a pobble present and other birthday goodies

for my birthday this year i am getting the pobble for a present! she arrives between 6 and 6:30 tonight (unless traffic is horrific) to spend the weekend with me. as we were im'ing about it she told me that she was going to be my present... and i am more than happy with that.












hubby's present for me arrived yesterday... a new hot pink cell phone and bluetooth earpiece with matching pink streak. his bluetooth was a christmas present and i've been jealous of him ever since.

tomorrow night my parents will take us all out for dinner at the chinese buffet. i really wanted mexican, but the kids won't eat mexican and besides... i can have mexican on saturday for my actual birthday since the pobble also said she would cook... and she can make mexican.

i will be 37 which is still young... but it's as old as i've ever been. last summer vacation my uncle made the comment that i was pushing 40. i gave him as hard a time of it as i possibly could and i am pretty certain that i embarrassed him... after all, if i am pushing 40 that makes him OLD.

this growing up thing still feels weird to me. how was it that i came to be pushing 40? i don't feel like i'm pushing 40... and is it possible to push 40 away?

in the meantime i have been growing my hair for locks of love. i've been saying that i was going to cut it by my birthday whether or not i had enough hair. after a while the ponytail gets boring and i yearn for the short cut which gives me no options on the question of how to wear my hair today. i might have 11 inches if i go very short... but hubby has been pretty adamant about wanting me to have long hair so i will probably go yet another month before doing any chopping.

now it is time to get back to work so i have lots of time to celebrate my birthday weekend!

God's peace y'all

do i offend?

i arrive at work, put down my things and my secretary says, "want a good laugh?"

well, of course i do, "i could use a laugh... tell me."

prior to my arrival she had taken a phone call from a local business owner who was calling all the churches in town. she had just recently moved her little shop to a small shopping center next to the local tatoo parlor. (and yes, i have been considering going there for the next tat... even have a business card for one of the artists.)

now this woman is what i might call a jesus freak. at christmas time she had a sign outside her other shop that said, "Merry CHRISTmas... Put the Christ back in Christmas." and now that it is fast approaching easter she has a, "Honk Twice for Jesus." sign in front of her new shop.

so, the owners of the tat parlor approached her and told her she had to take down her sign.

"i'm not taking down my sign." she tells them.

"it is offending our clients," they tell her, "who are satanists."

"i'm not taking down my sign." she tells them again.

"there will be repercussions."

so she called all the local churches and asked them to have their members drive by her store and honk twice.

i laughed out loud, with my jaw gaping... and then i went on a tirade.

we live in a pluralistic society. not everyone has to be christian. and yet... instead of us being more tolerant of others we've become more intolerant! i really don't care if some (you-know-what) satanists are offended by jesus!!!

*sigh*

God's peace y'all and don't forget to honk twice for jesus.

being sick stinks

well, i am still on the antibiotics for the strep. feeling better but still not totally myself. the thing that really sucks about being out for so long is the back log. 10 mintes before church started and i realized about 50 things that i needed to have done before today arrived that never got done. phone calls that got started, but never completed... phone calls that never got made at all.

and there were a host of things out of place. a whole piece of music was missing from the altar that i use every sunday. (5 times now i've done this particular one and i still go flat in the one part.) i had to run out of the church and down to my office to find another copy of it and wound up grabbing the whole book for one page of chanting.

the silent prince came with me this morning. he usually goes with hubby, but i took him today. that threw me off a little. i didn't make it into my office before church and so i didn't see all the things that would have reminded me of things i needed to have...

and then he peed on the woman who was watching him. she had to get up in the middle of my sermon to change him. i almost ran home to get her dry pants... but since i had already left the santuary once for something i had forgotten i let her suffer through wet pants for the rest of the service. bless her heart.

and i've been neglecting posting my sermons on-line. something i was doing religiously (pun intended) for quite some time. so i'm going to do it now.

here's the link and the last several weeks of sermons.

God's peace y'all

oh bugger

so the silent prince has a gate on his bedroom door. we have it there so that we know when he is upstairs he's safe and not getting into things.

today i put him in his room, shut the gate, and went to take a shower so i could go to work. i bathed, got dressed, put on some make-up, and walked down the hall to my closet in order to find my shoes. my closet is in between the kids' rooms and i happened to turn and look into the princess kitty's room and guess who was standing there...

