Happy Birthday William!

William turned eight today. I can hardly believe it. Eight years since I looked into those deep blue eyes that I just knew would turn out brown just like his mother's. Eight years since I watched him trying to take it all in. Eight years since I left him and Karen at the hospital to make sure that all was well with Grandma Pat and Thomas, and noticed on the way home for the first time that there was a full moon. And realized that it was Friday the 13th. Since then, I think, I have considered Friday the 13th to be an exceptionally lucky day.

To celebrate, we pulled William and Daniel out of school just a bit early (they were originally supposed to have the day off for Columbus...uh Discovery Day, but now we have a day in November called Energy Day instead and, well, it's a very long story), had dinner at Hart's Turkey Farm and played for a couple of hours at Funspot.

William got a board game called Othello from Thomas (which he actually got last night so that he and Thomas could play the game; Tom works most nights), an Air Hog radio controlled helicopter from Daniel, and a digital camera from us. William's been using our cameras and taking wonderful pictures, so we decided he needed one of his own. I hope to be posting a lot of them to the Web site from now on (a picture of Karen,. in fact, is tomorrow's daily picture).

Daniel and William fell asleep on the way home from Funspot, after declaring it his "best birthday ever." He and Daniel are now upstairs dreaming while the adults in the house try to wind down for the night. Tomorrow it's back to the regular old routine. Except that now it includes an eight-year-old.

I just can't get over it.

We Just Keep Going

Daniel has an interesting way with words, an an amazing imagination. Last week he told the teacher in his daycare classroom that he thought they should change the nickname of the room from "The Snowy Owls" to "The Snowy Pouncing Kittens of Doom."

We laughed about that for days. I think perhaps I should start a new section of the Web site called "Dannyisms." What do you think?

Not that it's going to happen very soon. Things are, well, just a little busy at the moment. Let's take the last two days. Yesterday we had a showing of the old house to a potential buyer, and so we spent Saturday night and yesterday morning getting the house prepared, not only cleaning, but trying to catch up on a couple of repair jobs.

After the showing we worked in the new house moving things out of the way for the arrival of sheetrock this morning. Until dinner time, after which I was off to rehearsal. Dancing this time, just what I needed after moving heavy boxes around all day. All well, the show must go on.

And the madness. This morning, I drove Thomas off to see a car, which we took to our mechanic to check over. Unfortunately, the mechanic found too many problems with the car, and so Tom won't be buying that one. Back to square one.

And back home to 70 sheets of sheetrock in our driveway, waiting to be taken into the house. That's where the teenagers come in! They took the sheetrock into the house while I made a minor modification to our stairwell wall. When they were done, I started hanging the sheetrock. I think I'll know what I'm doing by the time I'm done.

Inbetween all of this, of course, are the myriad little chores that are part of being an adult with children--daycare, homework, meals, bills, and the like. Sleep. Maybe. Kind of hard to sleep sometimes; my mind is racing much of the time. A combination of having too many things on my plate and not actually knowing how to do a lot of them.

But for the most part, I'm figuring it out.