Empty House Begone!

This is the last day of peaceful quietness.  Or foreboding silence and emptiness.  Depending on how I’m viewing the world at any particular given moment.  It generally takes a few days of everyone being gone before the silence really starts to get to me and I finally cave in and turn on the TV (which then stays on until some boys come home and turn it off) for background noise.  This time, they’ve been gone entirely too long and I’m really looking forward to my full house again.  I do not know what I will do with myself if I happen to survive long enough to see them all to adulthood and find myself living alone on a regular basis.  I suppose I will travel.  A lot.

Today we’re leaving late because my daughter wants to tag along and she happens to be in northern Ohio at a basketball camp for the weekend.  Good news, they’re losing badly and as such she’ll be home early enough that it’s still reasonable to leave tonight rather than tomorrow.  Not that I was going to wait anyway.  I’ve never claimed to be reasonable when it comes to things like road trips.  I was chatting with BFF and remembering a time when my middler was a baby and I was traveling quite frequently between IL and OH.  It was a seven hour trip, door to door, and could *maybe* be done in 6.5 on a good night under the right circumstances.  However, middler was a horrible, horrible, awful road tripper as a little guy, and these trips would quite frequently fall into the 10-hour or more marathon sessions that were hell for me and the older two (who were in the ranges of 4-6 for the younger and 7-9 for the older).  Middler could escape from every car seat known to man once he started toddling, so from about 12 months on I’d be driving up the interstate at 70+ mph and BOP here’d be little middler between the seats grinning just as big as you please.  I’d stop and get him resituated and restrapped and check everything to make sure I had it all done up correctly and try my best to look all mad and mean mommy when I told him in no uncertain terms that he had to stay in his seat… and ten or so minutes later BOP there’d be his little head again.  I recall one night pulling over somewhere in KY and just crying on the side of the road, because I was out of solutions and I’d been stopping every 10 minutes for 300 miles and I was just so tired and so frustrated and he just would. not. stay. and I could not find straps that could contain him.  And he wasn’t old enough to understand, and not going was not an option (I was doing court-ordered visitation schedules and it really was not optional).  Oh, if he was behaving enough to actually stay in his seat (sometimes if the other kids would stay awake, they could make this happen for me) then he had terrible motion sickness and would inevitably puke all over everything at about the halfway point.  It was hell.  I do not know how I survived these years.

I never did find a good solution, but one strategy that I frequently employed was leaving at dusk such that the kids would fall asleep within an hour or so into the trip, and I’d arrive at the other end at 2 or 3 a.m. tired and bedraggled but at least without the drama of Middler Houdini and his Incredible Puking Extravaganza.  I really enjoyed the late night drives, and being alone, and loved the feeling of it being just the trucks and me.  I recall on occasion that the only thing I *really* hated was having to stop and pee, because 1) I felt vulnerable as a woman traveling alone with 3 small children at 1 a.m. at a truck stop in Nowhere, Indiana and 2). I hated that I had to wake 3 sleeping children just so I could run in and pee.  But I was not about to leave them unattended and sleeping in the car so what choice did I have?  It was still a better solution than driving with Houdini Pukekid, and I just tried to minimize the stops. I could do the trip with one stop on a good night, but more often it took two.

Tonight, I’ll be reminded of those trips as my daughter and I head out to Chicago kind of lateish.  Not *that* late, but it will be 2 a.m. Ohio time when we arrive, most likely.  These days, however, I’m more likely to be in bed by 10:00 p.m., and pulling an all-nighter means that I’m going to need to catch up with an all-dayer (of sleep!)  Then again, I still have frequent bouts of insomnia in which I proudly proclaim on my facebook wall that “Sleep is for wimps” and declare that I do not need it anyway.  Hopefully some of that attitude will hit me tonight, as I anticipate it will be a GREAT night for insomnia!

Speaking with my mom about this (the late traveling and such) and she insists that we all did things when we were younger that we wouldn’t dare repeat today – that common sense and the wisdom of aging instills upon us a desire to tread carefully as we realize just how fragile life really is.  I disagree, however, at least for myself.  I did in fact do all sorts of silly, inane, foolhardy, dangerous, and spontaneous things that I consider to be in the realm of “Mommy Adventures” (as my kids like to call them) but I think that I would repeat most of them today if I had the chance.  And the lungs.  YOLO and all that.  Life *is* fragile, but I tend to view that as more of a reason to live for today and enjoy and treasure the moment I’m in.  I try not to think about tomorrow too much, and maybe that means I’m in denial a bit but I’m okay with that.  I’ll let other people worry about what tomorrow will bring, I’m too busy having fun today.

