Friday 5: The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly

It has been one helluva week, I’m telling you. It felt like one thing after another kept happening to try my nerves and patience. We had limited childcare for our three-year old because this week all of the teachers are preparing the preschool. He starts next week, but the other three family members all started school. We’ve had several evening engagements (orientations, meet-the-teacher) and so on and so forth. Further, with all the chaos, I’ve been going to bed entirely too late, and I only ran one time and that was last Sunday. It’s weeks like these where I have to give into the madness; otherwise, I may completely lose it. I’m sorry for the grumpy/mournful/sour tone in the first part of this post. I’ve tried to lighten it up with the photos. And also, I’m so glad it’s Friday. Whew.

5 Thoughts

The Good:

1. The bright spot of the week was watching our sweet, amazing six-year old start first grade. He has such grace and ease for such a young age. We all love his teachers and his school. I had to keep thinking of his excitement and joy this week as everything else seemed to fall apart.

2. My dad had surgery this week. My dad is the coolest person ever. If you’ve never seen him, his body looks like Barney Fife, so they told him Monday that he was a bit underweight which makes being put to sleep a little riskier. We were all very nervous, knowing a routine procedure can go awry very easily. But by God’s grace, it didn’t. He came through with flying colors. Case and I sat in the surgical center with my mom, and I’m so glad we did. Seeing my dad’s face light up when we all walked in during recovery was the best.

The Bad:

3. My car broke down on Monday when the boys and I were leaving my parents’ house. They live about an hour from us. My parents had kept them that day because neither of their schools had started. As we were leaving, my car (which is only 8 months old) just completely stopped working. To make things worse, I had left my phone at their house. So…just to clarify, I’m in a ditch with two little boys and no phone. I wait for a relatively safe looking car to drive by, I flag them down and use their phone. My parents come to the rescue and after about three hours, we’re back home with a rental car and my car towed to the shop. They are having a time fixing it. It’s still not working correctly.

4. Case pitched the mother of all tantrums yesterday. The child is weaning from his naps, and he still needs them SO badly! Why won’t kids take naps? If sometime told me to take a two-hour nap every day, I wold kiss their face and be the happiest girl in the world. So anyway, yesterday during the witching hour (around 5:00 or so) and after no nap and before he’d eaten, he screamed and yelled and fought so hard because he didn’t get his way about something. And don’t worry. I DID NOT give in. I will not give in when they start acting like that. This tantrum was insane. Seriously, I barely survived it. My sweet little boy turned into a monster for an  hour. When he finished, his face was bright read, his hair was sticking up all over the place and he had the sniffle hiccups for a very long time. By bedtime, I think he’d completely forgotten about it, but I sure hadn’t.

The Ugly

5. Early in the week, I wanted to get more steps on my Fitbit so I parked at the very back of the grocery store’s parking lot. As I got out of my car, I noticed that two people were asleep in the car in front of me. The car was beat up, the seats layed back and two people were completely out. I looked a bit closer and noticed that they had sores on their faces. The guy’s mouth was open and he had no teeth, yet they looked like they were only in their twenties. They appeared to be crashing from a meth high. I all of a sudden got panicked that a child may be in the car, so I walked right over to the car and looked in the open windows. There was plenty of trash and cans in the backseat but no child, thank the Lord. I also realized later that one of them could have woken up and punched me in the face, but they didn’t. It breaks my heart to see people like this. Addiction is so powerful. I’ve been thinking about that young couple.

5 Photos from the Week