week ending April 15, 2007:

Week ending April 15, 2007: Well, this hasn’t been the easiest of weeks. My grandfather’s health is failing, Chloe has a virus, and Casey spent about 8 hours working on my car only to have to spend another 8 hours doing exactly the same thing again because it didn’t work the 1st time. My grandfather is 91 and has lived a full and happy life, Chloe will get better soon, and I’m grateful that Casey has the confidence to repeat the fix on my car even though it didn’t work the 1st time. The fix saved us several hundred dollars and saved me being stuck at home with no car for several days while the car would have had to be at the shop. Sometimes I wonder about what life would be like now if I’d gone back to work and we hadn’t cut our income in half while doubling our family’s population. I don’t think we’d be spending so much time fixing cars. But then I remember that our parents lived for long periods of time as one-car families, so maybe two old cars is not so bad. We made another decision this week that would have been easier with two incomes. We decided that instead of driving to Florida with the kids, we’d fly. The gas prices are going up and the flight prices are going down, so it was easier rationalize the expense. I am really excited about taking the kids on a plane. I bought the tickets Saturday morning and then Saturday afternoon I took the kids to the Observation Gallery at BWI airport so they could see planes taking off and landing. The kids were pretty under whelmed with watching airplanes and were much more interested the moving walkways. I just never can guess what they are thinking. To them 200,000 lb of airplane accelerating from 0 to 160mph in a distance easily viewed from our comfy lounge was interesting almost once. However, taking every article of Chloe’s clothing out of her closet and spreading the hangers evenly throughout her room (while I wasn’t watching) was interesting for quite some time. They said they were “packing” to go to Florida. Even being sick is interesting to them. Alex is a bit jealous that Chloe is sick so we had a conversation that went something like this: Alex - “Mom, am I sick?”. Me - “No, but you probably will be soon”. Alex- “Oh, thanks Mom!”.