Six Word Saturday! (9/3/10)

My six words for today:

Marine Son™ will be stateside tomorrow!!!!


Talking to him online right now! He's out of Afghanistan!!!



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Wednesday, but not wordless!

My, oh my, what a wild 24 hours it has been!

First there was talk of my good friend coming down from Toronto for a visit in May or June. Then there was the rumor of our favorite boyband doing a concert a mere four hours away on June 1st, then there was talk of combining her visit with the show and maybe taking in a theme park, too, and it was glorious plotting and planning! And now today there is unconfirmed talk of another show right here in my home town. The day before the other show. *squeal* And yes, these two old ladies are crazy enough to do the local show then drive north the next morning to catch the next show. And then stay over and hit the theme park.

Insanity is awesome! You only live once, and we plan to enjoy every second of it!


Ok, I said 24 hours of news. There's more, you ask? Well of course there is!

Our daughter was accepted into the Performing Arts High School that she auditioned for last month! Her acceptance letter arrived in the mail yesterday, along with another acceptance letter to the Communications Program at yet another school. Combine that with her acceptance into the Bio-Medical/Environmental Studies program at a third school, and you have one proud set of parents. :)

Her heart is really with the performing, so that's where she'll be going. I'm so excited for her! I was singing and playing piano all through high school and I know what it's like to love what you do. She'll be great as long as she accepts that fact that she has a lot to learn. Oy, that's going to be interesting.

Ah well, that's what we pay the teachers for!*




*Don't hurt me, I was a teacher too, lol.

Foto Friday #7, OORAH!

I'm deviating from the archive photos today in honor of my son. He's our middle child, and he left yesterday morning for an 8-month deployment in Afghanistan with the US Marine Corps. One of these days this, too, will be considered an historical family photograph.

Godspeed, Steven.

Crossroads

I sit here thinking about today's post and I can't help but recall the old song, "Girl, You'll be A Woman Soon." While the lyrics don't at all mesh with what I'm thinking (I'm not a boy pining for a young girl, after all), the title just won't let me be.

Our daughter, our baby, has mere months left before she leaves behind her safe life at the K-8 school she has attended since Kindergarten. She will be in the scary world of High School next fall and while it may not be scary to her, it scares the hell out of her father and me. We won't be two minutes away from the school any longer. There won't be faculty and office staff there who have known her since she was 5 and have always looked out for her. There will be older friends with cars and other temptations, teachers who don't know the girl that we know inside out. There will be pressures that even she can't begin to imagine at this point in her life no matter how worldly-wise she thinks she is.

She is our baby, our surprise child. Let's be honest, after our two boys reached the ages of 15 and 9, and the husband and I were 41, a little girl wasn't at all the retirement we were planning in just a few short years. We have maintained for all of her 13 years now that she is a blessing, a gift, and we mean it wholeheartedly. I can't imagine our lives without her. She's tough. She began life 8 weeks premature, and weighed in at a whopping 3 pounds 7 ounces. They called her "the dancer" in the NICU unit because she never stayed still; they had to swaddle her just so that she could rest and conserve her energy. Her love of dance has always been there and no I won't embarrass her by telling the "table dancing" story from when she was 2, but it was a classic moment in our family story bank.

She has applied for several magnet schools in the area, for their drama programs. She has been rejected for one and we are still waiting to hear from another, but this morning we learned that she has been accepted into a magnet program for Bio-Medical and Environmental Studies. Pre-med. While her father and I blinked in disbelief and laughed, I can't even print what her response was. She applied and attended the open house because it would look good on her records. Even looking over her grades, they still want her. Go figure. And I don't mean that in a negative way at all, I'm just being honest here.

Yes, she can do anything she puts her mind to and I have no doubt she could do this, too, if she sets her mind to it. She is our child, she's brilliant. And talented. And beautiful. And funny. And sensitive. And---

And she's growing up way too soon.

In the job description

I was all set to sit right here and write out some Monday Musings and then it hit me. Today is Tuesday.

Well shoot, y'all. My days are all mixed up. We've had house guests ("We're not guests, we're family!") since last Thursday and my normal boring routine has been filled with chatting with my son and his wife and keeping our monster dog from squishing their little dog out of sheer enthusiasm. Ours is a 102-pound shepherd mix while theirs is a 14-pound Lhasa Apso. Fun times, you guys!

We have visited family, partied, celebrated his temporary homecoming and other things, visited friends, eaten out, eaten in, picked strawberries, gone to church, driven down to the Florida Keys for lunch, winced when we realized the daughter probably has food poisoning from it (it will be a long time before she eats another chicken wing in a restaurant), and prepared for one last dinner out tonight at the home of my oldest son.

