The best day ever! (part two)

Look what came in the mail today! My books finally arrived today for this up coming term. The mail-lady brought me an open box and told me that the UPS driver delivered them to the wrong 234 in my complex and that the woman living there had given it to her. She brought them to the back door and knocked, which was odd since she had already been to my back door and literally opened the door and threw a package on my kitchen floor...so I sort of expected her to do the same this time. Maybe the only reason she actually knocked is because it's a crime to tamper with my mail, but it's perfectly acceptable for her to just open the door to my home and throw stuff inside. So anyway, I opened my first package and (I kid you not...) I jumped up and down screaming that my Wollmeise arrived. I am totally in love and I can't wait to knit something with this yarn. But first I think I'll just keep it for a little while, and touch it and love it before I even get around to winding it into a lovely center pull ball.

I went onto the Wollmeise site today (I've taken to stalking it like other obsessed knitters) and I was very upset to find that she had updated the "in stock list" today and that everything was already sold out. I've looked every day for two weeks and today I got lazy (I was preoccupied with trying to get through to the RI Unemployment Teleserve line) and I missed it. Nuts! Well...I guess I'll just have to pay more attention and stalk it properly. I need more.

So, Monday will be the big day and I'm not too excited about it. I'm going in at 9:30 am and I'm sure I'll be fine when I get there but I'd much rather be at home with my boys...even if they act like they did today. I've gotten my work clothes washed and sorted out, and I've been back in the gym for the last week or so, which helps my work clothes fit better :) I also needed to get back in the gym because I need to get my energy back up. I also needed to get some iron pills because I just felt really weak around that time of the month, but I've been feeling much better now. I think I'm getting the hang of this "vegetarian" thing, and I'm cooking more now. It's been fun and my family will eat some of the things I cook (voluntarily). Maybe I can slowly shift them over.

Whiped out

Today was just like any other day, except the part where I slept on the couch for four hours, woke up feeling tired and weak, and forced myself to go to Sams club to buy a gift for a friend's wedding tomorrow and a large bottle of Iron. The cycles of my body are so unpredictable due to my IUD and now that I'm not eating meat I really feel it. I've never felt so weak or tired since I last gave birth and when I was in the store I started to feel hot and swayed a little bit. I've been good about getting protein, and now with a friend's advice I'm making sure that I eat enough carbs too so that I keep up my fuel and my blood sugar doesn't drop too low but I guess I'm still not getting enough iron even though I've been pretty good about varying my veggies. I'm hoping that the pills will kick in by tomorrow morning so I can be alert and peppy at church, and at my friend's wedding.

I'll need to eat before the wedding tomorrow. It's a really low key wedding in their Aunt's back yard with a cookout to follow and there will be the customary hot dogs and hamburgers. I'm not eating hot dogs or hamburgers now. I joked that I'll bring a Boca burger with me and ask them to throw it on the grill, and two of my friends suggested that I really should. I don't know how comfortable I feel about carrying veggie burgers around in my purse and then asking them to throw in on the grill but I might have to consider it. I'm already feeling weak and I don't think I can live on green salad and potato salad all day, lol.

Palmyra

This afternoon I picked The Boy up from his trip with the Ward to Palmyra for the pageant. I got him packed up Friday night and took him up to the church to drop him off bright and early yesterday complete with a lunch box full of snacks. I figured he'd have a good time hanging out with the other Young Men and families from the ward in New York and when I picked him up today I thought it all had gone just as I expected until we got in the car and I asked him about his trip. He loved the pageant, loved sleeping in the bunk beds in the cabin, and loved being in New York. What he didn't love was being called a "murderer" or reading signs that our church "is founded by the Devil" or that "astrology authenticated the Bible, not the Book of Mormon". Really... Does it make a person feel better about themselves to yell at a 12 year old boy and call him a murderer? And whom did we murder? How can someone claim that astrology authenticated the Bible and not the Book of Mormon? Last I checked (and I can certainly be wrong on this one, but last I checked) astrology was not condoned by any church, so...to me it's like saying "my Ouija board said the Bible was authentic but not the Book of Mormon"...of course it's not going to tell you that the Book of Mormon (the most correct book of scripture today) is correct. The adversary doesn't want that! And as for our church being "founded by the Devil", well the Bible says to turn the other cheek and to be Christ-like in our treatment of others. It doesn't tell us to yell at children through bullhorns and put terrible things on picket signs and threaten people. Our Bishop told one of the children (young adult really) who got very angry about it to calm down, and told everyone "just smile". That's the real Christian way. And what did my son get for smiling at his accusers? He got a grown man yelling at him "don't you smile at me." I guess those protesters really showed us who were the real Christians...

