At least one thing is nice and neat. And has been since the morning after we moved.  Normally we would do it the night of the move, but we were just that tired.  I think our lights were out Saturday night by 8:45pm.

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In no particular order

If you don’t hear from me for a week, send in a search party.

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We are in the midst of this move and to be honest, I can find the time by procrastinating, I just can’t find the energy.  I’ve been feeling ‘blog guilt’ since the new year about not posting frequently enough, and I plan to get back in the swing of things once we’re over this hurdle.  We start loading up on Friday and unload Saturday.  I think the last three months have been more of an emotional/mental drain rather than physical. Hard to explain.  Anyway, I’m not dropping off the face of the Earth, I won’t even say I’m that busy in the grand scheme of things, but I’m just struggling to hold onto a shred of my wittiness and creativity that inspires my writing at the moment.   I’m thinking about posting pictures too, I just haven’t gotten there yet.  Have patience with me.

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So we had our storage building moved to the new house today.  My brother inlaw was kind enough to ask his friend at the lumber yard (who has experience moving buildings) if he could cut us a deal to move it.  Goes back to what I said before, moving in the South is always cheaper!  Further proof.  Anyway, I asked Scott how they were going to move it.  His response and I quote “He’s going to pick it up with a forklift and set it on a trailer.”  Oh okay, I thought, trying to picture this in my head.  Quite frankly, just the mental image of $1500 of blood, sweat and tears balancing on a forklift didn’t sit well with me, nor did it make much sense.  I’m thinkin, now what kind of forklift is this?  I’ve never seen one that could just pick up a building.  But in my mental picture, this is an approximation of what I saw:

A very lowboy trailer

And a very heavy duty forklift

So when a flatbed, not to mention a tall flatbed and

a bobcat arrived…I was feeling a bit skeptical.  And by skeptical, I mean nervous.

Caleb and I took our seats in the spectator box – aka in front of the huge pane glass window of the living room.  We raised the blinds all the way as if we were drawing back a curtain and settling in for the show.  As I clung to Caleb, I said “Oh man, this is making me so nervous!”  He looked at me and said “It’s alright Momma” and covered my eyes with his hand.  Attempt one failed.  The building shifted and fell.  Yes fell.  Luckily, my husband happens to have built a very structurally sound building.  Of course every time the truck pulled forward trying to get lined up correctly to back the bed underneath the building, he got stuck and spun tires.  So they kept having to hook a chain to the Bobcat and pull the truck back up the slope.

Does anything look amiss to you in this picture?

Here, this illustration should help.

They were able to get it loaded on the second attempt and tossed two straps over the top.  When we reached the street, a tape measure was stretched from the top peak to the ground.  Seems we wouldn’t be going under any bridges, as we were exactly at the bridge clearance for most bridges.  So our convoy left.  Truck with gigantic building, truck pulling trailer with bobcat, van pulling trailer with lawnmower and tool box, Ford Explorer hauling 35lb. child.  It was like we were told to get in line according to size of load.  Then we came to the bridge.  Up the on ramp we went.  Across the highway.  And back down the exit ramp on the other side.  Everyone pulled over in a gravel lot at the bottom of the ramp to walk around the truck and gawk at how it looked like it would tip over at any given second.  The decision was made to press on, as it looked no worse a few miles from the house than it had looked pulling out of the driveway.

We have conquered…building.

At that point, I had to turn back and head home to retrieve the money to pay this poor man for his troubles.  I raced in the house and back out as fast as I could.  There is a very steep hill between here and the new house.  Each curve I came around, I kept expecting to see the remains of our storage building and a truck tipped over on its side.  When I reached the hill, I thought surely I would have caught up with them, but they were nowhere to be seen.  I breathed a sigh of relief that they actually made it to the top of the hill.  But when I reached the house, they weren’t there.  I called my brother inlaw to check on things, and they had taken a detour around the steep hill.  I don’t blame them.

They did arrive safely, and in one piece…right side up.  Scott said he thought for sure it was going to fall the whole way.  I think everyone  rode leaning to the left, trying to balance out the building leaning heavily to the right. The poor driver, who drives a semi for a living by the way, said he tried to talk to my brother inlaw the whole way there so they could keep their eyes off the wobbling building in their side view mirrors.

