School is about to resume! My life is about to resume!

I used to hate mothers who gushed about school starting and how they couldn't wait to get their kids out of the house, but it is for the sakes of the mothers as well as the children. Summer is fun for a few weeks and then it gets old and the kids like to have things to do. (Three months is really too long for a break, but having been in a custody battle in the past, I know that when judges split it between parents, the six weeks can be a great break to egt away from a parent that the kids can't stand.) This summer has been wetter than usual so there has been a lot of time spent indoors. As this to me feeling stagnant and a bit depressed and yes, I want them back in school. I can't wait to resume normal life with a routine and no fighting. They don't fight much when they can come home and gush about school and everyone has things to talk about.

This past summer has been pretty boring with Basil getting a broken arm. He is gaining full use of it and doing well since he got his cast of a couple of weeks ago. I got him a physical therapist, with no thanks to his bone doctor. I was galled because I used to be in sports medicine wrapping injuries on the field and helping athletes and asked for my son to get a recomendation to see a PT. The doctor refused saying that my son would be fine. What I saw in my work had been that athletes of all levels would get injured when they were not fully healed because they didn't know how to get back into shape, so I pressed on and got another doctor to write a prescription for it. Keep in mind that this is for several visits for rehabilitation of his arm before school resumes, not a prescrition for Rx! He didn't hurt, but he was very weak with that arm. I tried showing him some exercises, but Mom telling him to do some hand exercises is not the same as the uber cool PT. His PT is also a fox-- one of those athletic chicks who perspires "I have it together" and he likes working with her. (She could demonstrate wearing moose antlers and it would look cool!)

Because of Basil's injury, we have done very little-- his cast went up far on his arm and he had a hard time staying clean.

My older kids are officially at their new high school and middle school. Just knowing that we are probably moving to the neighborhood has changed my perspective. I feel like I can engage in life now and start to leave the fire behind. This is no longer temporary since we are not moving back to our old property: Cloud will most likely graduate from her high school and so, probably will Guy. I assume that they rest of the kids will, also from this area. They are in charter schools across town though so this will be "fun."

So now I don't have to be sorry about writing about the fire! It will soon become part of my past. I so much didn't want it to define me, but where you live is a big deal and I found myself talking about why I wasn't where I should be quite often.

We've not heard back from a bid that we placed on a house last night, but we are hopeful. My husband bid a little lower, but not much. Cloud kept talking about the house in particular and crying, "When will Dad bid on it? Someone else might take it!!!" The anxiety in her voice was causing my blood pressure to shoot up as I could feel her worry as I have also felt like this. When we were talking to he academic adviser at school she suddenly got sad-- she didn't know if she'd graduate from there and got really sad because she was excited about some academic programs that they have at her new high school. I wound up telling her and she shot up straight into the air and screamed and started jumping up and down hearing that we really placed a bid on the house that she likes. I swore her to secrecy that she not tell her brothers because I don't want them all worrying and asking. She felt better and in fact she hugged her adviser telling her, "I can ride my bike to school in good weather! OMG, this is the best day of my LIFE so far!" Then she paused as she remembered that the fire took her bike and then she resumed her joy, "I can walk to school in a half an hour or less!" She was so happy that when we went outside, she saw her younger brother who has Aspberger's (high functioning, but clueless half the time and we don't know what his him being a guy and his condition!) and she ran up to him and hugged him. He screamed and thought she wanted to give him a noogie!

This new area is great-- Cloud also explained to me that from the house we want that we can walk to church which is something I had envied people at my husband's church who lived near by. We even do it from our present location.

In the 12 hours since I last wrote of my frustration I am feeling better. We were at my church today for a children's function and I found myself thinking who I wanted to be friends with now that I know we won't be changing churches if we move because we won't move.

I am scared of a fire in the new house even though it is extremely unlikely. We will be buying escape ladders and learning to use them, as well as fire extinguishers and talking to the kids about grease fires (smother them with baking soda or salt, not water) and other ways to avoid a fire.

I adore my real estate agent and have entertained ideas on becoming a real estate agent because I can think of nothing as vital as selling someone a home.

My husband is going to give me a little dog for my stress over the past 11 months. Our real estate lady has a cute, cold nosed dog and I carried it around our marathon house hunting and decided that I liked it. It is a toy dog and he says that if I take it for walks that I will be trolling for eagles! I really like bigger dogs, too, but we will probably get a rescue for a bigger dog. We have one who came with us from the fire and he is great, but we want a couple more as our house will be bigger and I like not being alone.

