Fall

While walking Charlie tonight I noticed the vibrant leaves that have changed color are falling and are giving way to the brown more muted colors. More bare branches are visible now and I am once again aware that winter is on its way. It's neat though, we'll be ramping up for the holiday season soon which will carry us to January. Then the hard part hits. the stretch between January and April seems to take forever with little to break it up. Good news is, if everything goes the way it has been planned, I'll be graduating in April and will be in a new position. I cannot begin to express how excited I am at this prospect. I am restless at work, eager to be done and away. More and more things are getting on my nerves and I am tired of the constant ebb and flow of drama on the unit. Working alone sounds very appealing right now.

The kids are excited about Halloween, Ryan wants me to put more decorations out, there are still a bunch in the bin, but that takes time and it's been busy. We are to go camping with the troop this weekend, pup and all. I love that Ryan can run through the woods with his cub scout buddies.

Ryan continues to inhale books. A Half price books opened nearby and it is a gold mine for kids books. Grown up books too I imagine, but I do okay at the library. We got him 4 Magic treehouse for what it would have cost to buy 2 at BN. Charlotte hs developed a passion for drawing. The characters are consistent but I love watching her as she changes what they wear and the stories that go with them. She is learning high frequency words in school and is spelling them. She also continues to absorb books. Recently she made flags out of origami paper. She has very specific plans and it is fascinating to listen to her.

The pup has bounced back from whatever his ailment was. He is getting into things again and his appetite is back to normal. He is a sweet pooch. I am eager to enroll him in the next set of training classes. He picks up things fast.

H1N1 seems to be making fewer headlines now. People around us are getting sick and passing around what seem to be garden variety colds. The hospital has instituted no visitors under 14--which has definitely made the unit a quieter place.

I've read through my email and FB, time to get to work on this week's post for school.

Black September

I understand from friends that there are times when you should just write the month off as a loss and good riddance. I have never experienced this phenomena. Now I have. I am calling it Black September and hope that as the month has passed that the black cloud firmly affixed above the house has moved on as well. It is difficult to catalog the events. Should it be consecutive or by what was the most expensive, or perhaps what required the most doctor visits? We of course start with the car accident, proceed to poison ivy, then onto a viral infection with only headache and atrocious fever as the symptom to just recently, the dog swallowing foreign objects and vomiting. At the end of all of this, I have a well but tired daughter, a new van, a lethargic but rebounding dog and a son with pink patches on his legs where the poison ivy continues to fade. I also have my life--which before would have seemed to be a fundamentally silly item to give attention to. We all have our lives, but like our heart that beats hundreds of times a day without us really acknowledging it, we don't often consider or appreciate this fact. So while the house is a shambles and we continue to move through our days at an often frenetic pace, I have to stop every once in awhile and acknowledge that I have my life. I have been stopped in my tracks more than once in the last few weeks with this realization. The richness and joy and companionship that I can embrace fills me to almost bursting. I am happy.