June Rambles

The longest day of the year finds us in (mostly) good spirits and in possession of a lot of happy plans. The trial of uncertainty is over. At last, I feel like I can be where I am. 

We celebrated the end of the school year, and the end of my 10 month year at work, with a playdate to the kids' favorite park with some of their favorite friends from daycare. To this day, one year through kindergarten, Miles' best friends are those he met at our precious daycare. 

Aaliyah is just in his heart. He beams when he sees her and they begin to frolic. 

Happily for Adele, Aaliyah has 3 siblings! One of whom is just a few months older than she is, and goes to daycare with her:

I'm thrilled that the whole family will come to Miles' little birthday party, planned for two weeks from yesterday.

Goodness, I have some planning to do!

Last week, frustrated at a local event that turned out to be a real bust, we went strolling as a family to Pandapas Pond, a favorite swampy hike. It's so good to have both the time and the weather for these outings. 

There has been a lot of mud and sticks and worms in their summer so far. Counting it a success. 

Last Monday we sent Jon to Seattle for a conference for 3.5 loooong days.

No, really. Days are 45% longer without Jon. I've scientifically observed it. 

Obviously I had to send him a picture immediately to demonstrated that I'd kept the kids alive that long. 

It was close, though. 

Something always goes wrong when Jon goes out of town, btw. It's like Mercury automatically goes into retrograde. We've had kids get sick and the car break, but this time the cats decided to scare me and attempt suicide. I found evidence that they'd eaten zinc lozenges and, as they'd been throwing up all week (aren't you glad you read my blog??), I took them to the vet for the first time in too long.

Yes, so, the really insane thing about how I decided to handle putting cats in boxes and kids in car seats and travelling with them all is that I decided to let them attend a pioneer themed story hour at a local historic house, cats in tow. I put their yowling selves on the porch in their boxes and brought the kids inside. Because I love stress. 

I actually thought it might be good if they did one enjoyable thing that horrible, horrible day. 

As I posted on Facebook in desperation for some adult sympathy,

The best part of today had to be when the cats were locked in the trunk with my keys, yowling, & Miles was screaming in terror in the yard bc the car alarm wouldn't stop and I needed the keys to make it stop. Oh, and Adele was buckled in. Good times.

The good part about Jon's being away is all the time we spent in the public library. I've been able to encourage Miles in reading independently- he's almost done with his "Magic School Bus" title- and Adele's been able to make her own choices. I have made some of my own. Jane Ray created the prettiest Bible story book I've ever seen with "Let There Be Light." All text is from the KJV, but the pictures just infuse magic into those old words. 

Words cannot describe my relief that Jon is home. Most other times he's been away the kids have been in school, or I've been visiting relatives. This time it was just us, at home, and that was long. enough.

So we are making plans to visit Rochester and to visit North Carolina and to celebrate Miles' birthday, and lastly, we are making plans to move... half a mile away.

In the early days of June, I was despondently looking at apartment listings, wishing we'd heard back from anyone and that I could with any confidence investigate renting any of the lovely houses for rent in our area. 

Jon heard back from only about 1/4 of the jobs he applied to, and all responses were in the negative. There was one interview, out of state, which happened on the 13 of April and from which to this day we have heard NOTHING back. Anyway. I found this lovely little house listed for something we could consider affordable, and decided it was too good to ignore. We were shown the house, but informed there was someone ahead of us with an application. I figured it was just my amusing myself, window shopping, but my heart was bitter because the owners were such great people, friends of Jon's, and it was in so many ways a perfect little house for us. Yard, big kitchen, near our current neighborhood and school. 

Well, a few days later the owner emailed me and said the person ahead of us backed out, and she'd love for us to be the renters. She even cut the rent a bit to entice us to commit, but said she had to know within a week. I was wretched; how could we commit when we could be moving to another state in a month, for all I knew? 

But somehow reason caught up with me, in the form of Jon. He suggested we find out what we'd be on the hook for if we did have to move, and the owner said she simply would need us to find a replacement. That was something I felt confident we could find, with 5 years of networks surrounding us here. And you know, it was less than a month before most of these jobs wanted the candidate to start. We came to accept that there would be no new job this year.  

Which is extremely frustrating, when we let ourselves think of it. This is almost exactly what happened in 2009 when Jon finished the MLS in the first place. Now he has two more master's degrees, with a total of three, and I'm wondering how many degrees a person has to have in this century to get a job. When will all this school pay off? Will it? It's a significant worry. But it's a worry we're shelving for now, in hope that the God who brought us to this amazing town with such tenderness and concern for our needs will not fail to provide the next rung in the ladder. When the time comes. 

For now? We're moving to our first (tiny) house at the beginning of August. 

There's a yard, a fire pit, and our lot-mates have the sweetest little dog. I'm nothing but grateful, at the moment.