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Friday, September 24, 2004
a nice day :)
To file under Things To Make Me Happy About Being A Mom*:
Last night the kids really "surprised" me. T was home getting ready to head out for the fire he's working on (which is in the Los Padres National Forest, between Highway 1 and Highway 101 about halfway from Monterey to, oh, say, Santa Barbara, by the way. He's in King City. Steinbeck fans** will know where that is), and I ran to the store to get him the latest issue of Sky and Telescope to take with him. C was feeling much better at this point -- Tylenol is like a miracle cure for her. So I asked the kids to please unload the dishwasher while I was gone, as much as they could. When I got back I had to walk through the kitchen but I was told that under no circumstances was I to look toward the dishwasher, because they were working on a surprise. So I pretended not to see them scrubbing off the dishes with a brush and loading them into the dishwasher, and sat down in the living room to read. At one point LT came in and told me that he didn't know where to put a certain dish in the dishwasher. This was followed by a loudly whispered argument in the kitchen, and then the declaration: "I needed to know because we are cleaning off the counter, Mom!" And they did do that, too. They really did quite a good job.
**I am not one of these.
And today has gone pretty well. C continues to feel pretty well. The kids were cooperative. With C being sick and T being gone, we took the day off from sit-down school, but the kids ended up having a great time doing learning games on the computer. I don't have the guts to be an unschooler, but I can certainly see where they're coming from.
On the money front, things are looking up a bit. Today we answered a classified ad offering two free dressers to a person who'd come pick them up. So now, instead of needing to buy four dressers, we only need to buy two, and those can wait a bit; it was the kids' dressers that were in the worst shape. Our A/C ended up being fine in the car (did I mention it was broken?). T kept trying to add Freon to it, and it wouldn't take any, and we thought that was a problem with the intake. Then he rigged it so it would come on whenever the car was on, and it was cold, so we concluded that since it obviously had plenty of Freon, it must be an electrical problem. But then he had to disconnect the battery to sort of shut down and restart the car's computer, for something totally unrelated, and when he reconnected it, the A/C worked fine. Also, I fixed our fridge again, so we don't need a new one of those. Basically, we had a list of things we needed money for pretty badly, with the total running up about $2500, and God has whittled that down to about $700 -- eye appointments and glasses for T and myself, and two dressers. Which is almost definitely within reach of the overtime T will make from this little one-weekend fire. yay God!
