But back to the not writing.  I've been spending most days, all day, with my girls- we read, we play games, we bake, we go to the pool.  It's summer and we do summer stuff.  As a result, I feel like I've grown closer to them, even more connected to them than I have been, and the weight of that is enormous.  Let me remind you, I'm the girl that anytime I love something, it gets taken away.  Recent history has proved that true, as well as a long, consistent past.  Maybe I am superstitious.  Maybe I'm just a realist.  I just have been careful not to look too long and lovingly at anything I care about, tried to conceal it to a degree- because it is my greatest fear and possibly my undoing.  But I've been stupid.  It's been my undoing anyway because the fear is worse than anything.

Geez, reading back over that I do sound like a superstitious kook.  But how to overcome it when life has shown me over and over and over that when I trust that someone or somethinng will be there, when I believe in the ability of love to protect, the universe is going to give me the big cosmic smackdown.  It might come in the form of a brain tumor growing in my mother's head, my dog slipping under the tire of the school bus, or dementia eating away at my Grandmother's personality-- but come it will, again, and again and somehow, always, something I cannot fight, something where will or perseverance doesn't matter.  The most frightening thing of all is that I never loved my mother, our dog Butterscotch or even my beautiful, stormy grandmother as much as I love my girls.  Now, I guess I just wait for the Universe to bring it on.

Eggless Cake Mix Cookies

That's right- cookies you can make in a pinch WITHOUT EGGS!!

No Egg Cake Mix Confetti Cookies

1 Box Confetti Cake Mix

1/2 C Oil

1.5 Tbsp Baking Soda

1.5 Tbsp Vinegar

Milk as needed

Throw it all in a bowl and mix it up.  I prefer it to the consistency where I can roll the dough into 1-inch balls and bake on a cookie sheet until lightly browned at 350 degrees.

If you want thinner, chewier cookies- you can thin out the dough and drop by spponfuls onto the cookie sheet.  I used milk to do this and mine turned out super chewy.  The kids loved these, as did my husband and everyone at the pool.  They were gone in a day.

The regular recipe uses 2 eggs and 1/3 C oil.

Anyhoo, superquick recipe and you can mix and match- use chocolate cake mix with chocolate chips or white cake mix with coconut and raisins...  I wouldn't add more than a cup of 'stuff' to the recipe as it becomes bulky and difficult to deal with.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Okay, so today it was peanut butter and homemade strawberry jam(and heck ya, I'm going to try and get as much mileage out of the fact I *jammed* as I can).

This weekend was brutally hot here in Northern Cali.  We were big, giant slugs.  Took Avery to ice cream and a movie for her friend, Corinne's, 7th birthday.  Afterward, Corinne and Avery went to swim at Sophie and Lila's house  so I got to sit and chat with my friend Cathy and her husband for a couple of hours which helped pass the sweltering afternoon.

Avery went home for an overnight at Corinne's and I went home to take Vi to the movie store(ahhh, air conditioning).  We picked out Inkheart and then went home to Dean who had thrown his back out jumping over the fence that morning to retrieve a ball.  Dean's bad back led him to laying on the living room floor all day playing PS2.  Woo.  Vi and I ordered pizza.  To make it fun, we ordered one with anchovies for Dean.  That was our Saturday night.

Sunday morning, I got up and went to get Ave and then we went to church.  I let Vi sleep in- also just in case Dean woke up and couldn't roll himself off the bed or something. 

I spent the afternoon reading Harvard Business Review's Managing Through a Downturn.  It was interesting reading but more academic than practical methinks.  Maybe that was the point.  One interesting thing the book pointed out was the inability of large, strongly branded companies to respond to checks in the market adroitly and how they often lost out to smaller up-and-comers who ran lean and HAD to respond to their consumers and the financial climate with innovation or they would just get crushed off.  Google at one time got alot of attention for their policy on allowing workers to spend up to 20% of their time on special projects, new ideas... innovation.  It's an interesting business question- how do you grow without becoming so big you slow yourself down? And once you get big, how do you continue to move flexibly?  I guess part of the answer is that you corner the market on human capital in whatever business you're working on- get all the smart people and then hold onto them.

Anyhow- if anyone is interested in reading "Managing Through a Downturn" drop me a line, comment or call me and I'll pop it in the mail to you.

