The kids woke up to a surprise snow day this morning. Josh went to take them all, but on the way into the grade school, not only were the roads slick but there was a line of cars backed up to the gas station. So he turned around and decided just to keep everyone home. Fridays are also his day off in the winter. They watched a movie and Elianna went down to the program director’s apartment to work on a puzzle. The boys made a ramp for when they went sledding.
Today was another scheduled dayshift day. I was supposed to be finishing training on Spring but they’d had a call-in so I ended up getting pulled over to Summer. I was fine with that and had halfway expected it. Getting pulled is when you were supposed to be on one floor but you get moved to another in order to deal with staffing issues. On summer there’s the “front half” and the “back half”. I had the front half. The other nurse was very patient and helpful.
So training now is going to look like being on my own with help. I don’t know what this means as far as getting on the schedule. I really am liking this job and am thankful to have it. The management is good, most of the nurses are nice, the aides do their thing and occasionally we overlap in patient rooms. There’s just an element of having to suffer through the newness and not knowing where room 20 is when you’re standing right in front of it. But now I’ll always know.
Dad drove us down to the bottom of the big camp hill. The ground is hard enough that we didn’t have to worry about getting stuck. The taps have been in the trees I think for almost two weeks. This is the year is the highest yield of sap we’ve ever had. We collect it in 5-gallon buckets and then store them in the camp fridge. It really could be sap collecting galore around here, the issue is how to process it all.
Today was a work-at-home kind of day, nothing too crazy, just the normal things. I went to the grocery store in the afternoon and bought some more food to have for suppers. There was a woman in front of me apologizing for her massively full cart. She said she was doing an instacart run for someone who she thought was apparently stocking her deep freezer. I said, “Oh it’s okay, I have five kids, I understand.”
My cart was only about a third of the way full though. Thankfully a cashier opened up another lane and waved me over. “Sorry about your wait, ma’am”, he said, to which I replied, “Oh it’s okay, I have five kids, I understand”, meaning like I’ve been that person holding up the line. He said he had five kids too. I don’t even try to get the food all at once now. I have to break it into increments otherwise it’s too much.
When I just solely focus on food-making, I actually really like it. Not enough to plan in-depth, but enough to have a general idea of what I could make and how many nights I have something for. I like having food on the table for people when they come home from all of their various places. My daughter came home from track while I was in the middle of making supper. I told her I was trying to be a good wife.
And have everything ready for when Dad and the boys came home from Menards. I was saying it kind of jokingly because she’d said something to me about five different times before I answered her she said. I didn’t even know she was home. I was texting another child about other things. “So now you just need him to be a good husband”, she said, “and have him tell you when he’s coming home.” I finally did call him.
They were right around the corner. I was listening to more marriage podcasts today and I just–sometimes I just get disturbed by the sayings. I want so bad for things to be equal, that if you’re going to say this then you better say that. And they’re trying. People are trying to keep as many people happy as possible, to be considerate, to be sensitive. Sometimes I think we’re all just making this harder than it needs to be.
I’m calling it the curse of trying too hard. Is there such a thing as the phase of settling in? Cause that’s where I’m at, where I think we are now at. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but it’s like we’ve been through the adjusting and thrashing and clashing. There’s a level of acceptance where disappointment falls away, and you think maybe what the Bible said was true, that the hope produced by suffering became something real.
Today was the first day I drove to work in the daylight. I like it so much better this way. The boss asked today I how felt things were going. She basically said it’s up to me as far as how much time I think I need. I am starting to get that feeling like I might just have to jump in and go for it sooner rather than later. I’m not going to be able to know everything beforehand. As long as I have someone I can ask, and on day shift I do.
After work I picked up my son from the bus stop. He’d just gotten there so it wasn’t like he had waited too long. Yesterday he called me from the kids’ car phone. Elianna had gone to run and he was bored after she’d disappeared to stop and talk with the soccer girls. I tried to not miss the moment, realizing that having one of my kids call me because they were bored and just wanted to talk was a dream come true.
I meant to stop by the store and get a Valentine’s Day card on the way home but forgot. I was able to get one on the way into church. I like seeing people in the store buying Valentines things for their special person. Dad and the kids went to the church meal and I met them there later. I’ve gotten more used to the ashes tradition. I’ve been missing my kids again more thinking of former life stages. Those times were so grand.