Once there, everyone stood around and cringed some more as we debated how to get it off the truck without dropping it or rolling it over and destroying it.  The decision was made to go back and get the bobcat and suddenly the whole damn thing started rolling backwards.  You have never seen grown men move so fast.  Catatrophy was avoided.  It was unloaded and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.  Or as my brother inlaw put it best…”Do you have a hammer and a straight pin?”  Um, why?  “Because you couldn’t drive it up my butthole right now.”

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With our upcoming move, we decided to clean out and sell anything we could to save some space and make a little money at the same time.  I listed several things on Craigslist, which generates an inordinate amount of emails if you have an active list near you.  I think I’ve read and replied to 50 emails or so in the last 24 hours.  But hey, I made $105 today!  And I’m hoping to come close to that again tomorrow!

We sold a trampoline that we got for free.  How terrible is that?!  A renter moved out and left a ton of stuff behind, the trampoline included.  Scott went to work on the heating and air for the home owner, who was cleaning up to get the house ready to rent again.  He was planning to set it out at the road.  Scott gladly took it off his hands.  We want one, but this one didn’t have a net around it, so I wouldn’t allow Caleb on it.  Now we have a chunk of change to put toward one with a safety net!

With all the emails flooding in, my day has been crazy.  I had two people come and pick things up, Caleb and I ran errands this morning, and I seriously answered emails every spare second in between.  I didn’t eat lunch until 3pm and dinner is in a few minutes (it is now 9:15).  And when answering all these emails, I did what was necessary to keep Caleb entertained.

They are flowers by the way.  Or so he says.  All the way up my arms.

The lady that came by tonight probably thought I was really weird.  I forgot to explain.  Oops.

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If you stick around long enough, I’ll teach ya how we do everything down here in Nascar country.

    …It ended up bein the Clampetts go to Maui!
    Cuz you get my family together and there is an empty K-mart somewhere!
    They showed up at the airport they were usin coolers and grocery bags for luggage
    The sky cap was like “which ones yours? the Samsonite?”
    They were like, “no we got the igloo with the duct tape on it and the 5 piggly wiggly bags right there!”…     -Jeff Foxworthy

So we’re moving.  You already know that.  Scott walked by when I was editing these pictures and said “Sure, sure.  Make fun of the rednecks.”  Nah, seriously we’re not rednecks.  I’ll show you more proof on that subject next post.  But moving is always cheaper in the south.  Seriously.  Proven fact.  Know why?  Because there’s a 95% chance most of your family lives within 20 miles of you.  And a 99% chance that most of them have trucks, trailers, and brute strength.  So when Scott’s boss offered up a truck to move our storage building contents?  Well we jumped right on it.  There’s no better price tag than “Free!”

Take a very old…

…very rusty…


truck

Drive it home…

Just don’t count on it cranking right back up.

As an added bonus, it is a dump truck, so we were able to just back up the the porch and dump everything out!  Okay okay, so we didn’t really do that.  But it would have been cool if we did!  And I definitely would have taken pictures and video.

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Make it stop.  This kid refuses to nap.  He will do anything but nap.  I had him in the bed for over three hours today and he never did just give it up and catch a snooze.  And he needs one so badly.  Right before bed, everything falls apart.  He turns into nightmare child, hitting and kicking and screaming.  Completely out of character.  Most nights I’m able to just take a deep breath and just let him scream (all while feeling like I want to rip my hair out).  Last night he had a meltdown because he couldn’t see the lines on the toilet paper to tear it evenly.  Tonight it was the process of getting undressed that sent him into a screaming wall pounding rage.  I just hate dealing with it because I know it could be avoided I guess.  He hasn’t napped in several days.  I’m now experiencing what it is like to have a kid who falls asleep in 15 minutes though (that’s new to me).  The night before last was a new moon, so he kept me up pretty much all night.  Then would not take a nap the next day.

