7 Quick Takes about Patriotic Chiropractor Humor, the Thing About Skunks, and Dropping Kids Off at the Airport

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

How was your 4th of July? 

That afternoon, on the way to buy sparklers for the kids Phillip spotted a roadside letter board outside of a chiropractic clinic that said  "God bless America with liberty and adjustments for all."

This is the last thing you see before someone "avada kadavra"s you.

—2—

At the end of her homeschool year, I made my 17-year-old read portions of Walden and even play a Walden video game in preparation for an educational pilgrimage to Walden Pond this week. Unfortunately my attempts to make it a learning experience were mostly met with eye rolls and one-word answers, but I tried.

We visited the cabin replica, watched the video and looked at the displays in the visitor's center, then walked around the pond and saw the site where Thoreau had built his cabin.

This quote from the visitor's center ended up coming in handy later in the day, when we were hiking the trail around Walden Pond and caught a giant whiff of marijuana. It's legal here so we unfortunately smell it all the time, and we joke that it smells like a nasty skunk. But this time we all just grinned and said "How invigorating!"

—3—

Technology. 

I charge my phone on my nightstand and this week it gave a loud notification early in the morning. I was having a hard time getting back to sleep but it was too early to get up, so I put on my headphones to listen to one of Jason Stephenson's super-mellow sleep talkdowns. After several minutes, the talkdown was interrupted by the headphones blaring "BATTERY LOW!" in a loud robot voice.

I probably wouldn't have fallen back asleep anyway, but it was still very annoying.

—4—

Sometimes I think I bit off way more than I can chew when I decided to work on our yard. I don't know anything about landscaping. I don't even like it. 

I look at the enormous mountain of topsoil where the enormous mountain of fill sand used to be, and I wonder if I will ever be able to move it to where it needs to go, one shovelful and one wheelbarrow at a time. 

But I just keep telling myself that if I just work on it a little bit every day, there's no way for it to stay unfinished forever. Even if it feels like it.

I made a ton of progress today, actually. I've shaped quite a pretty hill with a rock wall around the mailbox if I do say so myself, and covered it with topsoil, and now the rest of the topsoil is getting distributed around the yard to the many, many areas that got ripped up and destroyed by the big equipment that came in to redo our driveway in the fall.

—5—

Learning another language is so hard. I haven't felt this dumb in 20 years. But I also have moments when I am really proud of myself — probably precisely because it's so hard.

And I'm getting better by objective standards of measurement. For example, I graduated from the children's graphic novel on the right to the YA novel on the left, AND I EVEN UNDERSTAND IT BETTER THAN THE KIDS' BOOK. 

I mean, it still takes me 30 minutes to read a chapter and I have to have my phone nearby to look things up, but still. I am learning new things.

—6—

Earlier this week, the 15- and 11-year-old flew to visit their grandparents. I was a little nervous, mostly because when I dropped off their older sister at this airport two weeks ago to go to music camp, I assumed everything was fine but ended up getting a panicked phone call 30 minutes before her plane took off saying she was stuck in a long line at ticketing and wasn't even at security yet. (Amazingly, she still made her flight.)

So this time, I asked the 15- and 11-year-old to call me when they got to their gate. But time went by and they didn't call and they didn't call and they didn't call, and also didn't answer when I tried to call them. About 30 minutes before their flight was supposed to take off, my phone rang, and I prepared myself for the worst when I answered. 

"Sorry," my 15-year-old's voice said, "We've been sitting here for like an hour and I just realized I forgot to call you."

These people are trying to kill me.

—7—

Just a reminder from the Internet that I thought was worth repeating. This comes from a blogger named Mommy Cusses, but I took out the cuss (sorry, Mommy Cusses).

To be honest it is a little jarring when your first kid turns 18 and you have that "Wait, was that their childhood?" moment that feels a lot like having to hand in a final exam before you had time to check your work. 

But you really should stop putting so much pressure on yourself. For your kids' whole lives, you've done the best you could with what you had at the time, and because you're the mom you're going to keep on doing that. And it's going to be great.

Click to Share: