What All Happened Last Week, Part 1

We had a rough week last week, and I talked and explained, both in person and on Facebook, until I was tired of talking about it, but I'll go ahead and talk about it again anyway, because this is real life. This is the way things really happen in this crazy, mixed up world.

Sunday night my husband turns to me and says, "I think Allie is dying." Allie is our yellow lab who is probably mixed with something else, but we don't know what. Allie is the first dog I remember owning. She's suffered from ear infections almost her entire life, and we've never had the funds available to do anything about it. I hate how she sheds, hate how she makes my house smell, hate how she sometimes keeps me awake at night with the noises she makes, hate that she doesn't get the care from us that she should. All the same, I love my dog. I do not want her to die so soon. Not like this. But I don't want her to suffer either.

Monday morning the entire right side of her face was swollen huge, and there was a never-ending string of drool hanging from her lips. Michael took her to the vet. I was anxious while he was gone, wondering whether she would come home with him at all, trying instead to focus on what the boys and I were doing in school. She did come home with him. There were medicines we would try. We'd see what happened, and take her back on Wednesday.

Monday afternoon Michael and I watched the Doctor Who finale for the most current season. I cried a lot. It's was one of those really good, emotional episodes, and every incarnation of the Doctor was referenced.

Monday afternoon I bumped my head really hard on the door handle to the freezer, so hard that I wound up in the floor weeping for at least five minutes. It really hurt. My boys gathered around me wanting to help, but there was nothing they could do.

Monday afternoon, maybe thirty minutes later, I'm cooking bacon and starting to dice an onion for collard greens when I hear a crash followed by my four year old son screaming, my six year old calling for help. I run to the living room only to find my youngest on the floor, the right side of his head covered in blood. I scream for my husband to come quickly, while I run to the bathroom for a washcloth with which to wipe the blood away. He has an ugly gash on his temple, less than half an inch across, but gaping, with a puncture where his head hit the corner of the coffee table. After the emotional trauma of morning and afternoon, I am not prepared to handle this calmly. It is a mercy that my husband works only feet away

We spend the rest of the evening in the Emergency Room. He's fine. No problem. Nothing to worry about. Man stuff, as my brother tells me. My oldest child and I manage to have fun in the waiting room while my husband waits for the doctor with my little one. We play the dot game. We open and start Life of Fred Apples, and he doesn't even seem to mind having to work a few problems after every chapter. We read Magic Treehouse. The kids are in bed by 10.

And then on Tuesday I am attacked by a large and strangely aggressive cock roach.

Mysterious animals

My dog. Yesterday I'm in the kitchen working on something. I don't remember what. Allie, my dog who almost died last week, walks up to me and stands there, staring at the back door.

Oh, I think to myself, I guess she wants to go out.

I take her out like I always do, watch as she travels down the stairs. I sit on the door step waiting, so she'll know she is welcome inside once she's done. She does nothing. She comes right back in the house.

I get back to work until, only seconds later, there she stands again, looking for all the world as though she wants to go out. I repeat the process. Again she does nothing, and I have to call her to come back in side.

I get back to work, but still she stands there, looking as though she wants to go out.

“Will you see if you can figure out what she wants?” I ask my husband.

Michael takes her out, and again she travels down the stairs only to stand there. When he brings her back in he says, “She's a Fox.”

“There's a fox in our yard?”

“No, Allie is a Fox. She goes outside and then forgets why she's there. Must be hereditary.”

Napping in the middle of the day

Okay, so you know how they call a person who likes to get up early in the morning a lark, and a person who likes to stay up late at night an owl? I have recently come to the conclusion that I must be both, because, honestly, my worst time happens to be right in the middle of the day. So recently I have been experimenting with naps.

Now, I read in one article that if you wanted to take a short nap and be ready and alert at the end of it you could drink a cup of coffee beforehand. Since the caffeine takes about half an hour to take effect, it should wake you right up at the end of approximately 20 minutes.

I tried it today. It didn't work.

It takes me a little while to drink a cup of coffee, I'm guessing ten minutes or so, though I've never timed it. Well, then I had to go to the bathroom. And then my sister called me on the phone. The net result was that I was wide awake by the time I closed my eyes to take that little nap. Better luck next time?

Language: I love it; my husband doesn't. There's so much more about language that I'd really like to learn.

Nobody talks like me, except that I actually do. I use words like ameliorate, or imbued. I look up the meanings sometimes when I'm not sure. I don't always remember to look up spellings. Since I've taken to letter writing recently, I've noticed some alternative spellings creeping in. Sometimes I use an s when what I really need is a z.

Someone asked about an old English pronunciation on Sunday. These are not things we typically discuss in church, but it did come up, and that's when I realized a benefit of teaching my children the 70+ phonemes that Romalda Spalding identifies. If I learn how they are pronounced in English, without the prompting of a familiar word-surround, it'll probably be a lot easier for me to read the alternative pronunciations that occur in other languages. Phonics instruction suddenly becomes a much more exciting idea to me.

Speaking of phonics instruction, I thought and fretted over what sort of program to use with my children this coming year, thought about it all summer, trying on different possibilities and notions without actually spending any money. And then I thought, why not just do whatever Andrew Pudewa recommends. I like him. I like what he has to say about education. I like that he seems to understand boys in a way that I haven't found elsewhere. So after agonizing some more, I realized, Hey, I can try it. I'll just consider this year a trial run of Primary Arts of Language (PAL). I hope to get the package in the mail today. I'll want to start putting it together immediately. I can't wait.

I'll let you know how that goes.