Went this morning and turned in our paperwork for the pool.  I was too sick last week to take the kids swimming but now that they've had half an hour to digest their PB&J, that's where we'll be... for tthe rest of the summer.

School schmool.

Yeah, we all know I am a perpetual student. Scholastica in perpetuum.  I might have mentioned a few dozen times, the story about how terrifiecd I was of speaking a foreign language in front of anyone after the debacle that was High School Spanish.  The Spanish teacher at Annie Wright was... difficult.  Especially after having come from 9th grade Spanish at Holy Names Academy where our class literally ran the first teacher off then proceeded to drive our next instructor into a fugue state in which she crawled under her desk, rocking, and stayed there until they came for her.  Yes, somewhere in that class, that class in which some sophomores and juniors had been 'retained'(a politically correct term for FAIL), I developed a fear of Romance Languages.

When I got to the UW and found out that they had a language requirement, I was ready to go down to the commons, tie myself to a tree and slather myself in peanut butter and let the rabid squirrels(you know the ones that would suddenly dart across a campus road causing a four car pileup, then shoot directly toward you and before you could run and scream, there it was tying to crawl up your leg, sure that YOU had peanuts and lacking that it would settle for chewing your face off- you know, those squirrels) gnaw me to death.  Then one day I happened upon the Classics Department.  LATIN.  And NO, I wouldn't have to answer the teacher's question of "What color is your house?" with "My mother is a purple hooker in Las Vegas".  I would have to read, I can still remember, "Auricula Meretricula" which, get this, is about a hooker.  Written to go along with our Wheelocks Latin Grammar which I still have to this day because it is super handy to have a Latin reference on hand, especially when you are in Academia in perpetuum.  Seriously.  See?  Latin is COOL.  By the end of my many quarters of Latin to fulfill my language requirements, we were being tested by being asked to translate excerpts from Homer (no, not Simpson- stay with me here).

I did go on to learn German well enough to get through daily life living in a small suburb of a small suburb or Nurnberg.  And turns out, even though I did not have to answer questions in Latin or write goofy stuff, like letters to people or make a shopping list in Spanish for our camping trip, blah, blah, blah, I did end up having to recite my declensions in front of the class.  Terrifying.

What has this got to do with my life now?  Oh, right.  Nothing really, except I was going to mention that I signed up  for classes today.  Drum roll, please.  My plan is to finish up a degree down here with all requirements complete.  I'm thinking I may just go for the quick and easy Health Care Administration degree or hey, Health Sciences, or maybe even Poli Sci.  Doesn't matter.  The whole go-to-college-and-get-a-degree thing is a conspiracy anyway.  But I did sign up for classes over the summer- I'm taking a class on Governments in Central and Eastern Europe and a class on Gay and Lesbian Development.  In the fall I will be taking a refresher course on Microbiology, hopefully taking a test to pass out of first year Chem since I've already taken it, then I'm taking Community Health and finally, some class on healthcare in the United States.  Eventually, since I only need like 4 more credits to graduate, I will wrap up my degree and apply to the Nurse Practicioner program at UCSF.  They have a 3 year program in which you receive your qualifications to sit for the board exam in the first year.  The following two years are devoted to getting a Master's in nursing.  By then, I'm sure I will wish I was somewhere else, but for now that is my plan- cause I just have to have a plan- can't sit around waiting for life to happen- I'm going to happen to life.

Tonight was our soccer party for the Spring season for my U10 girls.  It was fantastic.  We ate pizza and I brought a giant bag of embroidery floss, scissors and masking tape and I sshowed all of them how to wield these weapons of terrible destruction. Er, or not... yeah, we made friendship bracelets.  The girls love them, were totally engrossed, and a number of them ended up trading with others.  I was so sad I almost bawled in front of my girls because a couple of them are leaving- girls that Dean and I have coach.  I always thought the point of being with a team was to work together and stick together.

Yeah.  Insert baleful look here.

Must go to bed.  But I wanted to share my excitement because it is strange how even simple things, like a curtain billowing back slightly from an open window, let the hope come in... and light up everything and everyone around us.

Can't wait to coach the girls that do come back and who knows maybe I'll get the older girls that moved up when we move up.  Long night and this is stretching out to be a long morning.  Mwah.

Life internal.