... that's right! the silent prince! little bugger.

so i picked him up and put him back in his room then proceeded to watch as he threw his little leg over the gate and pulled himself over.

life as i know it is over.

and then there is my grandmother, who turned 100 at christmas. you may remember that i wrote about her and my uncle having cancer. my uncle is doing very well, but my grandmother's tumor is growing despite the radiation treatments. the tumor is next to her eye and if left unchecked will rot her face... an unpleasant and awful way to die. so she will be having surgery to remove part of the tumor.

i think it is best, if the tumor were anywhere else in her body, doing anything else... i might feel differently, but it is not somewhere else or doing something else. it is rotting away her face... that beautiful face that smiles and laughes.

her name is pansy so if you would... please keep her in your prayers, good thoughts, and or whatever it is that you do to connect with God or some higher power.

and God's peace y'all

3 out of 4

3 out of 4 members of the cats household now have strep throat. 4 out of 4 members of the cats household do not recommend having strep... especially hubby, the one out of 4 who does not yet have it.

i say "yet" because strep is contagious and i expect him to show symptoms any day now. if i am lucky i will be well enough to take care of everyone once he gets it.

i say this because hubby is super-dad and super-hubby capable of doing 10 loads of laundry, cleaning the entire house, and mopping all the floors in a single day. not to mention the fact that he gets the kids up in the morning, gets them dressed, and puts them on the bus before i have my morning cup of tea.

needless to say... i am not looking forward to him imminent sickness, of which i am sure he will get eventually.

so now i am going to get into bed, watch bad daytime television, and hope the kids take naps.

God's peace y'all... and a little echinacea, hot tea and vitamin c too

i love the 80's

so last night i downloaded a mess of alternative 80's hits and have been playing them over and over again allowing the memories to wash over me. the 80's were not my favorite time... i was a depressed teenager filled with angst that would have made ally sheedy's character from the breakfast club seem happy-go-lucky. and yes, i now have a copy of don't you forget about me by the simple minds.

while i didn't enjoy the 80's i certainly have some amazing memories of friends and the music we listened to.

walking home from the bus stop with ed, who was dating one of my best friends while i was dating one of his, singing the violent femmes, blister in the sun while wearing our combat boots. i was so proud of mine which resembled cowboy boots. i still have them because i used to say that i wanted to be buried in them. of course my feet have grown after all this time that it would be a real trick to get them on my feet even if they were dead feet.

then there was malcolm, who all us girls in highschool would describe as dark chocolate. he was a swimmer and tall and as smart as he was beautiful. there really isn't one particular song that made me think of him, but once you start reminiscing other memories appear and so did one's of malcolm. years after graduating i was flipping through my yearbook and realized that i hadn't noticed that he had signed it saying that he had as big a crush on me as i had had on him. while i am grateful for the life that my mistakes lead me to... if i had known then...

on my 19th birthday the pobble and i took a weekend trip to va beach. it still ranks as perhaps the best vacation of my life. it was a four hour drive from her home to the hotel with the view of the beach. at the time i had a cassette of roxette's she's got the look. it was one of those singles... the kind with one song on each side. we might have listened to side b a total of 3 times the whole trip fast forwarding it every time it came to the end so we could listen to side a one more time. we were in va beach before we decided that perhaps we should listen to something else for awhile.

but 80's music reminds me most of college even though i didn't finish college until the mid 90's. i had a few friends who were dj's on the college radio station. one had an all 80's show, another had an all female show, and the third, my big sister from the sorority i was in would make me keep her company while she did her late night show.

when i was having boy trouble jacklynhyde played i need a lover who won't drive me crazy by pat benatar and once while she was covering for ted's saturday night 80's show she dedicated a song for me called jesus was way cool... or something like that... while i was working on a sermon i was going to preach in the chapel the next day. i can't for the life of me remember who sang it or any of the lyrics... but it was hysterical. it didn't help with the sermon prep... but it did give me a good laugh (and a few worries about who might show up in chapel the next day to hear me.)

and then there were the pet shop boys and erasure... i can't go into the stories that erasure brings up from my college days... needless to say we played them loud and got really goofy in the college owned house we lived in senior year.

ahhh... the 80's where we could dance if want to... climb up solsbury hill... and shout, shout... let it all out.