Harry Potter and Unemployment

So, what do Harry Potter and my phone call the RI Unemployment have in common? Both run about three hours in length. It took me two hours of calling and hanging up just to get into the call que, and another hour and a half of waiting on hold via my speaker phone to get a person on the line. I found out that I had been approved for benefits five weeks ago, and they had to reopen my case and fix something so that I could call and report for last week. I'll be getting some papers to send off so that I can be paid for the last five. And now that I've gotten this all straightened out, I'll be going back to work in two weeks, lol.

Harry Potter was great, and did not feel at all like a three hour movie. Dante and I went to the 1pm show and didn't get out until 3:45. Then we went home, ate something, and I took a nap because Alex had me up at 6:30am. He's doing well with his potty training still, and in a few days I'm going to start trying him at nap time with out a pull up. This means that I'm starting to limit his drinks now and I'll need to make sure that the boys are on board with me so we can be consistent.

Aaron went into the kitchen and moved things around in the cabinets like he occasionally does, and this time I was there while he did it. I always put things back where I had them, because I need it there so I know where it is. As he moved a bag of nut clusters, I said "DON'T DO THAT" and moved them back. He started to ask what the deal was, and then cut himself off and said "OCD?". I didn't know how to explain why I didn't want him to move the bag so I just said yes, but really...I just don't like when people move my things around. I do all the cooking and I like to know where stuff is. I'm only anal about my work space. If I use something regularly, I want it handy. He said that he sees me "scatter" things around and so he didn't figure I'd have OCD tendencies, but I told him that nothing is scattered and that I know where everything is. He said that it all looks messy but to be truthful, 75% of the stuff "scattered" around is his stuff and I left it where he left it. The table is covered with unopened mail...all in his name. I have a few books and some yarn but I use those things almost every day where he doesn't really use his things. I do have a few things out like my bike and the cat carrier, but that's because we don't have anywhere to put those things. The real problem is that we don't have storage and we are a family of four living in a two bedroom apartment in Rhode Island where every apartment is so old that it was built in the colonial days and they didn't have things like couches or bikes. So tomorrow while Aaron is on a movie set as an extra for the movie The Fighter, I'm going to move my spill-over yarn into my clear storage drawers upstairs and leave his things out, and tell him that if it still looks cluttered, then he has himself to thank for that.

Touch of OCD

Yesterday I went to counseling with my husband, and we talked a little bit about how I usually take on way too much, and then I'm way too hard on myself about how things come out. Like the time that I sent the photo of my 2x2 ribbing to the Knitters Guild to have them look and tell me that I had done wrong, and they told me that the swatch looked fine and I was being too hard on myself. "This is not machine knitting" she told me. I've always had a hard time accepting compliments, and I usually concentrate on the areas that I didn't do well, and don't see all the things that I did very well.

