De-ranged, and Other Insanity

It has been over a month since my last post, brought to my attention by a friend of mine who was worried that something had happened to us. Nothing earth-shattering has happened, nothing is wrong, we're just getting into the rhythm of our new abode and subsequent schedule changes.

Things have been INSANELY busy here as we continue to settle in our new house and get A into local therapies, school sessions, etc. Did I say 'insanely'? I meant to say, 'psychotically'.

A's IEP meeting was on Wednesday, April 16th, and we started his first speech session in the new school district that Friday. Since then, nearly every day he goes to speech, OT, or ABA therapy in our old town or 10 minutes away in our new one. The new school system opted not to put him in the classroom because there were only 6 weeks left of actual school days at that time, so they are waiting until summer for his ESY services to start attending in a class.

So in the meantime we get itenerant services, which are great but involve a lot of gas in the car to get him to the locations for his group speech, private speech, and OT through the school system, in addition to his private OT and ABA therapies an hour from here. Blessedly his special instruction teacher comes to the house on Wednesdays so we don't have to drive for that one. Some days he has more than one session, in different locations (of course!). So his sister and I pack up in the car with him and we go all over the western part of the state throughout the week. It's a good thing we have a pretty state to drive through, it helps soothe my soul when the little one gets cranky in her car seat. My own personal Zen moments so I don't give in to the temptation to duct-tape her mouth shut when the whining frequencies hit the higher registers. : )

We have continued to unpack the house, and finally got our own washer and dryer in place and the ones that conveyed with the house out into our "mudroom" area. The "mudroom" is really an unfinished addition that has a concrete floor, raw studs, two missing windows, and a roof that is too flat and leaks in a few places in a heavy rain, but it's great for the dog. And an extra washer and dryer.

We have also been having fun with my husband's work schedule; he switched to "mids" for a couple of weeks, and then they reassigned him back to another schedule for "days", so there was some general chaos and crankiness as he had to change sleep schedules (keeping the kids quiet so daddy can sleep all day is a challenge, but not one we'll see again until mid-summer at this point, Thank God.).

I am also doing the artwork for the church entry hallway (it runs the length of the hallway), which will change with the sermon themes ~ luckily our pastor tends to preach on one topic for at least 5 weeks at a time. It's about to change again when he switches back to finish II Timothy, so I'm working on the "benevolence" section of the wall at the moment. I'm also working on the flowerbeds and general gardening and groundskeeping around the building only, thank goodness! I don't think I could handle the entire 17 acres.

We have had a bunch of people over to the house a couple of times, and planned a third gathering that had to be cancelled due to flies. Yes, flies. It would seem that we live in a triangle between 3 chicken farms, the furthest from us less than 5 miles. Every time they clean out the chicken coops, we have flies literally carpeting our house in a black, moving blanket, and a lot (!) get in when we enter or exit. A horror movie could use our house as a set when they're really bad.

Fly strips and fly motels help cut down on their numbers, but our best friend has been the green Raid can ~ that lays 'em out completely. The down-sides of the green Raid can are a) it's chemical control, which we are trying to get away from, and b) we have to cover up all food prep items and get the dog and kids out of the house when we spray ~ which, since it has rained nearly every day for the last 3 weeks is not such an easy thing. The flies are not a new problem, our neighbor filled 8 of the bag kind of fly traps last year ~ each trap holds 50,000 flies. So until we can figure out something more effective, outdoor picnics are not an option at this time. Eschk. We're not in the city any more, Toto.

I read somewhere that flies HATE dried garlic, and it's used as an addition to horse feeds, etc to keep the flies out. Experimenting, I have discovered that diluting garlic liquid spice with some water, putting it in a spray bottle, and spraying the snot out of our front and side doors (and the surrounding frames) works surprisingly well at repelling the suckers, although I have to spray the glass too for them to stay completely off the door, which makes the panes look a bit grimy. It also makes my house smell like a Korean restaurant, but I'll deal with that if the garlic continues working as well as it has been.

My own flowerbeds got a much needed weeding here at the house, it took a few days to hack through the undergrowth. I think a machete probably would have come in very handy, but I didn't want to destroy the perennials that are already up. Thank goodness there were enormous piles of leaves everywhere, already broken down into leaf mold. That's some primo mulch right there, so I used it! I also have 6 tomato plants (3 different kinds), 5 different bell peppers, 4 celerys (celeries?), and 4 cucumber vines growing happily out in the back, as long as the resident groundhog (huge thing!) and bunnies leave them alone. It's a start.

My mother-in-law came to visit for a week, and we had a great time! We did all sorts of things we don't generally do, including taking the kids fishing, to Chuck E. Cheese to see the "crazy mouse" (in K's words), and my husband and I got a date night. For four whole hours! Woo hoo! We go out about two or three times a year by ourselves without the kids, that's been our average since we got married, for a variety of reasons. It was absolutely divine to be able to look at my husband during dinner and not try to compensate for A's stimming and flinging food on the walls (or other diners, if we're in public), keeping him in his chair and relatively quiet, or his sister knocking over her "big girl cup" onto herself, the table, and/or the floor. After a nice, quiet dinner, we walked around for a while able to hold hands with each other and eventually went to a coffee shop and stared at each other in awe as we made actual complete sentences in a real conversation. Yeah, I know; we need to get out more. : )

As is the case with a lot of special needs families, finding babysitters has been a challenge, not because A is completely horrible (he's actually very compliant and usually sweet), but because most people are very uncomfortable with some of his mannerisms, odd vocalizations, and the fact that he's as big as a kindergartener and not potty-trained yet. To quote a former neighbor, "That hand thing he does just freaks me out!" We also generally feel compelled to pay extra because we not only have two kids, but one of those is "special needs" ~ and we don't generally have extra, so we go out when it's free. Adding to the problem, we used to live about an hour from our friends (with the exception of one family), and my husband's unorthodox work schedule, in which he works weekends and has his days off in the middle of the week, also added some difficulties. This made it hard to get a sitter, as most high school kids have homework to complete and school the next day, and most adults have put in a full day of work themselves and also have to go to work the next day. Add driving an hour to and from us and you have a very long day indeed.