God's peace y'all

ave maria

this morning, after doing what i had to do i took my cup of tea and sat out on my back porch and listened to bobby mcferrin (of don't worry be happy fame) and yoyo ma performing ave maria.

this is it on youtube (without yoyo).

God's peace y'all

birthday weekend

hubby's birthday is monday. since we have no money for any gifts i hatched a plan to invite two of his favorite friends up to visit for the weekend. on sunday i was whispering to my mom that they were coming up when hubby appeared, on the phone with his mom, and said, "my mom's coming up for my birthday. is that ok?"

well, of course it was ok, but it threw me big time and i think his mom (hi mom) and he were a bit concerned that maybe i didn't want her around.

so i gave in and told hubby that they were coming. mom's waiting until tomorrow to come up so we would have tonight just with them and we would have the chance to clean the house.

in the meantime, the princess kitty has decided that we MUST have a birthday party at a restaurant for daddy. since our lives are really about her... we will be going to the chinese buffet (hubby's favorite) for dinner sunday night. when my mom called and asked if they could just meet us at our house afterwards, i said, "no, this is about the kitty, not hubby and she wants a party for daddy."

so i did home repairs today... including fixing the toilet that wouldn't stop running. in the process there is now another leak. it's a small one and manageable until the big weekend is over and i now have the parts to fix it. i'm a bit tired of plumbing at the moment anyway.

my hands are also blue. yes, blue. no, they aren't sad... they are actually blue. hubby put one of those bowl cleaners in the tank which makes the water blue every time you flush it. of course this meant that my hands were in it as i worked on the tank. surprisingly very little else is blue... and honestly, i only have a few blue spots left on my hands.

so that was the day... think i will go get a hard mike's and wait for b&c to show up for the festivities to begin.

God's peace y'all

i lost it

so i bit the bullet and changed to the new blogger dashboard. i wasn't too worried, because it told me that i would be able to access my old template and therefore (so i thought) have access to all the cool sidebar things i had... and still be able to put the picture i had in my header back into my header.

as it turns out, either they lied or i am not as smart as i had once assumed.

of course i am connected to a few web-rings... but since i joined them so long ago i don't remeber what they all were or if i remembered what they were then i can't remember how to log on in order to get my link back.

this is an "ARRGGHH" moment.

so instead of working i am trying to figure out what i had there and how to get it back. in the meantime i added a new clock to the sidebar and changed all the colors on the blog.

there is nothing like starting from scratch

God's peace y'all

apraxia

apraxia is (if i have this right) the brains inability to organize information so that a person can do certain things. this includes speech.

the silent prince is called so because at almost 5 years old he still doesn't talk. he makes lots of noise and babbles. sometimes the babble even sounds like he is trying to say something...

last friday hubby and i took him to see a developmental pediatrician. we've been waiting for this appointment for over a year now. when he was diagnosed with severe autism and mental retardation last summer we were told by that doctor to keep the appointment as a follow-up. we are really glad we did.

while he is autistic, the doctor used some other words to describe him too. apraxia is one of those words and it means that we have a new focus on helping him to speak. it also means that his babbling might also be his trying to actually say something. as hubby has said for awhile, "he knows what he's saying... we just don't understand him."

she also mentioned the possibility of some type of attention deficit disorder. we often described this part of his personality as short attention span. what the doctor told us is that he doesn't even get to this point. his attention is so short-lived that he doesn't process information for memory unless he is put in a position to be more organized.

the lead is also a factor... how much of one, we might never be certain, but she talked to us about the possibility of using medications to help him focus his attention once all the lead is out of his system and thus help him to learn better. (this might take a long time because his levels are being stubborn and refuse to move to treatable levels.)

when we asked her about IQ testing (in regards to mental retardation) she talked us out of it, at least for right now. without verbal skills it is difficult to test IQ though possible. the problem is that she believes his IQ would still test much lower than it actually is... "no need to break your hearts" was her comment.

while all this sounds overwhelming it is really good news. the more issues there are the easier it is to chip away at each thing a little at a time... and as we go along the severity of his autism diagnosis might lessen in level.

in the meantime his new favorite food is a clementine... i've had to hide them so that he doesn't eat the whole case grandmom got him at once. he's learning how to dribble a ball (and if he grows as tall as daddy i won't rule out the NBA). he's incredibly proud of himself every time he pee-pees on the potty and the movie dumbo absolutely hypnotizes him. and he is still the happiest little boy i know.

God's peace y'all.