During the session, I got to talking about how the stress of my father's death, my break-up, moving, and finding out about Dante's ADHD left a mark on me and how I haven't been quite the same since. I feel like I just didn't handle things as well as I could have...I was just too tired and too agitated to be much of a parent to Dante for at least a year. I wasn't very much fun to live with, and I think that it affected my relationship with Dante for a long time. We weren't very close and I had a hard time connecting with him. All my time went to making sure that I got him to school, that I got to work, and that we both got to church. I felt a bit like Bella in New Moon after Edward left her, and she spent most of the book pretending to be normal for Charlie. I tried to look like nothing was wrong for Dante. And now I have guilt about that. Even though I know that I shouldn't and that nothing that happened was my fault, I still feel it. Now I get really upset anytime I talk about Dante and things that he's been through, like 6th grade math, because all I can think about is everything that I didn't get to do for him. My counselor stopped me in the middle of telling her everything I was doing now to make sure he can pass math this coming year, and told me that I started to cry about not doing enough, but all she's heard me talk about is everything that I was doing for my family. It's just that what ever I do never seems like enough when I'm working, and maybe I'm feeling a little anxiety about going back to work.

I should start work in the next week or two and to help me stay focused, I have asked Aaron to tell me when I'm being too hard on myself. We talked in the session, and decided that he should ask me if he can help me with anything, and that can be my que to calm down or re-prioritize. But the really funny thing that we talked about is that I knit constantly because I need to do something with my hands at all times. I'm used to running on all cylinders, all the time and I don't know how to do one thing at a time anymore. She said that I might have a touch of OCD and that the knitting helps hold off the anxiety. It's funny because I studied OCD this week, and usually Psychology students get paranoid that they have everything they read about (like med students do), but I didn't pick up anything when I read about OCD. I figured I had some issues with depression (which I have in the past) but not any compulsive issues. And maybe I have a little bit of a compulsion to knit, but it doesn't help at all that there are so many patterns out there that I want to knit, that I couldn't get them all knit if I did nothing but knit every day of my life. So last night after I realized that I made a mistake on the heel flap and had to rip it back, I decided that it was a good time to put the knitting down, went and got a hot cocoa, and sat on the couch next to Aaron and just watched wrestling with him. It was relaxing. Maybe I'll try today to allow myself to do nothing, and see what happens.

Today, Dante passed the sacrament for the first time. He had two babies trying to talk to him as he took the sacrament tray out to the lobby for anyone who arrived a little late. It was really cute. I was alone in primary except for Kristen who was a huge help, and we pulled some missionaries in (at her suggestion) to play piano for us for music time. I blew the dust off of my Family Home Evening manual and found the section on scriptures this morning to flesh out my lesson a little bit. It's funny how you try to prepare this whole lesson plan, and then when you get into it, it diverts off in a whole different direction. I guess that's the direction that the spirit thought my lesson needed to go. I played Bible or Book of Mormon with the Junior primary, where I put up the names of nine prophets from each of the books ( three new testament, three old testament, and three BofM), and had them tell me if the prophet is from the Bible or the Book of Mormon. It was really cute, but things were a bit out of wack today as they just had trouble paying attention with all the new people we had down there filling in for the day. Then we only had one child in Senior primary, so I pulled up a chair and we talked about the scriptures, what is in there, and then played Bible or Book of Mormon again, but this time we had two of the teachers play with him, and they had to tell if the prophet was in the New Testament, Old Testament, or Book of Mormon, plus something about that person. It went over really well on a smaller scale.

I'm swatching for my Something Red cardigan and I spent about an hour looking for something that I could use that was worsted weight, and roughly the same weight as the suggested yarn. I don't have anything that's exact, but I do have two options that are in the neighborhood of what I'm looking for. I checked Ravelry and one of the other knitters used the Cascade 220 which I have in my stash for another sweater but I don't think I'll be using it for that. Then I have some Lyon Brand Wool Ease in a country blue that I'm swatching with right now. I've got enough of both to knit this sweater, but I think I'd really like to be able to throw it in the washing machine and dryer because I really want something to wear to work. I've been knitting work-wear recently. I also have to cast on again for my Grandmother's socks. I took the other one off the needles because I just hated the yarn I was using and I love the pattern so I just picked up the Comfort DK in yellow and I'll start over again. Maybe right after I settle on the yarn I want for my sweater. I've always got a pair of socks on the needles, maybe I need to have a sweater on the needles at all times too!