I have a cat who likes to cuddle with me while I’m typing. Two of them do this thing where they get between me and the computer and take up space. Something else cats do is walk diagonal when you’re walking outside. You could be walking in a basic straight line, but the cat does not walk parallel with your steps. If you are not careful and watching you could trip over it as it merges into your footpath.
Dad told the boys that they have to limit their Minecraft time to 30 minutes a day during Lent. He told them they could play and get it out of their system tonight. They can also have one day a week where they get to play longer with pen pals or big brother. This is in addition to the discipline of giving up one thing and adding another. I’ve really been thinking about the lentil stew now and making that one or two of my daily meals.
No one else would have to do it. I actually made it last night for supper and it wasn’t too bad. I had more seasonings besides just salt. I’d love to do some kind of Lenten series where I write about deep and spiritual things but don’t want to make those kind of commitments. Today I cleaned some more in the kitchen. The boys and I met Grandma for lunch. She has a new rug for the living room that looks really nice.
We stayed up to watch the Super Bowl last night. It was a great game besides the part about the Chiefs winning. I had started out rooting for Taylor’s team, but by the end of the night had switched over to the 49ers. My entire family was cheering for San Francisco and after a while it just got tiring being on two separate teams. I hadn’t been all that impressed with the Chiefs anyway, and the others seemed to be really invested.
During the game I saw in my son’s Instagram stories that the world record holding marathon runner had died in a car crash. We’d just been talking about him back in October. He could hold a mile pace for for over 26 miles that was faster than my son could ever even run one. I remember asking him, “Was he Kenyan or something???”, amazed that anyone could run that long and that fast. Once again I was sobered.
I was watching marathon videos then this morning, not for long. Tim walked in and I swear every time he comes over I’m on the couch at the computer. Last week he was here to replace the two bathroom exhaust fans. I had wanted to rip out the tub and shower and have them put in a new one that’s one piece, but those are hard to find. So I was willing to give the new exhaust fan a chance to see if that makes a difference.
We’ve tried to address the mold and mildew places several different times. When our friends bring their baby over and ask to use our tub to give him a bath, I’d like to not have that be something I’m apologizing for. Today Tim was here to replace some more windows. He asked, “Upstairs or downstairs?”, and Josh replied, “Probably downstairs.” I didn’t know he was coming. We could have cleaned the downstairs during commercials.
So I continued with the “Monday pile” I’d made on Saturday from the stack of neglected mail and bills, two of which had gone to collections. I had to call Thrivent and get a plan reinstated and I am just going to set these things up to be automatically withdrawn. I used to pay the bills and keep up with all that. We did get our HSA raise approved so I was thankful for that. It’s really ridiculous to be paying collectors for sports physicals.
Speaking of bills, food has really gone up. I spent $200 at the grocery store on Sunday and that was only for lunch food, Super Bowel snack food, cat food, Sunday lunch for the kids, and a supper or two. I’ve had these thoughts lately about what it would be like to make up a giant crock pot of lentil stew. I could totally eat nothing but that for a week, and it would be so cheap. With only some onions and salt and canned tomatoes.
Our bedroom is clean so it’s good for whenever Tim is ready to put the windows in here. It’s a lot of work to maintain a house, both structurally and in the day-to-day operations. Josh noticed I had cleaned it and told me it looked nice. I was listening to the Java with Julie podcast this morning and it really made me want to go into couples counseling. It seems like it’d be fascinating, challenging, and possibly rewarding work.
Naturally, being in my mother-in-law’s pristine new house motivated me today to do some cleaning in my own. Josh and the kids went in after lunch to load some stuff that was still at the old house. I stayed behind with one of the boys. I didn’t want to be away from home that long. While we were here we started some laundry and dusted and wiped down the washer and dryer. I was going to do more in the downstairs storage area but it wasn’t as disheveled as it can sometimes be down there.
Next we went up to the bathroom. I deeper cleaned everything but the tub and shower. I took a knife and scraped the wax off the floor from a tipped over candle. It’s been there for months. Some things you see and are just not bothered by. It’s when someone else sees it that I tend to become bothered. One of my husband’s aunt’s had this dusting rag she was using to wipe down shelves and sticky spots off of mugs. She would probably be appalled to see our house. I don’t clean that much.
While I was doing that my son replaced the rusted vent cover with a new one I’d bought over the summer when I was doing the bedrooms. It’s just sat there on the floor all this time, another one of those things that just never bothered me. I bleached behind the toilet and cleaned the rest of the floor. While I was doing that I thought of a woman who’d helped us pack our bathroom when we moved from Hoyleton. I was a little mortified at the time wondering what might’ve all been in there.
