Busy Back Yard

The house deal is progressing as planned. We will close on the new house on Friday, June 26, and take possession of it by July 1. We’re giving the sellers a little extra time to get their things out and have the house professionally cleaned. Abby is finally getting excited about moving. She and David went over to the house with Pam this past week to look at a few things and they had a ball running and screaming back and forth between what will eventually become their bedrooms. It is nice to see them enjoying the new digs.

Once we have the new house available to us, we’ll begin moving some stuff over and making some of the little changes we wanted to make to the house and back yard. We’ll continue to live in our current house until it is sold.

Pam found a good solution for our carport need at the new house, so we’ll be looking for a builder to help us with that. E-mail us if you have any recommendations.

Abby just finished a week at an “American Girl” camp where every day they had a different doll from a different time period and they learned about life in different times. They made butter, made clothes for their dolls, necklaces, made yarn dolls and they learned about manners and table etiquette. We were amazed at how well behaved Abby has been at the table since camp. She knows more things about manners than I do! Next week, Abby starts horseback riding lessons. She's going to have fun.

David is turning into a real chatterbox. He is stringing together more and more sentences and says some really cute things. The other day, after supper, Abby was eating a Popsicle and David decided he wanted one. So he said, “Want a pop goes the weasel?” How cute! He is so full of energy and likes to hop and skip everywhere he goes. He does not like being held back, so we have a few fits over that every now and then, but most of the time he is really sweet.

Pam plans to start “officially” potty training David in about one more week. We hope he takes to it quickly. We have tried to familiarize him with using the toilet for quite a while, but we have not been consistent enough to make it stick. He just thinks it is a game and not a necessity at this point. The other day, I caught him emptying an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet. That was not much fun for me, but David had a blast.

We have been purging and cleaning out cabinets and drawers over here. We have gotten rid of a lot of surplus coffee mugs, cups and countless sippie cups that nobody wants or uses here any more. We still have a lot of things to go through, but it is nice to have removed some of the clutter in our lives already. It seems to reduce some of the everyday stresses to have things you need neatly put away in the same place and easy to find. I hope we will continue to do this at the new house. Clutter is like weeds in your lawn. Sometimes you don’t notice how bad it is getting until they have almost taken over.

I keep hoping to set some time aside for playing some music, but it gets harder and harder to find the time to do it. I did sneak some guitar time in while the kids were playing in the back yard. I grabbed a guitar and sat on the back porch while the kids played. That went OK until the kids started mauling me. I hope some day the kids will want to join me when I try to play music instead of interfere. They’re just too young to understand that right now.

I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist for this coming Friday afternoon. I’m so sick of wearing glasses and I want to be rid of them. I have previously consulted a local vision clinic about laser vision correction options and I was not impressed with their solution. I have always been far-sighted, but now that I am dealing with the “over 40” vision issues, I am finding that both my near and far vision is getting worse. I currently wear bifocals and they do the trick for most things I have to see, but the more I wear them, the more I need to wear them. It is like my eyes can’t see anything clearly without help and that bothers me a lot. I can’t read the alarm panel for our house alarm, or the caller ID on the phone, or even the buttons on my phone without the glasses. I dread the next vision check when I go to renew my driver’s license in 2011.

So, I am hoping for a better solution after meeting with the ophthalmologist. I’m willing to do something as simple as contacts or even do laser correction, if they can convince me they have a better plan than the last time I looked into it. The first time, the clinic wanted to give me “mono-vision” which essentially took one eye and made it my “far-vision” eye and the other would be my “near-vision” eye. My brain was supposed to sort out the images. They simulated it with contacts and I HATED IT! I will not allow that to be done to me. I saw that Bausch and Lomb has a new contact lens that is supposed to help my kind of vision problems. If they are right for me, that’s what I want to do. Stay tuned to see how this all works out.