Insomniart

Five O'clock Shadow--on My Head

Not peach fuzz yet... but yes, five o'clock, or perhaps 4:15, shadow is on my head. Yay! I'll be in wigs and scarves into December I bet, but it's nice to see a start!

I have stopped disability. In fact, I am happy to feel ability.

Even if it is very very fast being back in life and work again.

The dogs are flipping out right now, I think there is a skunk or a fox outside.

This week the kids return to all their activities, scouts, swim, dance. And I am having my first full week at my two part-time jobs while they are at school. I will be sewing patches tomorrow. I promised myself I would go to bed no later than 10pm. It is 11:37. Have a wonderful week everyone!

Reading: Janet Evanovich's Finger-Lickin' Fifteen, will be following this book with a fan letter to Janet thanking her for getting me through chemo with this series.

Relieved that: The kids' flu shots (the regular kind) are done and I have a date to get mine and Kev's

Watching {between laundry loads}: Top Chef, Project Runway, Biggest Loser and Glee

Avoiding: Nothing. I am taking it all on this week.

Lashings

I've been tearing up for days constantly but it's not because I'm sad. I have very few eyelashes left after the chemotherapy and the ones that are left, or perhaps the new ones growing in, are irritating my eyes and making me shed tears all day long! This week has been filled with simply adjusting to the new school year and getting ready to get back into working regularly. We also have been playing outside each day after school while the weather has been sunny. I always go out with the children because they want to ride in the road, which is OK on our dead-end street, but it's always around the time people are coming home from work and I like to call out "Car!" whenever I see one to cue the kids to move to the side. After cooking each day this week, I ran out of ideas tonight {or maybe out of patience} and made a frozen pizza. Guilty for my lack of effort, I tossed a salad with it. In the face of the back-to-school busy schedule, meal planning must become a firm requirement of my "mom" job description or we will never eat well again. I will study the grocery fliers tomorrow for the week ahead.

Reading: stopped in the middle of Fearless Fourteen, by Janet Evanovich, because the first week was so busy.

Watching: Project Runway on Lifetime

Avoiding: Beginning a new exercise routine

September Second Starts First & Fourth

I hear the bus. I bet you do too! Unreal that my sweeties are in fourth and first grade this year. Deciding what to wear the first day was not as simple as earlier years where I got the sole vote. I have strong opinions from them now to contend with. I'm a little old-fashioned. I don't like characters on their shirts but I will concede if it is gym day. I like collared shirts for him {lost that battle today} and a dressier look for her {no, not your Easter dress, that's a little too much!} on the first day. I always say, let them be little as long as they can. Let them be their age. I like her in a shoe I know won't trip and flip off and fly down the stairs and I like him ready to run in sneakers. She likes dresses, he likes sneakers, so most of the time we agree. Lucky me, for now. I like the first day to be happy all day and I have always tried to bake M&M cookies on the first day of school to have warm when they climb off the bus--this is only possible because they are still young and I'm still home part of the day. Who knows how long that will last? This morning he was adamant that he would make his own sandwich and pack his own lunchbox. This inspired her and then the two of them became a lunch-making team; it was so cute I had no room to squeeze in and make breakfast until they were done packing lunch! Plus I was sad that I wasn't the one to do it! I re-learned good and fast today that I can not squander the hours while they are gone because life goes twice as fast the minute they are delivered home to me again. I am working as a nursery school aide this year and I am so excited for my own first day in two weeks. I need to do some back-to-school shopping myself and get some sensible shoes for me, suddenly the only thing in my closet in one pair of leather sandals and one pair of flip flops, that's not going to get me through the year! But today was a day of putting everyone's best foot forward.

Submarines and Defenders

See this just proves that I need to blog out loud like this or I don't remember. I tried to begin typing what we did Thursday and I had to work to recall it. Finished going through the kids' closets, said goodbye to my mom who was visiting, dropped off all my paperwork for my new job, and went to see the Connecticut Defenders win a game at Dodd Stadium in Norwich. It was a blast! We had box seats through a very generous colleague and it was so exciting because we brought such amazing friends with us and their children plus ours made nine kids under the age of 10. We had baseball food and danced to the music when they scored a home run and sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Their mascot, Cutter the eagle, even came into the box to sign autographs! Today was cold and rainy but I got the recycling over to the landfill before it got too heavy along with some other errands, then the kids and I went to the Groton Naval Sub Base to see the Nautilus Submarine Museum. It's free, it's very cool and you actually get to go inside the sub and crawl around through its innards. They hand you a radio transmitted audio tour device to listen to which the kids thought was amazing. It reminded me of my first audio tour from when I was a child at the King Tut exhibit in New York City. Photos below: About to board Nautilus, and in the torpedo room...as opposed to the rooms in my house, like the hit-by-a-torpedo room! The day was wonderful and it ended as so many days do picking up a gallon of milk on the way home, cleaning up and watching a movie together. {We had been informed that Disney Channel had a Wizards of Waverly Place movie tonight.} It's supposed to rain a LOT here tomorrow, so I think it will be a reading day, we certainly can't do my original plan of picking our own peaches...

