Can I Get a Cup of Coffee Around Here?

Mornings have become a little hectic around here. I'm out of bed by 6:00am and can usually count on a half hour by myself to ask God what's up for the day before the little guy is crying. He doesn't do mornings well. Wrong side of the crib or something. David and Kelly are also up at 6:00am and heading out to school clutching a package of Pop-Tarts - the breakfast of champions and of kids whose mom won't make them anything. I get our Kindergarten girl up at 7:00am and get her on the bus at 8:00 and she's pretty much the easiest kid ever and she ONLY eats Lucky Charms which proves the theory, "You are what you eat." because she is charming indeed. A friend drops off her daughter at 8:15am so she can homeschool with us and I wake up the other three kids and unhook Grace from her dialysis machine.
I don't mind any of this except for my coffee problem. I pour my cup of coffee intending to sit and drink it and an interruption happens. By the time I return to it - it's cold. So I nuke it in the microwave and take a sip and then again an interruption. Ten minutes later I'm back- the coffee is again cold and another round of radiation in the microwave. I confess to nuking a cup 5 times in one morning. But today was bad. I had reheated my cup a few times and now I really needed it. It wasn't in the microwave. It wasn't anywhere. I retraced my steps, upstairs, in the laundry room, by the computer, the copier, the back porch. I'm mad and I really really want some coffee. I resort to bribing my children. I promise to give anyone who finds it a candy bar that they can eat right now if they want it. (I don't actually have a candy bar to give them but I was willing to lie at this point.) Everyone's dashing around searching. Steven finally finds it outside at the end of the driveway where I had set it down to shoot hoops while waiting for Gabby's bus to come. I send the coffee for it's final spin in the microwave and sit down. It's now 9:00 and we start school. We pray around the table and by the time we're done the coffee is cold. I get up and dump it down the sink.

Growing Old Gracefully but Not Ready to Die

I know I need to change my name from Big Red Driver and fix the header of my blog since David killed Big Red, but I haven't been able to think of what to change it to. I thought about the nursery rhyme I named my blog for, 'There was an old lady who lived in a shoe...." but I didn't know if I wanted to be known as an old lady. Then I had this conversation with our new 5 year old.
"What will happen to me if you die while I'm your foster kid?"
"Honey, why do you think I would die?"
"Because you're so old."
"Sweetie, I'm not old, I'm only 52."
"That's really really really old."
Five year olds expect to have much younger moms and I'm hoping to live well beyond my fifties.

Little Miss Tidy (or Monk's younger sister)

Most of my children are messy. Some more than others...don't ask about the boy's rooms. But I have one, just one, who is not only neat, but borders on compulsive. Her chore is taking the garbage to the road for pick up. This is what it looked like yesterday.

Just connect this thingy to that thingy and.....

With Grace's last surgery finished to repair her catheter, we did one last training day at Children's Hospital and they told us we were on our own. We loaded the car up with machines and tubes and bags and a million other parts and pieces and brought it all home. I was just a little, teeny bit apprehensive (massively actually) about the whole thing but how bad could I mess it up? Monday night we hooked everything up and started the dialysis running at 10:30pm. At 4:30 in the morning I heard an alarm from her machine, went into her room, slipped on a draining bag of fluid on the floor and did one of those clawing, spinning into the air turns and caught myself. Grace was so sound asleep she didn't hear the alarm at all or my flailing around next to her. I flipped her over a couple of times and the alarms stoped. The next morning at 7:30 I unhooked her. We did it!! If you have to have kidney failure and you have to do dialysis, peritoneal dialysis is the way to go. Grace has no more inconvenience than being tethered to a machine while she sleeps. She feels good, no side affects and the rest of the day is hers. As fun as this all is, we are praying that a kidney comes available to her soon and she can be "regular" again. Grace has never been regular but we're not telling her that!

Oh But You Look So Marvelous

I've been thinking for the last week that our little guy needed a hair cut. I spent a lot of time thinking about it but didn't actualy get up the nerve to do it until tonight. First, no two year olds like to get their hair cut and secondly what most kids just don't like, our little guy can take to a new level of unhappines. It was amusing (not to him) and the end result was a new "big boy" look. He wasn't buying it.

Keep Your Shirt On

My good friend, Adela, took in her nephew to raise a few years ago and he's now almost four. This is not only wonderful for him, but for us as well. Adela really likes shopping and that includes shopping for adorable little boy clothes. She and her husband had wanted to go into foster care and so had saved everything their nephew had outgrown. It seemed as though God had other plans for their family and so foster care was put on the back burner. Adela called the other day and asked if we would like all the clothes that she had saved. I really really wanted them but we had a dilemma still. Our little guy would strip naked if he didn't have a one piece outfit on which was amusing but probably not acceptable in most social circles. I asked a few people to pray that he would get over this nudity issue so we could put all those outfits on him. We picked up the two huge crates of clothes after going through them. The three girls and I were dying to dress him up. In faith the next day we put him in a pair of shorts and a shirt. He kept them on. We couldn't believe it!! The next day the same and again today!! Hallelujah...tomorrow he's wearing real clothes to church!! We decided on two outfits. One is the summer Hawaii look and the other the sporty look. How will we ever pick!! Maybe we could change him halfway through the service. Thanks for praying Anita!!!

Everybody's Getting Smart Around Here

School started at our house this week.
Kelly is off to college and is doing her best to negotiate public transportation from our house to classes and back each day. I think the classes are easier than the bus schedule.
Two are off to public school, one for the last year and one for the very first time. Kindergarten is adorable, complete with a Polly Pocket book bag/Dora the Explora lunch box and a little name tag with a picture of a racoon or something and her teacher's name. David is a senior and that's wonderful too although his book bag is much less pink and he isn't required to nap but just nods off in his after lunch classes.
There are four kids homeschooling this year and our first two days have been just about perfect.
Grace has also drifted off to sleep a few times during the day but she swears it's the Tylenol 3 for pain relief from the surgery and "but it's not because your'e a boring teacher or what your teaching is boring, Mom, really".









James has kept our two year old amused while we school and has apparently been giving him piano lessons as well. The little guy also read a few magazines to keep busy while we did math. It looks messy but I think he was just tearing out a few recipes from Martha Stewart Living that he thought the family might enjoy.


Does this mean summer is over?