Suzy Q Homemaker

Social media is giving me a big case of the Blahhs lately.  No offense, but really, I haven’t looked at my feedly or my google reader or the little rss feed app that I dowonloaded the day I was stuck sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office for three hours.

Twitter has me all cross-eyed half the time because, while I want to follow everyone that follows me, I honestly don’t have a billion seconds in each day to catch up on the twelvety-billion tweets you guys post.  SHEESH.  I have to download programs and apps that allow me to create lists of people and divide you guys up into “Choir Friends” and “St. John UMC” and “Cool Cats” and “Farmville” (WHATEVER I AM NOT ASHAMED!!!!).  For the most part, I’m doing my very, very best to keep up.

But in the twitter stream that I haven’t filtered yet, I have a hard time grouping any other categories together.

I want more from twitter than just blather about your latest blog post, the dinner you are about to eat, or the twitpic of what mess your kid just made.  I want a story.  I know of knitters who tweet minimalist patterns.  The projects on ravelry are wicked.  As un-colloquial as that term is for me, it’s the only term I can honestly use.  As you are not hearing my voice describing the knitted art in a North-Eastern accent, I think I can use that word on this, your computer or iPhone or smartphone screen.

I’d like to introduce #storyteller.

My husband wrote a book called Ten Tales for Almost Anyone.  He printed and handbound every copy and sells them in his etsy shop.  Each book is one-of-a-kind.  As for the tales, they are fairy tales geared toward adults but completely acceptable and fun for children, and a few of which are existentially-themed short stories.

His twitter account @osmosiphobe is currently tweeting one of his tales, 140 or so characters at a time.  I invite you to follow him as he tells “The Old Man and Death” in a way that may not have been done before.  Not every tweet has been tagged with #storyteller.  No, you must read the story on its own page.  The story itself is updated two or three times a day.

It’s a challenge, maybe.  Will you keep up with the story as it unfolds?  If you have questions about the story, Jamie can always answer them via email or his twitter account.

I love this story and I love the way Jamie tells it.  This is my challenge to my readers, though.   And there may be a prize involved down the line.  We’ll see.  :)

Jamie has been training for months to participate in his first-ever triathlon.  He and my stepfather were in the Novice Men group in the Langley Pond Triathlon.  I’m awfully proud of both of them.  They trained hard and I have a feeling this won’t be Jamie’s first.  I hear he’s looking up more triathlons for later this year.  Maybe he’ll inspire me to get my rear in gear.  Lord knows I need it.

This is how we play with Timothy.  It honestly doesn’t take much since right now he is into climbing and pounding on things to see if they make noise.  To play this game, all you need to do is lie down on the floor and protect your glasses and facial area.  Timothy will do the rest!   If you watch closely, you will see that Timothy has been trying this thing called “Standing Without Hands”.  It’s what comes before Walking which, incidentally, I don’t think we’re prepared for.  After all, we just got verification that child-proofing the floor hasn’t been going all that well.  Do we really need to add child-proofing everything else within reach of a toddler?  It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

We learned a lot of things this weekend while retreating with the choir.  I learned that even if hover-nursing in the van is employed, Timothy still won’t be happy that he is in his car seat.  Which led to the discovery that the Arby’s in Spartanburg, SC does not have changing stations in the bathrooms.  What’s up with that?

I learned that everyone should have at least seven cups of coffee before beginning a choir rehearsal at 9:30 a.m.  Or maybe that’s just me.  Either way, I found myself wanting to stab myself in the eyes a couple times when things got intense.  I’m just a sensitive gal, you know?  I like my body temperature to be regulated and the relative humidity to be just right.  I don’t like out-of-tune pianos or singing in a carpeted room, but these things can be overlooked because the fact was we were enjoying beautiful weather outside of the rehearsal room and delicious meals not cooked by us.

Sleep isn’t something I expect while on choir retreat.  I mean, I usually have an infant with me or am pregnant and sleeping on a hard twin-sized bed.  This year’s sleeping situation was really no surprise.   Timothy disagreed with us about how much and how long he was supposed to sleep at night, so our first night there was spent tossing, turning, and grumbling every hour when he would wake up to let us know he did not want to be in our 50′s-style beds-pushed-together bed.  I’m fairly sure part of the problem was all the sleeping he did in the car and how restless it left him.  Oh, and it was about 90 degrees in our room because evidently the “comfort zone” on the thermostat meant “TROPICAL ZONE”.

Jamie was happy to come along for the ride this year and joined the festivities around the campfire with his concertina.  He learned that there are several verses of “Whiskey in the Jar” that he didn’t know.  For the record, the tradition of putting out the campfire with the rest of the men was not appealing, so he did not participate.

Timothy enjoyed himself as much as an almost seven-month-old can in the mountains.  I brought along toys and he got to chill with his friend Emmy.  They hung out a lot, cried together, babbled at each other, and captured the attention of all the baby-crazy grown-ups.  Even though he was sad when we wouldn’t let him pull our dinner plates off the table or share our coffee, the fresh air outside was distracting and invigorating.  Yet somehow, he maintained an aura of aloofness that had us adults making some crazy noises and faces just to get him to smile.

Obviously he wasn’t going to act like he cared.

(stolen from my good friend’s facebook. THANK YOU MARY ANN!)

I’ve been trying to think of a way to write about this and every time I think I’m ready to write, I have to go clean up a mess or change a diaper or stick a thermometer in a baby’s butt!  I guess you can say I’ve been busy.

Jamie finally, FINALLY got a new job.  Last Monday, he got called for an interview for a teacher’s assistant job at a private school, went in for the interview Tuesday, then got accepted Wednesday.  It all happened so fast!  He started yesterday, but in order to help out the family that he worked for before, he is staying on in the evenings for the next two weeks.  This means I’ll have to be doing all the homework/after school/dinner stuff by myself, but that’s really no different than it has been for the past six years.  Once these two weeks are over, he’ll be getting home in the afternoons and we’ll be able to co-parent in the evenings.  It’ll feel like a vacation!

The major change in our routine, though, will be mornings.  Because Jamie’s job schedule was so sporadic for the last couple years, he has been the one getting up with the boys to see them onto the bus in the mornings.  Now he has to leave before 7:00 A.M. and I have to get them on the bus.  It’s so crazy!  I am so not a morning person, and have enjoyed my few years of sleeping in.  Every day is going to be different because Timothy isn’t always going to be sleeping while I try to pour cereal or find missing socks.  But I think I can handle this change as long as I can take a shower and drink at least half a cup of coffee before the craziness begins.

This morning was our second day of the new routine.  Timothy and Simon were both asleep when I walked the boys down to the end of the driveway to wait for the bus, so I got to spend some time with Corey and Aiden.  Corey spotted a squirrel going across a wire and when I started singing a circus tune, he got the giggles.  We watched the squirrel for a good five minutes until it made it into a tree and disappeared.

The birds were loud and Aiden said it would be cool if all the birds could make a band.  I told him to close his eyes and listen for a minute and it might just sound like a band.

After they listened for a few seconds, Corey said he wishes he could record it so he could listen to it every day.

I wish I could record those conversations so I can play them back in a few years when the boys are too cool to talk to me.  I know that day is coming.  And I want to put it off for a little while longer.  I want to bottle up these moments.  Or!  (not to sound super nerdy) I wish I could extract them from my memory like in Harry Potter so I can look at them later.

Yeah.  That would be pretty awesome.