Painting and Bedtime

We had a birthday to attend today for my darling niece. She's a fan of Angelina Ballerina so I made this board for her to enjoy at the party. This is what I was talking about the other day that I had painted and was thinking of making a small side business of selling or renting them...

It was so much fun to see them play and have a great time together with their friends. It was a beautiful day.

Later today I signed my son up for swimming, mailed my daughter's form in for ballet and tried to shop for some new clothes to wear for my new job as a nursery school aide which starts soon.

At the moment my kids are up way way way past their bedtime and laughing together. It is wonderful to hear them giggle but oh I will never get them back on a school schedule! I say the phrase "settle down" at least twenty times in an evening. My problem is I don't get to "knock it off" fast enough and they take advantage of my desire for each night to be a happy night. It really can be such a struggle to rein it all in earlier when the sun is still out! Tomorrow will be late too for we are headed to a minor league baseball game with friends....I may not post until Friday I think, but I'll try to take some good photos of the action.

Fingerprinting the end of Summer

Worked hard today on paperwork for my new job this fall as a nursery school aide. I needed to get fingerprinted, so I went to the local police department. Because I needed a printed version of the form they took me down to 'central booking' where the printer is--where the arrests are processed. While we were in the middle of the process a prisoner needed to be moved so we cleared out until that was over. It was so gritty, so NYPD Blue! At this time of year many people are getting screened by local authorities and I just want to say how important that work is in the name of all our schoolchildren and their safety.

My husband took his food-safety certification test today. Our restaurant, Two Little Fish, is hurtling like the rest of us toward the end of summer tourist season. We can tell by how tired we feel.

Made fruit salad. And tacos. Trying to make all the foods the family will want to enjoy before the chill of fall comes. And by "the family," I mean "me." I need to make at least one batch of my famous potato salad...and tuna mac... and...

reading: Lean Mean Thirteen, Evanovich

watching: Season One, thirtysomething, released today for the first time on DVD

avoiding: straightening out medical bills

Forced Family Fun Shopping

Kevin and I made this board for Hope's birthday party a few months ago. It's 4'x4' and I drew where I wanted the cutouts and Kevin jigged them out and sanded them. We painted a base coat of white and in craft paint I added this puppy and kitten based on the American Girl pets Coconut and Licorice.

This morning we finished a new board for my niece's birthday with an Angelina Ballerina theme. I painted Angelina and Henry. I'll post a pic in a few days, it's still drying. So my thought is, maybe I could sell these? It wouldn't be worth it for less than $35. Do you think people would pay that for this? I can pretty much do any theme, I'm no artiste, but you're looking for a suggestion cartoon, not actual replica right? So that was the morning, plus a bunch of paperwork, then lunch at home to stave off "the hungries" and out with the whole family for back-to-school shopping! Yes, all of us!
It was so defeating at first, we bought next to nothing in the first four stores we went to, I was really worried. I kept thinking I would do better at home online {of course when I'm home doing online shopping I always feel I'd get a better deal if I went to the store} but finally we hit great shoe success at a Bob's and even better luck at Target for jeans and pencil cases. I don't enjoy that feeling when I'm in a store that somewhere else has a better selection or a better deal and it can be hard to fight the marketing absorbed by young minds of the shoe they have to have. And then I really don't enjoy getting to the next store and realizing I should have just bought what I saw at the first store because it was more in line with what we wanted even though it wasn't perfect. I ran into people we knew at all the stores which was fun for me, less so for the family in tow who wants mom to STOP TALKING and LET'S GO. It doesn't seem all so long ago I was equally impatient with my own parents for the same thing. Forced Family Fun Shopping only happens about twice a year so you have to just go with it. It's a solid reminder why I try to go out and pick things up solo whenever possible.

