A phone call would have been nice

This was actually about Tuesday, but my net went down and I couldn’t post til today.

Everything happening today was all revolving around one event – Rhiannon had to be picked up from school at 4pm. She was staying late due to having to work to help pay for her trip to Nashville.

Christopher is working 9am – 10pm today, so Corina could not take him to work and then take the van to school (she has to be there at 7:30) and I cannot even be awakened at that house due to my work schedule.  So, Christopher had to come home for lunch. That was nice since I got to see him, and it allowed him to make a much larger sandwich than I would have packed for him.  Then I left to take him to work again and then go get Rhiannon.  Corina was coming home as we were leaving and I gave her a list of things that needed done.

I dropped Christopher off at his store, then drove downtown to the water dept and paid the bill, then headed over to the middle school to get Rhiannon.  She’s always complaining that I’m late getting her, so I was happy that I got there at ten til four. There were several cars all lined up out front. One by one preppy little preteens came bounding down the steps to get into their parents’ gas guzzling SUV’s until I was the only parent still waiting. The 4 o’clock bus had come and gone after a whole pack of kids got on it. I waited til 15 after and went inside. The doors were unlocked, but the office was dark and there were no people in the commons area.  I was seriously unhappy.  I knew Rhiannon had a meeting with her Rural Resources group to do the catering gig this evening, but I was told she would be picked up for it from home at 6.  So, with the assumption that she was actually at the RR thing, I went back home.  My gas tank is now 1/4 talk empiter than it had been.  If I had to use the gas to get Rhiannon, then so be it, but for a trip to sit there for no reason…. unacceptable. I don’t have money to blow on this kind of crap.   Igot home and told Corina to text the woman in charge of RR. Yep, that’s where Rhiannon was.  The lady was not happy with Rhiannon for not telling me either.  This is the second time in two weeks that I have gone to get Rhiannon after her work program and she wasn’t there.

The whole reason she is working afterschool is because we weren’t able to come up with the last $60 of a ridiculously huge amount of money for this stupid field trip.  I mean it’s one thing if we had ONE kid, but we have FOUR.  This year I had to come up with money for the Nashville trip, two trips to the Aquarium in Gatlinburg,  Corina’s prom (which ended up getting the shaft and I’m seriously unhappy about that too).  Not to mention how much they charge for school lunches and breakfasts now that we aren’t on the reduced plan anymore. Oh my rant could go on and on.  It’s almost enough to make me start homeschooling my kids, and THAT gives me nightmares.

My point was, if we didn’t have money to give them for this trip, how the hell are we supposed to come up with money for gas to keep going and getting her? Answer:  We don’t. Remember that 4 o’clock bus I mentioned? Well, she doesn’t *want* to ride it because it’s a waste of her *precious* time.  She wouldn’t get home til about 5:30 since she lives on the other side of town.  So, rather than waste 90 minutes of a 12yr old’s time in the afternoon, we’re supposed to shuttle people around with having to take Chris to work at lunch, go get Rhiannon, come back home, Corina then has to go back and pick up Chris at 10pm…  do you know how much gas that takes??  Oh hell no.  If she wants to go to Nashville, she’s going to ride that 4 o’clock bus home.

Now, she is having a meltdown because she can’t find her tangrams thingy she’s supposed to turn in tomorrow for a test grade.  She had them out showing Chris on Sunday night, now she can’t find them.  She also is not graduating from DARE because she *forgot* to take her DARE book back to school and left it here, and so didn’t turn it in on time.   All of this drama is punctuated by her saying she’s not going to school tomorrow and she doesn’t care if we got to jail for truancy.  She said she’s stupid and should just die..  I swear to God, I don’t think we had this crap with Corina.

Christopher is home now and helping her find the stuff she’s missing – I hope.  Of course no matter what happens, it will be *OUR* fault that she forgot things and lost her project.

I want to go into a coma and wake up when they graduate high school.

 

The Junior Prom and a Full Day.

Today was first and foremost the day of Corina’s Junior Prom.  Of course, she’s not the only kid we have, so everyone else believed it was THEIR day.

Zoe: "Is it my turn now?"

I stayed up way too late Friday night. I knew Saturday(today) was going to be a big day, but I got in the mood to clean and do some laundry.  So I folded clothes and stayed up to watch HGTV til it was to infomercials at 4am.  Earlier that night, Christopher and I had snuggled on the couch and watched Under the Tuscan Sun.

So, today, I didn’t want to wake up when the alarm went off at 11.  In fact I reset it for later. I did finally drag myself out of bed, and heard the sounds of our kids fully into their busy days and neighborhood kids running in and out playing with our younger two girls.  I sat there thinking about the stuff on the schedule for the day and hauled myself to the shower.

The plan included:

1.Take Zoe to Dollar Tree for flipflops because she asked me nicely for them yesterday after crying for at least a half hour (no exaggeration) that she was the only girl who didn’t have flipflops.

