Mommathon

Turner does a great job of telling the story of growing up in a fundamentalist independent Baptist church. He tells of his pastor tallying the number of souls saved each weekend, bussing people into church from near and far to get their numbers up (and to save souls), some of the diversions he used as a child to make it through church services three times a week (two of those on Sunday), boxing matches between his pastor and the devil and how his pastor liked to use the letter P while delivering sermons. It’s a great perspective on how kids view religion growing up and also how what they got from their childhood religious upbringing steers them one way or another as an adult. The subtitle of this book really sums things up: one kids’ journey toward God despite a holy mess.

You know things are getting interesting when they break out the hazmat suits. They were going into our crawl space to check out the damage. They ended up ripping out at least ten of those HUGE industrial size trash bags of insulation that got wet. Tomorrow they are supposed to come back to rip up our kitchen floors and tear out the ceiling. Good thing I’m not hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year. ;0

There is nothing like coming home after being gone for three hours to find that your kitchen, dining room and entry way are completely flooded, water is pouring-POURING-out of the light sockets and there aren’t enough towels on the block to soak up the mess.

What I think happened is that the mechanism on the washing machine (which is on the 2nd floor) that tells it when the water level is high enough and it can start washing the clothes malfunctioned and so the washer just continued to fill with water until it spilled over onto the floor….for three hours. I truly cannot put into words how much water there was. When the fire department came they were in awe…that’s never a good sign. Anyways, my neighbors are the heroes in all of this. They brought over their wet vac and sucked up all the water in the laundry room and tried their best to suck up some of the water in the carpet in the hallway while I was downstairs trying to do damage control. My neighbors also brought us dinner and had their teenage daughter come over and entertain the boys for me. I called the insurance people and they told me I needed to call a company that would get started on taking care of the water damage ASAP. The company came out within the hour and they were here until about 10:30 ripping up carpet, installing fans, dehumidifiers and poking holes in the walls and ceiling to let out the moisture. Where was my hubby you ask? He was out of the country on business, but I didn’t want him to feel like he was being left out of the party, so I called him in the wee hours of the morning his time to let him know what was going on. Poor guy, he felt so bad that he wasn’t there to help, but there will be plenty for him to do when he gets back, I am sure.

Sorry, Monopoly, Colm has a new favorite game. I think in the first 24 hours after he first learned how to play it, I must have played it with him at least nine times, maybe more. The first night we played it, we didn’t have any detective cards where you can mark off clues as you figure things out. This did not deter Colm, he just kept all the clues straight in his head. The next day I made some clue cards, it makes the game A LOT easier. 🙂

My favorite quote from him as I was telling him how to play the game and I was explaining to him that he had to figure out who did it, what they did it with and what room they did it in. “Mom, why do we have to figure out that room? If they killed them in there, there would be blood all over the place.”

Part of the boys’ violin teacher’s curriculum is teaching kids how to conduct. Let me just say, I get tired just watching Liam try to learn how to do it. It’s not easy, folks. There’s all these different counts and beats and you have to move the wand this way for one kind of measure and that way for another kind. I don’t know how he will ever keep it all straight…I know I won’t. It did give us all a brand new appreciation for the conductor when we went to go see the philharmonic last week though.

The boys are both playing on a futsal (essentially indoor soccer) team together for the next six weeks or so. I love that they can both play on the same team. I also love that it’s just games-no practices.

I have been reading a lot of books lately about growing your own food, raising chickens, etc. This book is along those lines in that the authors spent one year eating only things that grew within 100 miles of their house. I will say that this isn’t the best written book I have ever read, but it was definitely interesting. It really made me think of all the things I would have to give up…bananas, oranges, probably anything that contains wheat which would include pancakes, bread and flour tortillas.