I know I've been gone for a while.  Life just suddenly got crazy.  It wasn't just that, though.  I think as life got crazy and chaotic, I just got very still on the inside.  One could, I suppose, debate the merits of that.  "Oh, it's good to be quiet on the inside sometimes blah blah blah".  But really, I feel like I am on the other side of a big, triple-paned glass window watching my life happen to me.  I am feeling a little detached.  Not unhappy, just... seperate somehow.

Mentally ill? you ask.  Yes, probably so.  But who wouldn't be.  If you made rats live like this, they would chew their own legs off, claw their eyes out or perform some other equally violent and melodramatic self-mutilation.

The end of school has arrived.  Anyone out there with children should understand the panic that this can illicit in a stay-at-home mom who hasn't had the foresight, or, uh, the preparedness, energy, will.. whatever... to arrange a summer full of camps and activities to occupy the kids.

That's right, y'all, aside from the two weeks when the girls are at sleep-away camp(Avery one week, Vi the next so  that they can have some one-on-one time)... it's just me and the girls and a long, hot summer ahead.

Thank goodness for the pool, is all I can say.

The past two weeks have been up and down emotionally for me.  Overall, I've been feeling good. 

We had a fly-up ceremony for Viola's Girl Scout troop and that was fun to attend.  Kim held it at her house and she was an impeccable hostess, as always.  She rented one of those big, blow-up water slides which was a blast for the girls.  Everyone brought food and Kim's yard looked beautiful with all the flowers blooming, so it was a great place to hang out for the afternoon.  Robin did a fantastic job with the ceremony, tying in her family's recent trip to one of the NASA flight control operations for the space shuttle- listing off all the jobs and their acronyms and relating them back to all the things we have to do for the girl scouts and how the girls will take over many of those jobs as Juniors next year.  The girls also got to eat a brownie and junior mints as part of the ceremony and 'blast off' from a trampoline signifying their flying up to juniors.

Avery graduated from Kindergarten and sang a solo part in the ceremony.  She was awesome- but of course she is terribly embarassed by the video so I am debating about putting it up.

The picture is of Avery with her friend Troy at their graduation.  I love the expression on her face as it is just so Avery.

Viola had  her last day at school today and brought home some beautiful artwork she's done.  I am going to photograph it and put it up because it is really beautiful.  The originals, I'm going to frame and put up on the wall.

I've been sick as a dog this week with some kind of respiratory crud.  My iron is getting low again as the old craving for ice has crept up on me again.  I sort of thought since I wasn't getting my period regularly that maybe I wouldn't get as anemic as quickly.  Then, the other night I'd taken some ibuprofen because I was getting chills and thought I might have a fever coming on and tylenol just does nada for me.  Anyhow, just a bit later I was doubled up with my stomach killing me.  I think my old friend the Ulcer is back.  Round  and round I go.  So, in addition to year-end craziness... my body is staging its own coup.

Um.  What else.  I've been reading like a madwoman.  Can't seem to keep my nose out of a book.  I simply cannot let all these books pile up so here is my plan to reinvigorate the blog a bit... I am going to post my Amazon reviews to my blog and I will note if I am going to pass the book along.  If you want the book, leave a comment and I will send the book on to you(you will also have to e-mail me your address)... sorry, I will also need to limit this to those I can send media mail within the U.S.. 

That's all for now.  Mwah.

TMI and the Y Household Grows by 1

So... you know how I haven't had my period in like 6 months?  Okay, maybe you don't.  After taking about 5 pregnancy tests which all came back negative, I decided it had something to do with my HHT, low iron, stress, the economy or the price of tea in China.  Really, I mean who knows why after 20-some years of being able to set tthe clock by Aunt Flo, she suddenly decides to take an extended leave of absence.  Hormonal rebound from the dread, evil, evil Mirena IUD?  Who knows? 

Well, guess what?

I'm not pregnant.  I woke up at 3am and yep, its back.  What was I complaining about?  What is wrong with me?  Why in the world was I worrying about not having cramps, a sore back and well, you know the rest.  Good thing my free sample of Playtex tampons came in the mail the other day or I would have had to go all medevil.

