Three years of silence is a long time. A lot can happen in three years. We finished our first year in Wisconsin. Doc working lots of hours at his new job, both in his office and at home. Cards finished middle school. Dash finished elementary school. Trixie having one more year of middle school. Dash and Trixie made some good friends at school. Cards kept to himself but did have a good group to sit with at lunch. The kids spent 6 weeks with my parents during the summer. My house was clean. Well, the main level was clean with the exception of the kids' rooms. Doc biked around Lake Michigan to raise awareness of suicide prevention. Then we started our second year in our little town in the middle of farm country. We rescued an obnoxious little dog at Christmas. Our beagle mix was not happy with that decision. They get along fairly well now. The kids were in three separate schools, high school, middle and elementary. Just before spring break, Doc comes to me with the news that his former employer in MI wants him back. Heck yes! We had to wait as lots of red tape had to be cut through. Finally in June it was officially a go. Spent a week cleaning, fixing and packing. Put the house on the market. It sold in 5 days. I took the kids to my parents' in MI for a couple weeks. Doc drove over the first weekend and we went house hunting. Looked at five, picked out one, made a reasonable offer as we had to find one that weekend, found out Sunday morning the offered was accepted. That house had been on the market 10 days. Same neighborhood as our first house but on the south side. It's two blocks from the youth pastor of our church. End of August we sold our house on Thursday, drove to MI, bought our new house the next morning, unloaded the truck, van and car with the help of some friends. Surprised our church family on Sunday! Monday went to high school orientation for Cards, met with the counselor for Dash and Trixie at the middle school and got Dash to cross country practice. We then had a week to get everybody ready for school. For the boys, it was three new schools in three years. Two for Trixie. It was a little bumpy at the start, but we eventually fell into a good routine. Cards joined some clubs, took racquetball and drivers' ed, and did very well in his classes. He reconnected with a friend from elementary school. Dash did cross country and track with a little racquetball in the winter. His grades were a roller coaster as always, but he finished well. Trixie took ballet and tap and was in AWANA. Her fall birthday party included friends she has missed. She joined band playing flute and participated in Battle of the Books. Doc got his old office back. He spent a month in Japan in the fall and taught a class in the winter semester. He went to Japan again during his spring break and then again for a month in the summer. We jumped right back into life at our church. Crazy busy, but we were home.
In December, I went to Trixie's band concert and ran into an old friend who is the principal of the sister school of the charter school my kids went to. She was Trixie and Dash's first grade teacher before becoming principal. A few days after the concert, I received a message from her secretary (also a friend) asking if I wanted to be their lunch lady as their current one was retiring in December. I like being home, but the extra income would be helpful. We did take a pay cut moving back. We could certainly live on just Doc's salary, but mine would accelerate paying off the mortgage, saving for a new vehicle and saving for college. In January, the lunch lady was back. Not a fan of driving in bad weather, but I do enjoy my job. I also work in the office between breakfast and lunch which is fun, too. February was rough with gallbladder issues which led to surgery in March. A week off of work and office duty only for another week. Spring break helped. Had a weight limit restriction for a few additional weeks. Recovery went extremely well.
Kept busy with the kids doing summer school with Trixie. She also had dance camp and a week at Camp Barakel. Dash did a lot of running in preparation for cross country. Cards met with his Latin teacher each week to do Latin II so that he could take IB Latin III in the fall. He also had summer work for IB Chemistry and IB English. So I didn't give him any additional "school" work. He has no desire to drive and with Doc gone a lot over the summer, no practice either. After 6 weeks of racquetball this fall, he also dropped that. The course load for the IB diploma is pretty heavy. It was a rough quarter getting used to everything but he's doing all right. The other big change is Trixie has quit dance altogether and is now doing fencing. She loves it! Oh, the other big news is that my parents also moved closer to us this summer. They live in the next neighborhood to the south. Two minutes to drive over there. Doc went to Australia for 10 days right after school started. It was wonderful having my parents here to get kids to where they needed to be. Every Sunday evening Mom and I have a calendar meeting to figure out who is going where with what child on what day. Some weeks are crazier than others. Trixie spends the night over there every chance she gets. She just came home today after spending three nights there. She helped bake pies for Thanksgiving, did some fun projects and helped put up Mema's Christmas tree today.
So a lot has happened in the last three years. I'm still a terrible housekeeper. I still have a never ending list of things that need attention. I'm also gone from 7:45 to 1:30 doing my lunch lady thing. Still hoping that next year will somehow be miraculously different when it comes to cleaning my house and finishing projects from my list. In fact, I've written down 75 things already for 2017 that need attention. Some cleaning, some organizing, some habits that need to be developed, some kids things.....it's just a really strange list of things that bug me and I want to change. Instead of waiting until January, I've already picked 3 things from the list to focus on. First, I'm going to thoroughly clean our library. Today, I found the floor! We had some heavy rains that led to discovering a crack in the foundation and some water damage to two of our bookcases. So the books from those shelves were stacked all over the other end of the room. I bought two new cases and put them in my office. We moved Doc's desk to where the old cases had been (after we dried and fixed the crack). He wanted a window which our office doesn't have.I don't know why it took so long to move the books from the floor to my office but it did. Some of the books were damaged. ;-( Anyway, I found the floor and vacuumed all of it today, not just the path down the middle. Next I will start on one side and use the Mt. Vernon method of cleaning and organizing. Lots of books, games, puzzles and toys to go through. Second on the short list is finding scholarships for Cards. He's a junior! I get emails daily from a scholarship website. Have I done anything to get Cards to apply? Nope! I know he's been busy with his school work and he's stayed on top of his chores. (The chore chart I developed in WI has been great.) And he should be preparing for the SAT in March. He has a really bad attitude towards it. But he really does need to be filling out scholarship applications. We will probably not have enough saved up for college even with my job. He'll either need to get a job or get some scholarships. Third on the list, my jewelry cabinet. It's in total disarray from our moves. I couldn't find a pair of earrings last Sunday I wanted to wear. I think Trixie would be thrilled to help me sort through my bling. On Sunday after church and lunch, I think we'll start sorting through my jewelry.
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