Hoping the “flitting” is gone.

Poor neglected blog!

I’ve been bouncing around like a gnat on caffeine these last few weeks, flitting here and there doing everything and nothing all at once.    I’ve been on a 2 week steroid pack for poison oak I managed to find while geocaching, despite looking carefully.

I realized, while taking the pack, that my brain functions in slow, methodical processes.   I like to take my time and make sure a task is completed thoroughly before I move to the next one.   While this method has it’s imperfections (ie.  the long list of uncompleted tasks always waiting their turns), I can be sure that my current task will be completed well.

But for the last 2 weeks, I have been experiencing life as a “flitter”.   From a land somewhere beyond my comprehension, this “flitting” took over my brain, and turned me into a mess of random chaos.

Put away glass…see water spot…water…laundry…add load to washer…see random toy, take to kid’s bedroom…notice stray shoe, take to closet…”hey, how did that get here”…”I should take down the shelf in the dining room”…walk through the kitchen, see the dishwasher still open and full…

Definitely NOT my usual nature, and it drove me crazy.  I’m glad it’s done and my regular brain has returned to it’s plodding, sedate pace.   Welcome back sanity!

Until next time…
C.

Perhaps I should have been more specific.

A few posts back, I mentioned I’d be kicking my little “black cloud of bad health” to the curb upon it’s one year anniversary of hanging over my head.    I should have mentioned the cloud should leave my household as well.    On Sunday night, after a great afternoon of hiking and geocaching, we ended up here again:

(yes, that’s the old photo from last time.)

No, it wasn’t me with the injury this time around, though I would have taken the pain for her if I could have.    My daughter fell and cracked open her lip, and off to the ER we went.   Apparently the wonderful warm weather had everyone outside falling off of stuff, because the place was packed!

I was so proud of her!   She didn’t fuss as we waited hours to be seen, even though we didn’t arrive at the ER until her bedtime.    No complaints while we waited in the room for the lidocaine to numb her face, and not even a whimper as the dr. added 3 stitches to her upper lip.   She was a real trooper, and all the doctors and nurses were impressed with her behavior.   She left with a handful of stickers and a blown-up rubber glove that made a great balloon, rooster comb, and cow udder.

She’s fine, and her lip is healing nicely, thank goodness!  Plus, she got a kick out of showing off the stitches at school yesterday.    And apparently it felt good enough that she could eat peanuts and chocolate caramel corn at the Reds game last night, so I think she’s on her way.

Now…black cloud GO AWAY!

Until next time…
C.

A crazy weekend and searching for treasure.

Whoops! Fun Fact Friday just sort of ran into next Wednesday before I could blink! Sorry about that folks.

My Mom and Dad were here this weekend to watch some baseball/teeball games (all rained out again-Ugh.). We were awakened at 4:30 in the morning to the sound of Mom asking us where the nearest hospital was. Uh-oh. ER visit. Sounds vaguely familiar, no?

Turns out Dad has kidney stones, and spent the whole weekend in the hospital. Definitely not the way he wanted to spend the weekend, however he did get to watch the race in peace. The decibel level emitted by my children rival any speeding car turning left. He is/will be fine, though, so all is well.

In other news, I finally tried something I have been dying to do for years. 3-4 Christmases ago, I bought my husband a handheld GPS. I thought it would be fun for him to use on fishing trips, and I really wanted to try geocaching. I thought his tech-geek and my nature-geek would mesh together and we’d have a ball finding treasure everywhere. Well, in theory, that sounded great. In practice, we never got around to it.

This weekend, we got around to it. Or rather, I declared that it was Mother’s Day and as the mother in residence, I got to decide what was on the schedule for the day. Since I couldn’t convince anyone to go on sunny Saturday, we all trudged out in raincoats and muck shoes on Sunday with a list of nearby caches in hand. I’m sure if any neighbors were looking out their windows, we provided them with untold amusement. Two adults, 3 children and a stroller, raincoats, giant ponchos and waterproof blanket (for the kid in the stroller), all walking down the street in the dripping rain toward the neighborhood park.

But we had success! We found our first cache without wandering in circles (too much!), and only a few minutes of searching once we found the right coordinates. This cache was a family-friendly one, and was packed with little kid toys. The accepted rule is to always trade evenly or trade up, so both kids chose their treasures (McD’s bunny and Matchbox Car) and their tradeables carefully. After carefully placing the box back where we found it, we jubilantly headed back out of the woods to try for another (which we also found!). By the time we found two, the thrill of being out in the rain started to be replaced by the day’s chill and sore kid legs, so we called it quits and went back home, guided by the GPS and my oldest’s eagerness to be the navigator.

So we’re hooked. At least the kids and I are hooked. I don’t think my husband is convinced I am quite sane yet. My determination to go in the rain may have made me appear just a little unsound. But we had a ball finding “treasure”. And the electric gadget we were looking at didn’t have any flashing lights or cartoon characters, or commercials. It led us outside as a family and I’m thrilled.

I’m also obsessed about wondering if there’s a nearby cache everywhere I go, but that’s a story for later.

Until next time…
c