We did (and do) get offers occasionally from people that absolutely love our kids, but again there's that middle-of-the-week availability problem; most of the offerers are already up to their eyeballs in alligators managing their own hectic family lives and careers. (Honestly, though, part of the problem is I hate asking people when I know they're already super-busy and stressed already. It makes me very uncomfortable, even if they might say, "yes.").

Let's see, what else has happened? Our stove, which came with the house and we have no idea how old it is, keeps losing the burners on the top ~ while they are on. This is lots of fun when you're in the middle of cooking, and the loose burner has caught on the pan you have picked up (not slid) and it lands halfway across the cooktop, especially when it has been on "high". I had no idea my husband had such deft skills with a set of kitchen tongs and a spatula, but he popped that sucker back in place every time. Needless to say, we searched the GE site for replacement parts using our model number ~ which we learned are amazingly expensive (I choked), and we also can't find a year or manual for it anywhere.

My husband e-mailed me from work yesterday, he was bored at work so he surfed the 'net and bought a new Kenmore range through AAFES: tax-free, free delivery, and $230 under retail price (God Bless Memorial Day sales). I did not kill him. The total price is about the same amount that the replacement parts would have been for the stove that conveyed with the house. Go figure. So we will shortly be "de-ranged" (hee hee) and get a replacement. Yeah, I know, it's bad. I can't say these cheese-ball things face-to-face because I will get something thrown at me, so there is some relative safety in penning them on the computer. : )

Still no luck with potty-training either urchin, although A has actually started stripping out of his pants when he's filled them with something. He still doesn't verbally tell us when he's gone, so now we have to not only check his pants regularly, but also watch for his naked heinie. But it's progress, at least he knows when he's done something!

Our deck is coming down soon. It is a very nice deck, but unfortunately was not kept up with the weather sealing, and I put my foot right through the middle of it a week and a half ago. My daughter loves to bounce on the boards, which bend under her whole 26-pounds. We are trying to figure out if we can refinish it and put it back up, or if we will have to get all new materials. There is a lot of wood rot, so we're afraid it's just finished.

In other news, the dog loves to go under the deck while he's on his cable, and gets stuck routinely. Usually we can get him to untangle himself, but I had to crawl under the whole thing last week and get him out. And this is not a tall deck, there is barely enough room for me to scoot under there on my stomach and pray that no spiders get on me, and that there aren't any bad snakes. We have also discovered this is the home of the ground hog, which is probably why our doofus dog keeps going under there in the first place, so by taking the deck down we can hopefully convince that large furry rodent to move somewhere else, posthaste.

Let's see, what else. A riding lawnmower came with the house, but you have to jam a screwdriver in the engine block and pretty much hotwire the thing to get it started, and the blade will not disengage. Not a great combo with kids or pets, although it runs pretty well once it's going. If it dies in the yard, it's too hot to re-start so you have to push it back to the garage. So someone else gave us a 1978 John Deere, which works fine when the belts to the mowing blade stay on, we can usually make 2 laps around the yard before it falls off, and we wait for it to cool down so we can re-attach it. But it makes a nifty ride for the kids when the blade doesn't work. We bought one of those old-fashioned "man-powered" push mowers (like from the 1950's), and it works just fine on everything but the blasted dandelion stalks. And on just over a half acre, with a little bit of an incline, this gives us a fantastic work-out.

It also makes our neighbors to the right think we're "lawn Nazis", because with the push mower the grass can't get too tall or it won't work, so we're out there in the breaks in the rain, mowing every couple of days or so. The rain we needed, but it does make the grass shoot up rather quickly. The neighbors are trying to sell their house, so every time we mow, they have to as well, and they don't really appreciate that so much. We have had SO MUCH rain, we've gotten 5 inches in 6 hours, and 3 inches overnight between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. a couple of times. The rivers here remain right at or over flood stage, which beats last year when we had drought and it was already over 100 degrees at this time in May.

I have dug out two old burn pits in the back yard, but haven't gotten to the third one, which apparently was not used as recently and is overgrown with all sorts of nasty thorned plants. I pulled boxes and boxes of ash, broken glass, metal, etc out of the ground. Now we're just waiting for the rain to abate so the soil man's dirt can dry out enough to bring some to us, so we can plant grass.

We have a very large sandy area where a swimming pool used to be about 6 years ago, and that was used as a burn pit by the previous owners. We have a forest of horse nettles that I keep chopping out because they are painful (through gloves!)and all parts of the plant are poisonous, so I don't want my dog or kids to get into it. My dog has just enough imbecile in him to ignore the spines and eat some of it anyway. Apparently horse nettles are in the nightshade family, but aren't one of the beneficial plants (unlike tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, or potatoes). And because they are related to the beneficial vegetable crops, I have learned that weed controls like Roundup only kill off the weeds around the plants, in favor of the horse nettles, so that just strengthens my "no chemical" stance. So I get out there and dig them up every few days or so when the rain abates for a few hours, and my husband is mowing the lawn.

There's more, like the Invasion of the Yellow Jackets, and the Bog of Eternal Stench (from the septic tank), but for now I'm going to leave off. I might actually post again before another month goes by!