nick – Lisa Holcomb

So hey, it’s February, and so therefore we have the Plague. David has this on again off again stomach virus at least one day every week since the end of January. Ben & Nick have been coughing, but seem okay for the most part. Greg has been snotty & feverish and coughing for a solid week now. I got a sinus infection three weeks ago, spent two weeks literally writhing in pain before that started dying off, and am now living in the land of Am I Sick or Not? (Which means one day of feeling good & productive followed by one day of deathly-sinus-headache followed by one day of chills/fever/but otherwise fine followed by one day of sore throat/sinus pain). Greg and I have missed all our MOPS stuff & coffee dates & play dates. It’s making me cranky.

I’ve pretty much watched every movie in the house that is safe to watch in front of Greg and am now starting to watch things like Pretty Woman and wonder why,oh,why anyone thought a movie about a prostitute was acceptable for young people to watch. As a kid watching it, it was AWESOME, but as a mom watching it, I’m thinking about things like Vivienne getting tetanus from getting scratched on the fence and what kind of horrible germs are in that toilet that she just plunged her hand into and whoa, all the dirt! Yeah. I watched Legend & Total Recall last week (after kid hours) and was amazed at all the gore. My brain, it is exploding. I shouldn’t be allowed movies in this state. No, no, no.

In other news, we’ve been on a science kick around the house. David had to do a research paper & model & report on a natural disaster and he, naturally, chose a meteor shower. So we did that. We also made a tsunami, because a meteor strike in water can cause that. Then we made a tornado in a jar. One of the other class mom’s is a biologist of some sort & she brought a bunch of chemicals up to school & did a demonstration, so David wanted to know what kind of chemicals he had access to at home, so we tried to figure that out & then figure out what kind of experiments we could do from here without buying anything special.

Ben’s started doing math at school. He got a 100 on his first paper (BEST IN CLASS, MAMA!!!) and has ever since been making his own math problems to work after school. He’s also been learning about coins and passed that mania on to Greg, who has been playing pirate or shopkeeper, whichever one takes his fancy as long as he gets to count the money. Ben’s been trying to teach him that each coin “costs” a different amount, but Greg just counts number of coins. It’s very funny to watch them argue about it.

I finally got my writing notebook back in the mail, so worked on that a bit yesterday. Progress notes to be posted at dreamwidth.

Nick is obsessed with the Olympics, which has been fun, I guess. He’s the kind of person that will watch any event, so if the Olympics is on at any point, he turns the TV on. I, on the other hand, am mainly just interested in the figure skating (so I went to bed way early last night).

I guess February doesn’t completely suck. I just wish we all would get better finally.

I hate giving subject lines for these posts, especially when I’m just updating about everything. Maybe I should go back and retitle this “More of everything” Hmm.

David has been doing a lot of scouts stuff from his book, which means that all of us have been doing a lot of scouts stuff because you can’t have just one kid doing all the “fun” stuff. The kids liked making family trees again (this time with phone calls to relatives to ascertain actual dates & real names) and finding the page in the phone book that has all the emergency info and calling different city officials to ask questions about how the city works and doing more of the recycling on their own (including picking out everything from their Happy Meals that could be recycled & taking that home to put in our bin rather than leaving it there with all the other trash “They waste SO MUCH, Mommy! Why do they do that?”)

Ben is steadily growing stronger reading skills. It’s been really hard getting him to read aloud to us at home. He’s the second best reader in his class (behind Amy, whose mom is an elementary school teacher), but reading at home has just not been something he’s willing to do. So now we just have him read a few pages out of each book we do at bedtime story time (in addition to whatever they send home as reading homework.) Knowing that he only has a few pages and that we’ll fill in all the hard words seems to make it easier on him. Ben has also taken to my old Cabbage Patch Kids lately. He has a few that he especially likes and will dress up for certain occasions. It’s pretty funny.

Greg is still climbing everything in sight. He has ropes that he carries around with him nearly at all times and will tie to things. He gets his brothers to help him tie them up higher than he can reach. During the day when they’re not home to assist him he’ll do general kid stuff, but as soon as they get home, he’s back to finding new & better places to climb. Oh, and when he paints stuff, he mixes all the colors & makes all his painting black. He paints weird stuff, too. like Oklahoma.

Nick continues to spend loads of time in Beaumont, but that will end on February 12th. I can’t wait for him to be home for real, but you know what? It’s going to be an adjustment. I’ve gotten used to my weeknight schedule & I don’t know if I’ll transition back to Couple Time all-the-time very well. Currently I’ve been doing Monday nights as project nights, Tuesday nights as other-people-time, & Wednesday nights as TV time. We’ll see if Nick likes that plan.

I’ve been writing, cleaning, etc. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. (Writing updates continue to be at my dreamwidth journal)
Or fixing people’s computer woes. Apparently word has spread that I have a way with computers, so I’ve gotten a few phone calls the past month or so requesting assistance. Mostly over the phone “how do I?” stuff, but this weekend I went to someone’s house & set stuff up, then fielded calls/texts about it all across Saturday afternoon & Sunday morning.

Speaking of calls/texts, we’ve noticed an upswing in our phone usage in the last 6 months, not because Nick’s been gone (we actually talk less during the day, so the extra call at night just blends into the regular usage), but just, ya know, being friendlier or something. I don’t know. So we started running our usage stats, first through Sprint (who actually said our current plan suited us, despite our being $20-$50 over every month), then on our own. We added in our wishlists of how we’d like to use our phones that we aren’t currently doing, looked up plan comparisons, phone reviews, etc, and found out that we’re better off staying with our current carrier (Sprint, which works well here all the way to CS) and getting smartphones with the unlimited family plan. So once our refunds from last years medical expenses come in, we’ll be doing that. We’re looking at the HTC Hero phone and the Samsung Moment (we haven’t actually played with them in store yet, but I’ll be doing that tomorrow if the sick kid goes back to school by then).

In other randomness, I’ve been drinking tons of tea lately, trying all different kinds from various places. My favorite is the supergood ginger kind that my friends sister gave her from Teavana (more details once I’ve seen the canister again). Republic of Tea’s Cinnamon Plum loose leaf tea is also very nice (but Blackberry Sage remains my favorite from them). Lipton has a flavored green tea that’s orange, passionfruit, and jasmine that I like for afternoons. I also have a new favorite otc bagel: Sara Lee’s Blueberry. There’s something different about them now: they’re more lemon flavored than they used to be. Mmm.

I have some news that I’m sitting on currently that I’m really excited about, but am awaiting more information before I can announce it. Eeee. I love having exciting news & I hate waiting to share it, but that’s the way it goes.

That’s it for this week’s update. More later. 🙂
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Now playing: Michael Mucklow – Pipe’s Canyon Sunset
via FoxyTunes