We’ve been house hunting hard.  Things are all up in the air right now.  It is all exhausting me.  Meanwhile, our current house is falling apart.  The ceiling is leaking, and not far from falling in.  Every time it rains, we have to blockade off the area with Caleb’s  Cranium Fort stuff.  Nice huh?  Then there’s the kitchen sink.  It also leaks.  I took a shower yesterday morning, then got Caleb a bath about an hour later.  Several hours after that, I started a load of laundry.  No harm right?  Yeah, not until I was crawling behind Caleb’s train chasing it with a police car and he called out “River Mommy!  A river!”  I look in front of us and sure enough, there is a river flowing out of the cabinet below the sink halfway across the kitchen already.  I saw the laundry soap residue in the sink.  So I headed to the laundry closet.  It has overflowed the drain and there is another gallon or two of water under the washer.  Super.  Oops, gotta pee.  Haha, not done yet.  Yep, both toilets overflowed and the tub is full of brown water and toilet paper.  AWESOME!!  Did I mention that this already has already happened in the eight short months that we’ve lived here?  Tree roots are growing into the pipe and they stop it completely up every six months.  I was told by the last plumber that he had been here several times for the same problem.  They have yet to just run a new drain line further from the huge tree.  Understand why we’re moving again?  Good.

And I almost forgot.  Conveniently, our dog slipped his collar over his head and took off at some point last night.  The shelter finally picked him up mid afternoon about five miles away.  $100 we didn’t have.  Here ya go.  Can I wash dog bowls or something?  Seriously the last thing we needed right now.  So he’s back home from his grand adventure, complete with a microchip installed (required, so that next time they can just call you to come pay your fines and get your dog back).

Anyway, I’m off to clean up the mayhem that has taken place during the last two days of plumbing nightmare.  Like I said, sleep is for the weak, no matter how exhausted you are, there’s always more to do.  Ahhhhh!  *runs away screaming waving arms in the air*

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We made the decision to replace Caleb’s Herbie.  I know I know.  You’re saying we should have let him learn a lessen.  I guess we sort of felt at fault.  We’ve always allowed him to take one or two cars in stores while we shop.  And Charley always goes also.  To this day, we have never lost one single $0.97 Hot Wheels.  So it figures that when he takes a car in that we paid a lot more than $0.97, and he holds it near and dear, it would be the first to be lost.  Neither of us checked to make sure he had everything he got out of the car with when we got back in.  So that’s my defense and I’m sticking with it.  We paid a ridiculous amount, again, to replace Herbie.  Caleb thanked me about 15 times when he opened the package.  He was so thrilled, and hasn’t put it down since.  I explained to him after his initial excitement settled that we would not be able to replace him again and he must take very good care of Herbie.  I told him we would make a special, safe place in the car that Herbie could sleep while we shopped.

So fast forward to two days ago.  We were getting out of the car.  You know where this is going.  The car that we searched ten times over, short of one place.  You know how the saying goes…”It’s in the last place you look.”  Well duh, you aren’t gonna keep looking after you find it, of course it’s the last place!  Ha!  Caleb laid down on the seat to get out of the car.  And wouldn’t you know, I small space underneath the carseat only big enough for a three year old’s hands or a Herbie car was revealed to be the hiding spot.

Caleb immediately picked out the differences though, however slight they are.  The thing he likes best about the new one is that it looks happier.  Herbie’s bumper is his mouth, and I must admit, the old car (left) does look as if he’s frowning.  The first has black hubcaps, while the new one has silver ones.  They are both Johnny Lightning, one came in a 5 pack and one came individually packaged (the new one).

I can’t believe I didn’t write about this over a week ago, but we actually went to meet Herbie.  Yep, as luck would have it, Scott was telling the secretary at work how much Caleb’s loves Herbie, and she replied “Well have you taken him to see the one across town?”  In disbelief, Scott drove by the house, and sure enough, there he sat in the yard.

The scariness that is google maps:

Think I’m kidding?  Here’s my husband standing out in the yard running his RC truck at our old house.

Anyway, back on topic, we took Caleb over there.  I didn’t have my camera!  We were already nearby on errands, so it wasn’t a planned trip.  Caleb just couldn’t believe it.  He ran around and around the car looking at him and talking to him.  This particular Herbie didn’t have any bumpers, Caleb was very concerned.  He didn’t have a sunroof either, but Caleb couldn’t see that.  Talk about not wanting to leave though.  He wanted to buy Herbie!  He wanted us to bring him home.  The whole way home he whimpered sadly that Herbie missed him and he missed Herbie.  He usually asks at least once a day if we can go see Herbie again.  He asked if I thought Herbie would talk to him next time.

He was so cute, but I didn’t anticipate the sadness that followed for a few hours.  Next time we’ll prepare better and let him know that we can only visit for a few minutes, but we’ll take pictures with Caleb and Herbie so that we can “see” him any time on the computer.