No, the +1 I'm talking about may only be a temporary increase.  A black cat followed Dean and Avery home from their "morning jog" yesterday.  He is overly friendly and wouldn't go away.  What do you do?  Call the neighborhood 'cat lady'.  That would be Holly.  And of course, she knew this cat.  Friends from school have been feeding him outdoors but they went away for the long weekend.  So, we're keeping him safe in the house until they get back.  The mom of that family is allergic and he isn't allowed in their house, so some secret part of me is hoping they'll just say "Keep him" since he seems to have an affinity for curling up next to me in bed.

Dean is calliing him Inky and the girls are calling him Diamond.  Have to say, I think Diamond fits better since he is quite long and slender- very regal looking.  Inky would fit a small, lithe black cat- like, say, Missy(I initially called her Inky but Dean was so persistent in calling her Missy that it stuck).  Diamond has clearly not had alot of indoor training as his desire to sleep in the dishwasher and the nook over the microwave would tell. 

Shhh... no one tell the City... we are already being harrassed to apply for an animal fancier's permit due to having 3 dogs.

The Pilot's Wife

I don't know.  Sometimes things seem to be going really well- and then they're not.  I've come to a realization that in my efforts to not-be-my-mother, to love my girls, to accomodate their personalities and promote their confidence and self-esteem- I may have been letting them walk all over me.  I started telling the girls to go to bed around 9 o'clock last night, giving them 30 minutes of warning.  They were still up at 11pm.

At which point I had a meltdown. 

And so I woke the girls up this morning and allowed them not even a second to acclimate, saying, "You want to stay up until 11pm, you better jump out of bed at 7am and have your feet on the floor."  And thus started our day.  Both girls took showers and I got in with Avery after she got shampoo in her eye, so now I am all clean and fresh and ready to start the day.

We also let our painted lady butterflies go this morning.  It was a bittersweet goodbye to these pretty little critters who the girls rush to see the moment they are in the door in the afternoon.  This is, in my estimation, the perfect pet because you get them as caterpillars, watch them eat and grow and then go into their chrysalids.  You transfer them to a little house made out of mesh and they emerge in there as butterflies.  The girls were always excited to stick their arm in and wait patiently for a butterfly to land on them and 'taste' them with their feet.  And then you let them go- no more mess or fuss.  Ha.

We're going to the dentist today.  Vi is getting two teeth pulled and then some sort of retainer to push her two front teeth forward.  The dentist says this is pretty much all she needs and her teeth will be about perfect- no cavities, no bite problems, relatively straight. 

Early release today, so I've got to get to the housework while I have a chance.  I'm going to put on a movie while I do the ironing, otherwise it's just tedious.  Who knows, maybe I'll have time to sneak  in a ride.  Okay.

Oh, one more thing.  I just finished rereading "The Pilot's Wife" for book club.  I have to say, the whole thing was just really depressing to me.  I think people have this need to pick a book so they can say "We're reading Great Literature here" and everyone goes for the things that move them emotionally.  We all seem to relate to grief and sadness in a very similar way whereas with humor it is much more difficult to find common ground.  I would so much rather read a book that was touching and humorous than waste a day of my life reading something sad and miserable. *note to self: don't be so sad and miserable.  *note to self: don't pick a depressing book for book club when it is my turn again.  Seriously, and if I have to read another Russian novel where someone suicides under a train, I will kill myself, or at least not read the book and pretend I did.

Swine Flu

I live in California.  I have been, for days now, somewhat uneasy as I send my two girls off to school in the morning.  It may sound goofy, but this whole Swine Flu thing has me worried.  I majored in microbiology in college and have read about every scientific book I could get my hands on about the flu virus. 

Not to be a panic monger, but the cluster of illnesses in a school in New York have me concerned because from an epidemiological standpoint, pandemic flu looks different than seasonal flu.  And when one person manages to infect a large number of people within a community- that looks more like epi/pandemic style behavior than endemic flu.  Seasonal flu is pervasive, remains within the population all the time and forms a bell curve(with the x-axis being time) usually peaking within the winter months, maybe at the end of January-beginning of February or so.  And yes, it kills alot of people, but usually people with weakened immune systems or who are elderly and infirm.  This atypical strain of H1N1 turns the body's own defenses against itself causing terrible pneumonia.  If one is so unlucky as to die from it, death occurs from the lungs filling with fluid until the infected person can no longer breathe and dies. 

The odd thing is that it tends to go for healthier individuals.  Few elderly people are contracting this or suffering complications from  it.  Our children and young people will be the ones most impacted by this virus if it becomes more virulent or more deadly.