When the Gas Light Blinks, Fill Up

Quinn took his first turn at altar serving today. He doesn't start as the leader carrying the cross, he's the shorter one who helps and brings the towel and rings the bell when the Host is presented. He looks angelic in the cassock and surplice. It was the first mass I've attended that was not a funeral that I had to wear sunglasses. I will have to try remember this angelic look the very next time he behaves rascally at home.
Hope asked when she will get to have "the holy snack" as she crossed herself (always always she does the shoulder touches in reverse, I will be sad when she regularly gets that right). She endured the length of mass better when I told her next year she can receive the communion in a white dress and have a party like her brother did. Knowing her, it's the dress that has her happy.
My gas light blinked on the way home so I spur-of-the-moment picked up Slurpees at 7-11 while I filled up. I'd intended to cook a big brunch with bacon and buttermilk pancakes at home after church, but everyone was in the mood for lunch instead. The heat of the day was spent quietly inside reading, dozing, tidying, playing. In the evening the neighborhood came calling for bike riding and pretending in the front lawn. We had the big breakfast for dinner with the best cantaloupe of the season. We must sleep downstairs for the heat is too much again.
I am remembering my dear Great Aunt Bette who would have been 102 today. I am attempting to channel her example into my methods of housekeeping and not procrastinating and being innovative. Tomorrow we look forward to Kevin's day off and the first Monday all summer that no chemo need be scheduled. It's like a vacation day and we haven't decided at all how to spend it. My biggest lesson learned today was that zucchini bread and banana bread will not be made if you have left the zucchini in the produce drawer and the banana on the counter. You actually have to take it out, along with the grater, the masher and the other ingredients. Obviously tomorrow's breakfast will be toasted bread with leftover melon. NOT toasted banana bread. Obviously I must channel Aunt Bette more effectively.
reading: Twelve Sharp, Janet Evanovich
watching: DVD of Season One of Little House on the Prairie
avoiding: back-to-school shopping

Off the Shelf

The last time I wrote an entry for this blog was two days after a personal disaster began. When I think of it now,  I'm not surprised that I just stopped. A lot of my life had to abruptly be put on a shelf. I was just trying to keep going with the basics--feeding the kids and not letting everything fall apart.
Somehow, March became August and the understatement is "a lot has happened." If you want the story, I kept a journal at www.caringbridge.org/visit/nancyurbonas. However, here on this blog, I am pulling myself off the shelf. I learned that it's a good idea to type a few lines about each day. It helps me remember them better, helps me collect my brain a bit, which is a very scattered type of thinking-brain. I need to be creative, I need to be motivated, I need to have a place to think. I don't think I always provide myself those things, so I'm hoping that if I type here maybe it will serve as a reminder.
It's Saturday night and a hurricane is headed northeast towards us or further up the coast. The waves at Misquamicut beach are larger than I have ever seen or heard them, and they have flooded over into the street. The heat, no, the humidity has been a challenge this week. One of the major things I accomplished today was I saved $69 at the market with coupons and store savings. It was the first time I'd been in a market since I was diagnosed with cancer, so it was more of a feat than it sounds. Bringing in the groceries from the car was like running a marathon; it took three panting trips by me and two helpful trips from each child. God bless them for helping. Grilled dinner this evening as I desperately try to preserve all things summer and cram as many experiences into the two weeks before school begins as I can. One of my closest friends {from days at Syracuse University in the marching band} came to visit me after dinner as she passed through the area and we had a wonderful talk and cracked one another up, particularly when we realized that my wig is coincidentally almost the exact style and color of her hair! No kidding, I looked like her shorter twin!
It felt good to not be shelved today. Below are two craft projects the kids painted and I had on a shelf above my kitchen sink. You see how one is waving? The cat might be ok just hanging out there, but not the dragon. The dragon wants to climb down and go grocery shopping.
   

Making a Big To-Do

I just sat down to make a list and so I thought I'd make it here.
Send four overdue wedding gifts.
Send thank you notes. For half a dozen major things.
Send holiday cards. Pick a year.
Do laundry.
Do taxes.
Send in the yearbook order.
Daisy stuff.
Cub Scout stuff.
That Netflix movie that's sitting here for at least two weeks.
Send a sympathy card.
Send a birthday card.
Order a birthday present.
Send brother his Girl Scout Cookies.
Clean out my closet. And Kev's. And the kids'.
Bathe the dogs.
Stamp the 17 projects minimum I've been thinking about.
Remind people to get the stamps they wanted before the best sale is over.
Paint the bedroom ceiling.
Hang that light fixture.
Plan the summer schedule.
Host the Usborne party you've wanted so you can get the books you wanted.
Easter is coming. What will I cook?
Clip coupons. Send the rebate. (there's four hours work!)
Work tomorrow night. Maybe work tomorrow lunch at school if they call.
Develop those pictures.
Scrapbook those pictures. For Heaven's sake, don't scrapbook, mop your kitchen floor. It rained--a lot--and you have two dogs!
Fix the hole in the drywall where the railing fell.
Figure out my work schedule for the restaurant for next week.
Do spring yard cleanup raking.
Am I going to have a garden? Get disgusted with how this is going and abandon list.
The only really positive thing is that since I cooked a LOT of food for my son's ninth birthday family party this weekend I do know we'll have leftovers tomorrow. But it's a start!
AND here's the link to my Usborne Book Party. I am a huge fan of the books and have a gazillion of them. I stock up at summer and Christmas on the new titles I need. I use the Spanish and math series for supplemental home school stuff and the art books are particularly fantastic. My kids LOVE these books and yours will too. Take a peek at the site and if you'd like to order please click on my name in the top right before you put things in your cart. My sister-in-law is the consultant if you have any questions and I can put you in touch with her! Thanks for helping me with my big to-do list!
Feel free to write me about your to-dos! It's Monday so we have a whole fresh new week to attack it!