With that, I’m off to Chicago and hopefully it will be a non-adventure.  My night vision is not as sharp as it once was. 🙂

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Middlin with the Middler

So my middle child is having a birthday this weekend, and it’s a biggie.  He’s turning thirteen, and I shall officially be the mother to two teenagers, one adult child, and two little ones who have yet to reach double digits.  In honor of this notable occasion, I took him by himself to Kings Island today, and let him have a day of me all to himself.  They seldom get that since there are so very many of them, although I do give them each their “days” every so often.  And this was all he requested of me for his birthday, just a day of riding rides and hanging out at the amusement park, so that is what he got.  Thankfully I’ve mostly recovered from my recent pneumonia(s) and felt up to it today; we put it off three times since Monday, and I was beginning to worry I wouldn’t be able to fulfill even this simple request.  But today dawned with good breathing and a well-rested mama, so off we went!

We had a great day, and! I am happy to report that the events of last summer wherein I was unable to ride certain roller coasters and the resulting worry that I’d passed a certain point in this disease?  Seem to have been just the result of a bad day (or three).  I was honestly afraid to try to ride this year, because the end of last year had me so sad over the thought of not being able to enjoy this activity with them any more.  I didn’t want to confirm my fears, and therefore I just elected to swim, knit, sit in the shade, and ride the little rides with anyone who was interested in that sort of thing so far this summer.  I hadn’t attempted any coasters at all since that one day toward the end of last summer that I thought nearly killed me, and my daughter and I had to leave Kings Island early because I was in such bad shape.  She was equally worried, and encouraged me to wait until later in the summer to try it, to give myself a chance to fully get over the pneumonia and give myself the best shot at being able to withstand the rides.  But I’m stubborn, and I felt good, and well, anyone who knows me at all knows that if one of my babies (shut up they are too still babies) asks me for something then I’m going to do everything within my power to make sure that I give them that something.  And my middler wanted me to ride coasters with him for his thirteenth birthday, and I was bound and determined to make that happen.

I’m really glad it worked out, truly. I did rent a scooter (which may come back to bite me in the ass because I should have probably saved that for gas money to go get the other boys, but we’ll deal with that in a day or two) but considering that it was about 100 degrees in the shade today and I survived every coaster he wanted to go on? Some twice, even! I will chalk that up as a win, and was quite thrilled to text my daughter with the news that last year’s bad day was just that – a bad day.  It’s hard to know with this stupid disease, and I *know* it’s going to get worse, and I expect that it’s going to get worse, and I’m prepared for it to get worse, and yet… I’m not.  I’d like to just have things as they are for now, and not get worse for a while.  I’m okay with not being able to do everything; I can still do the things that mean the most to me, and to them, and that’s enough for now.  I am not ready to readjust and reevaluate and rethink what’s important, I just want to be for a while.

Is that too much to ask?  Maybe so.  I’ll take today for what it is and deal with tomorrow when it gets here.  Not much else I can do, and that’s how I try to approach it.  Anything else is overwhelming.

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Pins and Needles

I should hear from one or more of the potential new places today or tomorrow, and I’m nervous.  If I don’t get the apartment then I don’t think there’s much chance of me getting anything at all on my own, and then I don’t know what I’ll do.  I’ll be on pins and needles until I hear something, and then I’ll be a nervous wreck because that means I’ll have to start moving.  Not looking forward to this process at all.

Today the kitties are going to their new home.  Actually kind of back to their old home.  I’m sad about that too, and will miss them terribly.  Especially the orange ones that I’ve had for a while now.  It will, however, be a relief to not have cat hairs all over everything anymore.  And the bag of cat poop on the door can finally be gone (ew! hubby!)

It’s my middler’s birthday one week from today, but he’ll be in Florida at Disney with his dad.  We’ll be celebrating this week sometime, probably by going back to the water park place on Wednesday.  Nine years old now, he is.  Hard to believe, doesn’t seem like that long.

I’ve also decided to go buy a new used car before hubby leaves.  My minivan has 215,000 miles on it, and I’m not convinced it’s going to last much longer without a complete overhaul.  Since my teenager can drive himself and never goes any place with all of us anyway, I’ve decided that I no longer need a 3rd row seating option, and I’ll be trading in the minivan for something small and cute later this week.  Assuming, that is, that we can document hubby’s income for the month of June to the satisfaction of the loan-making people at the car dealership.  I have to work on that the next couple of days.  Plan is to go car shopping Thursday.

That’s about it for now from here.  Incredibly stressful, and now I’m missing those boring days with nothing to write about and nothing going on except the misty mountains in the distance outside my window.  For now it’s 20 days and counting until hubby leaves.  I’m hanging in.

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