Vindication

Today I took Dante to the tutor for the first time. She had him take a math assessment to see where he was and what he needed help with. When he finished the test and she graded it, she told me (privately) that he had scored at a 5th grade level in math and that I was right. She said "it was like last year never happened". He specifically needs help in fractions, percentages and decimals (just like I said). I told her how the LEA called me this week and said that she hadn't pulled Dante's file and doesn't know what's in his IEP, and also that she wasn't sure what my primary complaint was. I told her that my primary complaint is that he was failing because he didn't learn anything, and now my other issue is that they passed him even though he didn't learn anything! The tutor is going to have another teacher look over the results just to be sure that what she saw is accurate, and she is going to write a report for me to take to the school next year. The did not teach him any coping skills, which I asked them to do, and they clearly did not teach him any math. So now he should only need a few sessions with her to refresh and pick up what he missed, and hopefully he'll be done just before I go back to work.

Aaron is going to have a procedure done on his right leg to fix the varicose vein in two weeks. They don't strip the veins anymore; they will insert a catheter into his vein and cauterise it. It's an out patient procedure so he should be up and around the next day.

Alex is still refusing to potty train unless he is completely naked. If he wears a pull-up he just goes in the pull-up, and if he wears underwear, he pees his pants. He only uses the potty if he's not wearing any bottoms, and that's just not going to work in the outside world.

Dante has tutoring, and summer reading to do. I have to make him play outside because Alex goes totally nuts if Dante is in the house. He's like a completely different child.

I finished my Mina's Tuxedo Vest and it finally dried (after 36 hours). I wore it out today and it's not bad at all. I think I'll be getting use out of it at my new job. I'm trying to re-read Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince before the movie starts this Wednesday. I'll be taking Dante to see it for his birthday. This is my 9th week of this term and my final papers have to be turned in by Tuesday at midnight. I have one turned in, and the other submitted to the writing center for review. I have sharing time this Sunday, and after next week I'll have a week break before starting an Algebra class and an Honor's Cognitive Psychology class. My work is cut our for me this time. I'll be trying to work on my Master's Level work during my week off from school, and working on a pair of socks for my Grandma.

Happy 12th Birthday Dante!

Today is Dante's birthday and he is 12. Just let that sink in a little bit. He participated in a full fast today, went into Young Men's, and was ordained as a Deacon in church. All big things. After the fast was over I made taco's for dinner at his request and baked a chocolate cake because he is tired of having 4th of July cakes every year. On the 15th, he and I will go to see the new Harry Potter movie for his birthday.

Now, as some of you may know I am a recent vegetarian. I was given a blessing after getting really sick and was told twice during the blessing to stay away from meat. I've been praying about it just about every night and I haven't gotten any message to the contrary so...no meat it is. I haven't forced my family to join me on this journey yet and my husband isn't very excited about it so it's just been me and sometimes Alex because he doesn't really like meat anyway. Dante will eat what ever I put in front of him so he doesn't really count. Anyway, I picked up some Quorn Grounds, that I originally got to try for free as one of my Buzz campaigns, and used it in place of ground beef for my taco's. It was great and I couldn't tell the difference at all. The boys had ground beef and I had Quorn Grounds. I think that the fact that I got to try this new soy-free meat substitute about 4-6 weeks before being told to go vegetarian was no coincidence. I'm allergic to soy protein, and milk, so I couldn't do it before but now I think I'll be okay.

The school term is almost over, and I'm still doing very well. I learned from my mistakes last term and I made sure to check on my final project regularly throughout the term so that I could work on it as I went. I'm well prepared to write my paper for my psychology class, and I've got my final draft reviewed and approved for my composition class. I've enrolled in my classes for next term, which are an Algebra class and Honors Cognitive Psychology. I'll be going back to work in a few weeks and I'll be working on finishing up the four projects that I cast on in the last week.

Well, before I go in to wash dishes and frost Dante's cake, I want to say that I got to meet Nancy today and it was a real pleasure! Nancy is bright, and sunny, and pleasant. Hopefully she'll be around on craft night and get to come along.