2. Finish getting house cleaned up since so much activity was going to be happening here today.

3. Corina take Rhiannon to the movies for her date with her boyfriend I’m not supposed to name.

4. Claude and Judy come here to meet and follow me (and Faelyn) to our old house to dig up the flowers Mom had given me 16 years ago. LOTS of irises and some daylilies.

5. Go get Christopher from work.

6. Get Rhiannon from the movies

7. Come home and do Corina’s hair for the prom.

8. Corina go get Tyler and come back here for photos. Then they go on to prom. She is to be home by midnight. (She’s still only 16!)

9. Get Christopher to mow the yard and plant the flowers I kept.

10. Faelyn has a friend over for a sleepover.

11. Make dinner, chill on the back porch.

Zoe found a pair of $1 flipflops she loved and I think she’s sleeping in them.

Got some cleaning done. I did polish the antique buffet and coffee table.

Claude was a great help getting those flowers dug up.  Mom had given them to me when I’d moved there 16 years ago.  I’m afraid I did not inherit her green thumb much to my disappointment.  I only kept 3 snowball bush saplings, my Sterling Silver rose, some mint, and most of the comfrey plant. Comfrey was her favorite herb, and I love the plant.  It has beautiful little bluebell flowers on it at different times of the year.  It’ll live through about anything too.  So, we got the flowers and I said good bye to Claude and his family as they headed back to Rogersville.  Faelyn and I took Sputnik with us AGAIN.  He’s our tomcat who grew up at the old place and thinks of it as home.  We keep taking him to the new place about a half mile away, and he keeps coming back to the old place.  Then off Faelyn, Sputnik and I went to get Christopher.  He had just gotten off a phone call when I pulled up and he got in the van and then the phone rang again. His grandpa. They talked and I drove home to let Sputnik in the house and get the plants out of the back.

Went inside and found Corina and her friend Tracy working on makeup. I knew something kept nagging at me, but with everything going on, the feeling slipped away. About half an hour later or more when I was just about done doing Corina’s hair, I got a phone call from Rhiannon asking where I was. OOPS!  I swear I am a good mother!  She could have called earlier… she stood out there waiting an hour before the theater manager asked if she needed to call. She wasn’t alone, there were other people all over. It was a Sat at the movies afterall.  Nothing else to do in this town. So I quickly drove out there and got her.

Corina looked amazing in her prom dress.  Due to issues with money due to the high deductible insurance and the new mortgage and the ungodly electric bill (everyone’s is high around here, unreal), we didn’t have much to spend on a prom dress, so we had gone by the Prom Closet run by Asbury Methodist church, and got her a gorgeous silver evening gown for TEN BUCKS!  It was awesome.  It wasn’t a pink frilly taffeta thing like most of the girls were wearing, but this dress could be worn again to some fancy event.

Corina and Tyler GHS Prom 2009

Aren't they cute?

The sleepover was fine, but they decided to go to bed early instead of finish watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua.  When I went to sleepovers we didn’t get to sleep til dawn.  Oh well.

A little later, Rhiannon brought me a permission form for her to go off campus to the NPAC to chorus practice and then to Taco Bell for lunch.  This makes no sense to me since Taco Bell is nowhere near the NPAC. They could just go to Arby’s and McDonalds down the street.  Oh well.  Anyway, I had to sign and date it.  And that’s when it hit me. Today is April 18, 2009 – exactly 20 years to the day of my car accident when I was 18.

I’m not up to writing the whole accident story here, but bascially my best friend was killed. I had a lot of broken bones and a head injury that they believed I would not live through. After being in a coma for 3 days, I woke up with absolutely no memory of how I got into the hospital or much of anything for about 2 weeks before the wreck.  I’ve since remembered a few little things like how Ali left me to sleep that morning (I was staying at her place) and she went to get her hair French braided. We were going to a job interview that afternoon.  At Walt Disney World, Ali’s favorite place in the whole Universe. We never made it.

I still struggle daily with the sometimes excruciating pain from the broken vertebrae. And the head injury is blamed for a lot of issues I have with memory and recall.  I have since learned to compensate for the short term memory loss by doing things over and over to learn by repetition rather than memory.  I (and the whole family) has a huge calendar we use to keep track of every little thing going on (like stuff for today)…  forgetting to get Rhiannon is a perfect example of my memory.  Things other people remember easily slip my mind even easier.  So, yeah not checking the calendar often makes it kind of useless.  Another things I do is try to get into a routine about certain things.  I had been in a morning routine that kept my house clean – almost self cleaning.  But things disturbing the routine for several days makes it stop being a routine and I have to reteach myself to do things in order all over again…  lists, post it notes etc.  I wish I had a secretary!

Good day overall.  Very good day.