It's interesting- some people see that this virus is an H1N1 strain and they assume, wrongly, that it is a variant of the seasonal flu.  H1N1 is a subtype of Influenza- but it does not share the same lineage as seasonal flu and thus the vaccine compenents are not effective against it.  This particular strain carries genetic material from four viruses: N American swine flu, avian flu, human flu and a swine flu typically found in Asia.  This strain- called by the CDC "novel H1N1 influenza" is unstable, making it more likely to trade genetic material with other viruses. 

So, we've noticed public health officials in the Bay Area have been waffling on recommending school closures where there is a suspected case of "novel H1N1".  They are saying that this flu isn't causing as serious symptoms as they thought it might.  The problem is, even if it isn't now and I might argue with that when you look at the curves from the CDC on hospitalizations for the most recent weeks for 5-24 year olds- (it's higher than ever!) if we allow this virus to run rampant in the population, it may well bump into a virus with much more deadly properties, swap material and then decimate us.  Okay.  Maybe I am being a little sensationalist.

The CDC keeps a FluTracker- showing how many samples they are testing and how many of those samples are positive for what types of flu.  We are showing a very unusual spike in flu activity- even the regular seasonal flu.  This flu could continue through the summer and come back with a vengeance in the winter.  Granted what looks like a spike in activity may relate to increased testing of samples and the close watch that public health agencies are keeping on this virus.

There is a huge correlation with the end of the school year and the falling off of flu cases.  Kids have lots and lots of social contact and do not always practice the best hand/cough/sneeze hygeine.  Parents get sick from their children all the time and childdren are the most likely members of a household to become infected through person-to-person contact within the home. 

Why are we going to wait until something like this reaches drastic and unstoppable proportions before doing something about it?  Why are we taking the chance of allowing this to recombine and mutate within our population? 

I am watching the reports coming out of our county and surrounding areas very closely and I may just decide to keep the kids at home depending on where things go.  In the meantime, what can we do?  Apparently, taking vitamin D may offer some protection.  I have medicines, food and water stockpiled per the CDC's checklists.  They are no bones about what a pandemic could mean to families and individuals- interrupted power and water supplies, no work, school closures, stores out of supplies...

I know, I know... the sky is falling.  Not.  Just do me a favor, if you read this, check out the CDC's site-http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluactivity.htm and just consider what you might need to do if this gets worse.  Just think about it. 

Oh what a weekend.

It's hot... wah... yeah, yeah, I'm a big whiny baby.  But really, it was over 100 today and right now, as I type this it is a sweltering 85 degrees in the house.  Now look, it SAYS it is 71 degrees outside but the 2mph wind is NOT helping anyone around here.

The soccer party was great.  We set up one  ginormous goal and one not-so-ginormous goal and sorta played soccer and alternately collapsed in steaming, sweating lumps on the park grass.  It was one of those days at the park... not a cloud in the sky, everyone out flying kites and walking around the lake, a breeze blowing through, just 20 degrees hotter than usual.

Here's my soccer pal Marlene and I with our team of U6/U7s post awards.

Despite the raging heat, Dean lit a massive barbeque and bbq'd burgers.  Avery got her soccer trophy and award for Best Kicker.  Vi ran around throwing water on everyone and tw-fisted the water guns.  Those girls.  Later after dragging all 400 lbs of stuff back to Big Blue(our aptly named suburban), we sat in the hot car trying to muster enough energy to drive home.  It's just by luck we're not now mummified in the parking lot of Lake Elizabeth.

What did we do when we got home?  Well, I'd love to tell you I put on my sweats and went for a five mile run but no... I got naked and then, because you never know what's coming, I put on a sun dress-- strapless so I'd have an excuse to spring the girls from their polyester prison where it seems one could easily develop jungle rot in weather such as this.  But then the sun dress was too synthetic and thus too hot so I ran around for the rest of the day in my black cotton boyshorts and a cotton camisole.  Vi was just a nudy-booty.

(Here is Vi on a slightly less hot day last week at the Heritage Rose Garden in San Jose where we stopped to lollygag after a doctor's appointment.)