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So I’ve been really bad about blogging this year.  That’s all I got.  Moving along…

My mom is down for the weekend.  Because my parents, yes, my parents went to an Eagles concert.  Yep.  I went to bed last night before my parents even got home.  Anyway, rewind to Friday.  Mom and I met to go to the children’s museum and pick up a few library books for me at the library across the street.  I had an armful of books, Caleb was heading for the door in front of me and Mom was behind me.  Caleb ran right up to the sliding doors, however he went to the one that doesn’t actually slide.  He put his hands on it thinking it was a door that you push open.  About that time, along comes the sliding door and it caught four of his little fingers in between the doors!  The door kept sliding and drug him along.  As you can imagine, the very back corners of the city block sized library probably heard the wail.  I had to pull his fingers out.  It didn’t break the skin or anything, but I’m sure it hurt.  I piled the books into my mom’s arms and picked him up and took him in between the two sets of sliding doors (you know how department stores have an inner and outer set of doors with the in between area ).  My mom was shocked…the only library employee that came to check on him was a security guard.  And he was standing way across the huge entrance area talking with another employee.  In other words the checkout desk and information desk was much closer.  He asked if everything was okay and if he could get any ice or anything.  Another older man (grandpa age) must have been behind us in line checking out asked Caleb if he needed some money for the gumball machine to help him feel better.  He was sweet enough to offer up two quarters.

My mom said she was telling her friend about it over the phone and her friend said employees are trained not to acknowledge things like that to avoid opening themselves up to a lawsuit or having a situation where something happens, they acknowledge the problem, then it happens to someone else because the problem was ignored.  How sad that we live in such a sue happy world that employees cannot acknowledge a child’s fingers getting mashed in the door.  It was just an accident.

Luckily, by the time we crossed the street and dropped the books off at the car, Caleb forgot all about his hand on the way up the steps to the children’s museum.

In other news, we are still house hunting which is very discouraging, as we are under time and money constraints.  I have been reading a lot.  I’ve been trying to take a few minutes every day for myself.  Who would have thought that you could use those few minutes of “mommy time” to read parenting books, yet still feel rewarded and refreshed, and as a bonus, a better, more patient parent, having learned techiniques from the book as well as gained reassurance in seeing many of the techniques are things you already use.  One of the books I ordered with my Target giftcard is Kid Cooperation: How to stop yelling, nagging & pleading and get kids to cooperate by Elizabeth Pantley.  This is not the first book of hers I’ve read, and each subsequent book, I seem to like her more and more.  Two of the books I ordered were written by her actually, and one of the books in above mentioned stack of library books was written by her as well.  I’ve been reading this book like it was a thriller novel every spare moment I have.

With the new year, I have really tried to step back and look at a lot of things.  I have been in a rut, going through every day frustrated and tremendously short on patience.  The stress of the last six months has definitely taken a toll.  Between the job situation, the car blowing up, the house scenario, everything seemed totally out of my control, including my own child.  I didn’t feel like we were on the same page, connecting like we should be.  I don’t know, it is hard to describe.  I just felt like we were in an endless set of days that were going nowhere.

I made a conscious decision last week.  I am taking all of this out on him.  He’s feeding off my stress.  He’s acting out because I’m constantly frustrated with him and I’m constantly frustrated because he’s acting out.  I stopped yelling.  I stopped nagging.  I stopped whining back at him (“Will you pleeeease let me finish doing this <insert selfish task here>”).  I played games with him without thinking about how quickly I could get the game over with.  I read book after book without counting the total.  I snuggled with him, tickled him after naps, took him outside to ride his tractor around the median 72 times, and played trains with him.  He helped me make dinner.  He stayed in his pajamas til lunchtime stepping on fondant (which sticks quite well to the no skid footies on pajamas) and covering himself with powdered sugar while we worked on Herbie.