I remember whenever we were moving into a new place my mother-in-law would always want to help me make up our bed. Every time. This way it’d be ready for us to sleep in. I really didn’t mind except that the mattress pad we had at the time had a dark brown, apple sized stain in the middle from some time when I had weirdly bled through the sheets. That was like a fluke occurrence and yet there was always this stain there whenever she and I stretched out the mattress pad and sheets.
She never said anything. The woman who helped pack up our bathroom I don’t think said anything either. This woman and her brother and sister were very nice people. It’s humbling when people are near your stuff, your space, especially the parts you don’t normally show people. But you wouldn’t have been as thankful for them if they hadn’t have gotten near it. When we were done with the bathroom we met everyone in town at the new house and brought the rest of the stuff in from the cars.
Today was a much better day at work. I didn’t leave with that terrible feeling like I’d missed something. The shift last week got inside my head so much that I wrote to my supervisor around 5 o’clock on a Saturday morning. The girl who was training me said it’s just because I’m new and getting back into things. She told me not to ever lose sleep over things related to work.
I’m feeling a little bit lost these days. This stage of life still feels so foreign to me. I have a son away at college, a daughter who’s regularly out and about with people from school, three other sons who I see but don’t interact with in the ways that I used to. They’re around and I enjoy them but there is still that separation and those stretches of times we don’t see each other or talk more in depth.
This all goes back to the feelings of gratitude we’re meant to cultivate. I am thankful for this job right now and that I’m able-bodied enough to work. Josh made me breakfast before I went in. Tonight we went over to his mom’s for supper. The new house is really coming along on the inside. It’s beautiful and my sister-in-law has done a nice job helping to get it decorated.
My brain, for whatever reason, has revolted against all things school related. I simply do not care right now. I have for sure decided to drop the intensive between the quarters. When I was looking at the the program requirements for UIS, the trauma class I would be taking would not have counted toward my remaining needed classes. So even though I would still love to sit in and learn the content, I’m not going to do it.
We were scheduled to go to Texas toward the end of next week. That plan too has now been cancelled. There was a conference down at Camp Lonestar and the kids and I were supposed to spend a few days in Dallas with my sister-in-law’s family. But when we sat down to really talk about it, there were things about the trip that didn’t make much sense. We were bummed to cancel, but there were other things going on.
This morning I worked on cleaning our room. Work had asked earlier if I could come in and help where they were short on days. I said I couldn’t this time. Last night we brought supper to my mother-in-law’s house where things are coming along and looking good with the unpacking. They hung a sign over the office door that says Theilen Farms est. June 2022. The weather has been lovely and beautiful lately.
My mother-in-law moved into her new house today. I dropped the boys off at school and then met Josh at the old house where the movers were going to be coming in the morning. It took them over four hours to load everything. During that time I left to go to a routine doctor’s visit at the Springfield Clinic. These annual visits can seem like such a waste of time sometimes. So much money for not much that happens.
When I came back everyone was out at the farm. My husband’s aunts were there along with an uncle. Everyone was sitting in the living room having some rest time while the movers unloaded things. After a while we all got up and started unpacking boxes. Josh and I worked on the guest room and the aunts worked on the kitchen. The boys put together the end tables that are going in the downstairs kids bedroom.
My daughter is staying out there with Grandma tonight and tomorrow. My sister-in-law flies in later this week to be here for a few days. There were some emotional moments before the movers arrived and once they were getting started. It’s still a shame that my father-in-law isn’t here to see everything. I don’t know if those who have gone before us can see us or not. I would think they are part of the great cloud of witnesses.
So maybe they aren’t able to see us at all times, kind of like in a cross country race. You see the runner at certain points, but you aren’t able to see him or her the entire race. I unpacked his coats and hats into the mud room and it looks exactly like how it would be if he were here and planned to use them. They’re supposed to be for anyone who is here who might need a coat to play or work outside. The house is huge.
I came home and was watching an Instagram story of a woman my age who is pregnant with her 9th baby. She is planning to have an unaided home birth but had gone and seen her midwife today. She was talking about hearing her baby’s heartbeat and out of nowhere it brought back baby heartbeat memories. I can’t believe my children were inside me at one point. Before I ever knew them, I’d heard each of their hearts.
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