Going though my rental house is a headache. How have we amassed so much stuff? What is worth driving across the neighborhood and putting some place?

I just want to get into this house soon. I will be more happy when we move in. I am not happy. I have not spent the last year being wistful, but I have never felt stable. I have become pals with a local artist who has a shop and with an art store owner  and this has been nice, but I would stay friends with them anyway. If we get this one house, we will have a TV room and a living room and rooms for the kids, areas for PC's and laptops so the kids can work on school work and we know they are not playing games. There is a bar in the kitchen that stands alone that I can put taco or burrito fixings on, or maybe have potato night and put things on it, then we can sit down in the ample dining room. We can have my husband's sister's big family over. My husband says he will make a room for me in the garage-- nothing permanent, but I will be able to have space for my art supplies.

I got my kids into knitting and now Cloud has signed up for an art class. I so much didn't like my kids doing "my" stuff with me-- I didn't know how to share it and a cringed when I let them try. My eldest two daughters love to draw and paint in spite of how I was over my things and they are both very good, but I was over protective which is sad. I am buying good tools for the kids to use and showing them how to take care of them. I think part of me being OK with them using my stuff is that I have had an artistic friend show them how to do some things and they listen to her on taking care of brushes and use of materials where they won't listen to me.

I was getting sad a few days ago and Mudd had been given some plastic animals at a birthday party and he wanted to play with me and he held an elephant and I held a mercat and he had his elephant tell me how much it made him sad to see the mercat cry. I think I am getting better.

The fire fall-out

I am still tlaking about it. I am more sorry that anyone can imagine.

All summer we had planned to build. In May I got sick of waiting and got my husband to look at real estate with me. He insisted that we build but thinsg were not happening. Our housing market is glutted and the bank was making it easier to buy an existing structure rather than rebuild.

In a nutshell, two weeks ago today my husband came home and told me that we needed to buy or size down out house. I am not proud of the new swear words that came out of my mouth. I adjusted, put 300 miles on the SUV and found houses for sale-- lots of them!

A few days later I had calmed down and I called an agent and that day my husband came home and said we could build. I was seriously furious and I topped the previous spree.

Over the last two weeks he has gathered information and we went back and forth and forth and back. Three days ago we met with the bank and it was confimed that borrowing for an existing dwelling would have a lower interest than borrowing for the house of the same amount. We palced a bid last night.

I like the house-- it isn't as big as the one we wanted to build, but it's lay out is decent and clever. The people who own it have loved it and taken good care of it. The kids love it, too and they like the neighborhood. We parked a ways away from it and walked through it about a week ago and Basil knows everyone now-- he is such a young politician in that regard! The neighborhood is full of pretty houses. Tiny front yards and bigger back yards, but as a whole it is pretty to look at. Some of the houses are tastefully bright, many have elegant rock gardens. (I want a pretty rock garden with a wroght iron table and chair duo for mine. I will sit and drink tea and look elegant! LOL)

Of course we made the bid and my nightmares began again-- several bedrooms overlook the garage and are quite high. The local fire department is very happy to come over when I am ready and show me and the kids how to safely use an emergancy ladder to get out of a 2.5 story window and show us how to use fire extinguishers, although I worry that my three middle sons will turn into pyromaniacs trying to find an excuse to use the ladders and the fire extinguishers! The chief told me that few have emergency equipment and fewer still know how to use them.

It is not the fire-- it is the year of transition that we have had that has been hard on me, personally. The kids love the adventure so I am doing well with it for them, but it was different for my husband vs. me. I am glad that he wasn't the one to light the candle that got knocked over. I think I am more careful than he is and I would have been angry at him. The kids could have been hurt, but once I got Starshine out of harm's way, I think she and Dmitri would have been fine. I took some very stupid risks as I had no idea what I was up against when I went into that room to put it out. What scares me more than anything was how close I came to being hurt-- a person running into a room that is on fire is likely to get hurt. They could have seen their mother ignite and the only thing Dmitri could have done was get out and get help and he'd be shouldering the what-ifs. I know better now and I am very blessed.

Anyway, I have been told by a professional that I am stage-specific where I need to by and I can put this behind me once we settle. I really wish we'd moved before school resumed, but now it looks like we will be moving int he first few weeks and this is a mega drag as the kids are in advanced programs with lots of schoolwork that they cannot get behind on. Transition is never fun, but we will make it through this, too.