I’m embarrassed and sad to say it, but I felt like he was so relieved.  Like he was thinking “I have my mom back, she’s not being so mean anymore.”  He has been clingy, lots of hugs and kisses and I love yous (there was no shortage before, but now he is showering me with loveys), he wants to sit closer to me at the table, he wants to hold my hand, as a somewhat negative consequence, he’s waking up every night and getting in bed with me, even though the mattresses are pushed together in one bedroom right now, he still thinks of them as separate beds, thus he must crawl across my ridiculously long hair and get on the other side of me.  But not before giving me kisses on the cheek in the middle of the night.  I’ve seen manners that I’ve been begging and fussing for him to use suddenly become standard in conversation, not only with other adults, but with me also.  If he needs my attention while I’m on the phone, he says “Excuse me.”  Many times I say “Yes what is it?” and he replies “I love you.”  He just wanted to tell me.

So rather than beating myself up over the last several months of building frustration, I’m simply going to blog it and bury it.  And if I begin feeling that way again, I will remind myself to come back and read this blog.  Kids pick up on so much more than we think.  They are so emotional, even if they show it in different ways than we do.  One of the best points I feel the above mentioned book has made for me… Just because kids are just that, a child, a three year old, a ten year old, a seventeen year old, just because they are a child and we are the parents, doesn’t mean they aren’t due a level of common courtesy and respect.  Do you find yourself nearly tripping over your toddler for the 14th time today?  I know I’m guilty of this, I just blurt out “Move!”  But would you do the same thing to a stranger or another adult?  No you’d probably say “Excuse me.”  Little things like that are so easy to forget when you’re going through the motions day after day with those closest to you, not to mention under foot.  But go ahead and say “Excuse me” for the 14th time, and even the 15th, or the 22nd, because you’ll probably hear the same manners in return next time your little person needs to get by you.

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I somewhat sarcastically mentioned that I would leave up the Christmas decorations well into the New Year, which would in turn, help me ease into January.  I’m usually not a new year fan because I love the warmth of Christmas so much and I hate to see the New Year usher people’s Christmas spirit out the door.  So out of laziness or self preservation, call it what you will, my blog decorations have not come down, nor has my tree.  That’s right, my Fraser Fir is still standing tall with an inch of clearance to the ceiling, fully decorated and not really even dropping an exorbitant amount of needles.  Yet.  I’m not really motivated to take it down either (my dad would have had a coronary by now, he takes the tree down the day after Christmas if at all possible).

A fort we built from cardboard blocks

For some reason, this new year feels different from others though.  I think it has a lot to do with my homeschooling research.  It feels like a new beginning, a start of something fresh and new that I have never experienced before.  This is the year Caleb would be beginning “school” so I have had my nose stuck in books trying to get a grasp on where to start.  I told Scott in the car the other night, there’s actually about 5% of me that is getting excited about this journey.  Don’t get me wrong, the other 95% is still terrified and filled with questions.  But I smiled inside this morning when he was walking around the [educational/classroom] rug at the library practicing his ABC’s as he stepped on each letter.  “Why” is a favorite question these days, and it is hard to have the desire to answer those whys instead of saying “because it just is.”  Which brings me to another subject that has been pulling my attention away from my blog.  Discipline.  We’ve had our fair share of challenges lately, and I feel like I’m not handling them in the best way that I could.  So what do I do?  Read, read, read.  I had a $30 Target giftcard from a friend, so I ordered three parenting books on Target.com.  I feel like having a good grasp on positive discipline will be indispensable when we begin homeschooling (I say begin just in reference to starting to present materials on a daily basis and guide his attention in certain directions for periods of time.  But I know children are always learning.  Play is serious learning for them.).  With all the stress of Scott’s job change and an impending move weighing down, I know that I have not been the best parent I could be.  I feel like I have been so negative lately, and easily frustrated.  Burnt out basically.  Thus the reason I want to make some changes this year.

With the new year, come the New Year’s Resolutions.  Beginning with baby steps, cause I don’t wanna screw this up again.  I wonder just how many people resolve to lose weight each year, only to have it become a distant memory by Valentine’s?  This week, I’m trying to cut out any after dinner eating (I’m bad about nighttime snacking right before bed, ugh) and drink 10+ cups of water per day.  I desperately want to reduce the amount of “things” I have as well.  I’m absolutely horrible about hanging on to things I *might* need.  Or hanging onto it just to have it.  Telling myself I’ll use it one day, but then I never do.  I could make a small fortune getting rid of some unused toys and clothes.  What an overwhelming task.  This is where the procrastinator in me looks around and says, I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just do it later!

Speaking of procrastination…well this isn’t really procrastination so much as the cheapskate in me…there’s a better late than never post coming up…

Any guesses?

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