Steamrolled

So . . . yeah.

I think it's fair to say I've been a little scarce around these parts lately.

I've been so scarce, in fact, that some of you lovely folk have emailed to see if I am still kicking around this old mortal coil.

And I am still kicking around, although it may be more accurate to say that I am substantially more supine than one might need to be in order to be considered "kicking around". (I wish I could fit the term "kicking around" into this sentence one more time. WISH GRANTED!)

I have been falling asleep by 8:15 almost every night, whether I want to or not, and since I do most of my blogging at night (despite what the timestamp says), this pregnancy is seriously cramping my blogging style.

I feel well and I have energy enough during the day, but as soon as the sun goes down, my body follows some kind of primordial circadian rhythm that commands me to sleep. I have lost count of the number of times that I have awoken to Rob shaking my shoulder -- book still open on my lap or television still tuned to a now finished season premiere -- saying "why don't you head up to bed, honey?"

Thinking that it must be close to 11, I'll rub my eyes and be surprised to see the clock reading 9:20. PM.

All I need now is my granny gown and some salve for these joints and I'll be ready for the assisted living set. Good thing I'm already used to eating dinner at 4:30.

I have always fought against making myself a blogging schedule. It just seemed to be too much structure and planning for something that I like to do as an off-the-cuff kind of hobby. But my illusions are coming to an end, and I can see that if I have any hope of maintaining this little blog, I will need to do something other than plop down in my computer chair after the kids are in bed and try to recall who said or did the grossest/funniest/most outrageous thing during the day.

So until I can get my blogging self sorted out, here are a few of the things that have kept me busy at The HomeFront for the past week:


One
Rob worked from home last week, and having an able-bodied man at my beck and call meant only one thing to me. Home improvement projects. (What did you think I was going to say? I'm already pregnant, people.)

Rob replaced the shutters, the exterior light fixtures, and power washed the house. I was supposed to paint the front door, the mailbox post, and the porch posts, but I got to none of them.

I did, however, go to Sherwin Williams and pick a vibrant red for the front door, and I am fully convinced that choosing the paint is nine-tenths of the project. Red is a tricky color, my friends.

Two
I was invited to join a book club, and I am so excited because I used to belong to book clubs when we were in the Navy but had yet to find one here. My first meeting is this week, so I had to power through the book, which is not easy when you are pulling down 18 hours of sleep a night.

The book for this month was "The Black Dahlia", by James Ellery, and I am not even going to try and sugar coat it; it was uber-grim. Dark and bleak. I thought maybe my hormones made me a little more sensitive, but nope. It's a downer.


Three
Not only have my narcoleptic tendencies cut off the blogging, I have not been able to enjoy my nightly rounds of your blogs. I have over 600 items in my Google reader, and I fear that I will not get to them. I'll just have to start afresh. Mea culpa.

Four
Fiver is excelling in school this year. It feels so great to be able to say that. His teacher is fantastic, and we seem to be firing on all cylinders this years. Not every problem is resolved, but that was never what I expected anyway. I just wanted him to feel like people had his back and they wanted to give him a chance.

He's got that in spades.

I did, however, get one unsavory report home last week.

Fiver takes a pudding in his lunch almost every day, and last week I ran out of the plastic spoons I usually send in with him. I have sent him with a real piece of silverware before, and he usually does fine, but his track record at home involves about a 50% chance of him dumping silverware in the trash as often as putting it in the sink.

Not wanting to lose all my spoons, I would send him off with a reminder to bring the spoon back. He apparently took that very much to heart, because a friend who was on lunch duty last week called me, concerned.

Fiver, while throwing away his trash, accidentally threw away his spoon. Instead of letting it go, he dove into the giant lunch room trash can, retrieved the spoon, and then put it in his mouth to hold on to it while he pulled himself back out of the trash.

My friend ended the story by saying, "I threw up a little in my mouth when I saw what he did."

Saints preserve him and his immune system!

I purchased a box of plastic spoons immediately. It's the best sixty cents I've spent in a long time.



And now that I have sufficiently destroyed any appetite you may have had, I think I'll sign off.

It is 8:42 PM after all. That's way past my bedtime.