We broke out the white trash, ...er barbeque food- hot dogs and green beans from a can for dinner, supplemented with string cheese.  Seriously, all I could come up with.  This evening as we lolled about, I read Dean the President's speech given at Notre Dame (psst... I'm Catholic and well, I find the whole thing very interesting- he kinda said "let's agree to disagree because there is more important work to do- let's unite in service"), Dean and I argued about the definitions of Adultery and Fornication(really, you're glad you didn't have to listen to that one), and why abstinence programs don't work. 

Then, for a change of pace- we watched "Marley and Me" which is, don't get me wrong, a great little flick but... dang, if you don't want your kids going on an hour long, emotionally cathartic crying jag- DO NOT let them watch this movie.  Man, is anything ever as sad as putting the family dog to sleep?  Not in the movies, I guess.

We're waiting for it to cool down so we can sleep.  The kids are going to sleep great after the crying movie.  Dang, maybe I should buy a copy and show them the last few scenes every time they get tired and cranky and they can cry themselves out.  Would that be child abuse?

Good night...

(This is Avery-Not-Singing aka Avery-Asleep)

Sorry for the complainarama.

If all you ever read was my blog, you'd think I was miserable.  How now, brown cow but I'm not.  I did just eat an In-n-Out burger after doing what I HOPE is May/June shopping at Costco.  And of course I had to get a chocolate shake, too... so I'm kinda sickly feeling.

Overall, though, life is in this weird place.  It may be Dr. Suess's waiting place from "Oh, The Places You'll Go!".   Pretty sure it is.  Waiting for ... something. 

I just really don't know how people do it who make it all look so perfect.  They get their kids off to school, go exercise, have time to clean and shop and do the laundry and the dishes and somehow keep up with things I haven't seen in years like... tv.  I mean, whatever- we cancelled the cable because we were never watching it except like six months later on TiVo and then you might as well just rent the DVDs.  IF YOU COULD SEE MY LAUNDRY PILE YOU'D DIE.  No really, because you'd fall in and be smothered.  And I did four loads yesterday, I am not kidding.  I think there are dresses in there from Easter, if not Christmas.  I coach soccer, occasionally cook a meal or three for my family, make lunches, go to brownies and dentist and doctor appointments. 

I still can't seem to beat the laundry, the dishes, the dust, the kids stuff everywhere...

______________________

So, I wrote the above on Wednesday and it is now Sunday.  It's 10am and I am still in my pajamas though I got up at 6 am.  The house was so quiet- not even any of those sighs or creaks that seemed  so loud when I was a kid and laid awake in my bed at night waiting for sleep to come.  Yet, there were my girls and Dean, all breathing slow and heavily in their sleep next to me in bed.  If I could have those five minutes forever, I'd be perfectly content.  Today is Ave's soccer party and then the season draws to a close until the fall.

Yesterday was brutally hot so I forced myself out of bed this morning to make sure the windows were open to let in the cool morning air.  Yesterday, by Ave's 9:30 game it was 95 degrees out.  I got up at six am and aired out the house knowing we were going to have a scorcher.  At 7:30, the sun was up, high and hot and I knew it was going to be a miserably hot day, looks like a repeat performance today.  We were having friends for dinner and the last thing I wanted to do was spend the day cooking and cleaning in a house that was already cooking.  Called up and changed our dinner date to the park down the street.  We had Vi's game at 12:30- last one of the season and they were winning by so much that we ended up swapping our back line for our front line and let the defenders get their chance to score some goals.  It was a good day despite the pounding headache I got from being out in the sun for too long(yay sunblock!). 

Later, Dean went and picked up chicken and meat and I cut up a bunch of veggies and packed up our dinner picnic.  We stayed at the park until after nine and the mosquitoes started coming out.  Our sort-of-neighbor Sarah, her husband and son, joined us as well.  We had a very impromptu soccer game that was fantastic.  Dean and I came home and hung out for a bit, discussing swine flu and conspiracy theories then watched a movie together.  Dean and I fell asleep on top of the covers and when I woke this morning the girls had piled in between us.

We have a soccer party today for Ave and then... who knows.  The laundry, of course... still waits, lurking like a multicolored monster on the laundryroom floor and... okay, right now all over the living room where I have the ironing board set up.  Maybe I'll get some "chores" done before the party so we can have some down time this afternoon.

Back to the grind tomorrow but I'm trying not to think of that just yet.  No more soccer practice to look forward to, either.  But soon, soon school will be out and we'll be spending long hot days in the pool...