Whew!

It has been a bittersweet whirlwind of not-quite a week. In the two and a half years he has been in the Marine Corps, he has stayed essentially the same good-natured kid I raised, but I find I no longer know what to have on hand for him to eat. And being a polite not-quite-guest, he was no help. "It doesn't matter, don't worry about it."

Hello? I'm a mom. I worry. It's in the job description.

They are leaving tonight to drive back to North Carolina so that he can report back to base on Thursday. Next week he and his unit will deploy to Afghanistan for 8 months.

Hello? I'm a mom. I worry. It's in the job description. (repeat ad infinitum)

I have faith. I trust God and his buddies to keep him safe, I really do. I know that as a sharpshooter with expert ranking he can do a pretty good job of keeping himself safe. But ...

Hello? I'm a mom. I worry. It's in the job description. (repeat ad nauseum)

It's a lifelong task, this job of mine to worry about my kids. I don't always say much about it but it's there, as any other mom will tell you.

I wouldn't change the job description for anything in the world.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings ...

I haven't looked at any challenges today. The morning was supposed to be spent at a church women's meeting, playing music and listening to a wonderful guest speaker. I had my Valentine-ish outfit all planned and was rarin' to go.

And then at 8:00 this morning we discovered that the dog was over the back fence in the vacant, but heavily wooded lot behind our house. This is a new talent of his, scaling the fence. In his defense I have to say that it's only a 4-footer, and the place he went over this morning was pretty decrepit.

I mentioned to the hubby that the dog had been outside for a while, and that it was unusual. He agreed and went to look for him, came back in and reached for his jeans. "Houston, we have a problem," were his exact words. I had to laugh when I looked out the back door and saw the pathetic thing looking back at me. "Mom? Help? I'm stuck???"

Hub grabbed the leash and went around the outside of our property, but couldn't coax him through the big, dense trees. I woke up the daughter thinking she could help. In hindsight you realize a lot of things. The first thing I realized was that I should have left her in bed. The second thing was something she realized well after the fact. "I should have hopped the fence myself and just led him to dad."

Instead, when we saw that there was a low spot on the fence we decided to call him and have him jump back over, the same way he got out. It almost worked. He got three out of four feet and legs over and then his right hind foot got caught on the chain link. He yelped like he was dying (and I know it had to hurt, he weighs 102 pounds and he was dangling by one foot) and struggled and she and I instinctively leaped in to help get him loose. He struggled some more, and in the fracas he panicked and turned on my daughter.

He bit her right hand and got her pretty good in several places. In the palm of her hand along the lifeline, the cut is about an inch long. On her middle finger (which she is thrilled to have wrapped up, btw *g*) there is a deep cut on the pad and also the cuticle area. The nail is split, too. That's what hurts the most. There are some smaller tooth marks on her thumb and the back of her hand.

Of course, we washed it immediately and as soon as I could get cleaned up and dressed, I took her right to the doctor. If I had gone to the ER we'd still be sitting there. I suspected he would give her a tetanus booster, but instead he cleaned the wounds and poked and prodded to make sure nothing was broken. We assured the doc that it was our dog and that he's fully vaccinated. I even offered him the vet's number if they needed proof.

Poor kid, she doesn't blame him at all, she knows it wasn't intentional, and he looked so guilty when it was all over with.  So she's on Augmentin for a week, has an antibiotic ointment to apply twice a day, and is at the movies with some friends. I checked in with her a little while ago and she says it's tender, but she's okay.

So. How was your day?

September already?

Can Fall be far behind? Unfortunately, in Miami that's usually a given. We rarely get any true 'fall' weather, though. Our seasons seem to be Spring, Summer, Hurricane, and OMG-it's-45F-outside-today!!!

I'm serious. :)

I used to love the beautiful fall days when we lived in Illinois a million years ago. It was a novelty to me, having grown up in Miami, walking through the crisp leaves and smelling smoke in the air and of course, actually wearing long-sleeved tops and not having a heat stroke.

Well, cool weather or not, fall brings the certainty of changes to my life. School is in session again and my baby is in her last year of Middle School. Next year it will be high school and all of the heartache that will bring to us, the parents. Our baby, our last baby, is a beautiful young woman now and I couldn't be more proud, but please? Can we slow it down just a tad?

The lazy summer evenings are giving way to busy-ness again as our church life kicks into high gear. Choir practice begins again this week (Christmas cantata anyone?), committee meetings are back on track, and tons of other places we absolutely have to be or face Dire Consequences™. (It helps if you say that in a deep voice and pretend there's an echo.)

So, we sit up straighter, dust off our Day Planners, set the alarms for an hour earlier and off we go.

Happy September. :)