sparse spattering of phone photos

New Years Eve flag football

I wish I was more enthusiastic about this end of January onto February time of year.

We had a full Christmas and a busy New Year but then it's been back to school and routines and pretty calm and uneventful around here. 

New Year's Eve car wreck: getting patients up from the bottom of the embankment 20 yards or so below the highway where their car came to a stop, upside down. Both passengers will be fine. Eventually.  And after many years of plastic surgery. Sometimes I think I should bring my nearly high school (and driving age) son on calls like this. It's one thing to tell people about the dangers of drinking and driving and yet another to see what the end of a fancy New's Year's celebration can look like when you make that choice.

I've been trying to get things organized for the beginning of the new quarter and do some cleaning and organizing I didn't get to before Christmas.

I have been very unsuccessful at maintaining a sense of normalcy when it comes to routine.

I found myself covering fabric bulletin boards at 3:30 am once. Another time I came back from an ambulance call at 2:3O in the morning and started working on a shuttefly photobook. I started to get tired when I realized it was getting light out.

So this means on more than one day this week Lex and I may have been still hanging out in bed watching Captain America at like ten am– the rest of the kids and Dev off to respectable ways to spend the day three hours earlier.

Once we got up nice and early and got the kids off to school and got lots of work accomplished: a closet cleaned out, his bedroom and the kitchen scrubbed, dinner in the crockpot.

And then took an hour and a half nap before lunch.

At least the other three kids are back on schedule.

The week prior I was feeling bad about my lack of structure when it occurred to be as I was reading at almost two a.m. that my teenage son was doing some sort of reading of his own beside me. I sent him to bed, but then noticed he was still talking to other people on facebook for at least another hour or so.

But by this time I was already all the way upstairs in my office and his room seemed so far away. I still have this pet peeve about communicating electronically with others in the same home and I also apparently some tendencies toward laziness, so I choose to ignore it.

And there were at least 4-5 other respectable teenagers online later than him that night. For some reason that confirmation that other young people all over town were also not keeping normal hours made me feel better.

Sometimes I'm pretty sure I'm not quite mature enough to be in charge of other people.

Also, not quite mature enough to be prompt about my work obigations. . . two new classes to pull together plans for and write syllabi for sometime in the next 24 hours. . .