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Boy, I wish I could just leave my listening ears under my bed.

Carlo is having a hard time with the extra time Nicky and Noelle are needing in relation to being back in school.  This manifests itself, of course, by a lack of listening and naughty behavior both at home and at school.  His teacher asked him if he brought his listening ears today and his response was, “No, they are under my bed.”  You can imagine what that means for day in and day out behavior.

Between back to work and back to school its been quite a week.

We were away on vacation last week and came 1/2 way home on Saturday, spent the night in Binghamton, and came the rest of the way on Sunday.  Monday started slow, but ended hectic as we tried to fit in some errands including school shopping and hair cuts.  On the way home, after our tooling around I took the speed bump road a little fast, because the kids like to fly.  Well, along the way, my check engine light came on!!

Now, Tuesday was a crazy day even before I had to get the car to the dealership.  Noelle had orientation for an hour between 9 am and 10 am.  I’d originally intended to work from home, but I ended up with a meeting I needed to attend in person, so I told her she could come into work with me.  I knew she couldn’t go to camp for this one day between vacation and school.  Nicky was going to work with Grandma.  So, we kept most of our plans.  Grandma picked up Nicky at 8:00.  Noelle and I dropped Carlo off at school (big pre-school II boy that he is) and went on to her orientation.  She did great.  Then we stopped by the bank, in case I needed cash to pay for a cab and then it was off to drop the car at the dealership.  The dealership did drive us out to work.  Mom came out to pick us up after work.  She dropped Carlo and I off the dealership to pick up the car (Carlo came with me because we’d just put him in a booster seat in Mom’s car and he was way too much enjoying the freedom from the lack of a 5-point harness).  Carlo and I paid for the car repairs to the tune of about $500 (Oi!  Its $165 just to hook it up to the computer and figure out what code is causing the check engine light to go on.  Turns out that it was a code that the fellow, who has been there for 10 years, has never seen before — claimed that the GL sensor was broken.  Apparently its the piece that sense back and forth activities or something.  They have never replaced one of these, its $1300 and they’d have to order it.  We agreed that we’d just clear the error message and see if it came back.  Later on it occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have taken those speed bumps quite so fast, despite the giggles it caused.  I did have them do an oil change and check the squeaky breaks, which needed to be replaced — hence the other $300 spent on the car).  The Carlo and I picked up pizza.  Mom had the big kids shower while we were waiting on the pizza, so we were able to do supper and bed at a reasonable hour on Tuesday, important because Wednesday was THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.

In the midst of this logistical day of hell my boss suggest I go to Prague for a week to take a training course in the middle of October.  Literally, a 5 day course in 5 weeks.  I’d be gone for a week.  She is very understanding of my home life, so I knew that if she was asking she was pretty serious about it.  There was a time in my life when I would have been out the door to buy a tourist book about Prague — its supposed to be amazing.  At this time, though, the word “Prague” just kept going through my head.  It was all I could do to figure out one day in NJ when both myself and my Mom were around — the thought of the logistics of care for my children for the week I’d be gone is quite overwhelming.  Fortunately, the folks are planning another class in late January, so Mom is going to keep the last two weeks of January light on appointments.  With my luck, it’ll be Berlin in January.

The first day of school went great!  I tried to just drop them off, as that was the preference of the gal running the line-up, but I’d told them I’d walk them to class and Noelle devolved into tears.  She bucked up fast when I got out there and said I’d stay and walk her in.  We were joking by the end of the walk to her classroom and after standing in the line outside her classroom she walked into it with her teacher without looking back.  I checked in with the school counselor in the middle of the afternoon and she told me Noelle was still doing great.  She’d run into Noelle with her class doing a hunt for a gingerbread man (its their way of letting the new kids learn about the rooms in the school).  Noelle enjoyed school and the wrap-around care.

The one problem with the day was that Nicky and I both completely forgot about the packet of homework he was supposed to do this past summer.  Oops.  He was anxious and so we sat down and did most of it.  He worked for an hour while I cooked (ooo, the kids and I made a delicious tomato and roast pepper soup) and then got frustrated.  So I told him to take a break and go watch the little kids’ movie, which he did.  He and I worked on it some more after dinner.  Nicky attached a note saying he had not quite finished it and if his teacher wanted it completed to please send it back again.  I also sent an email.  Turns out the teacher got a huge kick out of Nicky’s personal note and told us we could work on it all weekend.  She followed up today with a note that I have a very sweet son and he is one of the few in the class who understands and laughs at her jokes.

I dropped Nicky and Noelle off for the breakfast program both yesterday and today and they got out of the car happily and enjoyed their second breakfast (they have sugary cereals at school — oooooh).  Nicky walked Noelle to her class on Thursday afterwards.
The week ended well.  Everyone is happy and doing well at school — well, Carlo is being naughty, but I’m hoping that will settle down once we hit our new rhythm.  Noelle and Carlo have their first gymnastics class of the season tomorrow and we are going to sign Nicky up swim lessons at the college in the afternoon.  I’m thinking about trying to get a membership at their aquatic center, too.  Turns out they have open swim every night between 7 and 9.  With Mom here as much as she is, I could, conceivably, go swimming a couple of times a week.  I could leave at 8, right after books, so it wouldn’t even need to have a big impact on my time with the kids.  I’m thinking about it.

I have some first day of school pics, but I seem to have lost my camera cord.  I think its in the house somewhere and I also ordered a cheap USB card reader which should come next week, so those will come later.

We had a great vacation, but that is a separate posting.

BTW — I think I’ve decided to keep the current blog/picture system.  I tried to backup my website, but it turns out its huge.   Right now I’m thinking I probably couldn’t get anything free at the quantities of content at which I work.  I’d have to pay the blog people to have more space and pay the picture people to have more space.  So, its no longer looking so cheap and easy to leave my current set-up.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Family, Noelle, Nicky, My Valley Of Love and Delight, Carlo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.