good stuff...

(This edition has been written over the last few days.)

*This face:

*The sweet breeze wafting through the window this morning.

*It was in the wee hours of the morning and I still hadn't been able to fall asleep due to pain, and I was feeling frustrated, and yes, maybe a bit angry...but then I opened my eyes and the view out the window was so beautiful...what seemed like hundreds (though it probably wasn't nearly that many) of fireflies flashing throughout the trees and bushes. There's always fireflies out there in the summer, but I don't think I've seen them in such profusion since I was a kid. Glorious.

*A spontaneous trip to the antique mall with Rich, my favorite person to hang out with. Added bonus to the sheer fun of it--I managed to find a few small treasures that shall be Christmas presents for my Mom.

*Yellow bursts of sunshine popping up completely unexpectedly in the flower garden:

*Satisfaction in completing a project. Especially when it's for someone else. In this case, Craft Hope's latest project. The embellished flip flops that shall be mailed off today:

*Watching the first two episodes of Under the Dome last night with the whole gang. And being so excited about it that when I came upstairs I immediately went and pulled the book of the shelves to start reading it. ('Cause goodness knows I need to have yet another book going...silly me.)

*Anticipating this coming long weekend that has been set aside for pure pleasure. I'm a big fan of anticipation. :D

*The first couple ripe blueberries from our new bushes:

*Starting Ali Edward's Hello Story class today. Oh my gosh...already so inspired. Have filled an entire page filled with stories I want to tell using the first week's story structure.

And how about you--what's the good stuff of your life today?

what we've been up to...

It feels like a lot has been going on around here lately, but perhaps once I write it down it won't sound that way to anyone else. Funny how that can be. Anyway, since I last posted:

*Annie got a new friend. Meet Sully:

He's an 8-year-old chinchilla. He is so stinkin' adorable I can hardly stand it. Seriously, this picture does not even come close to doing his cuteness justice. Oh my gosh, and is he soft. And funny. And busy. And poopy (but at least, it's of the easy to deal with hard little pellet variety...'cause I'm sure you were wondering).

*Gray got a new "diagnosis." Meet Asperger's syndrome. Yeah, there's really nothing new to meet here. Honestly, all this new information does is group together some of his other diagnoses (sensory integration disorder, selective mutism, social anxiety) and some of his awesome quirks and some of his exercise-in-patience quirks under one overall heading. Gray's still Gray. And always will be. Lucky for us! But having this information is allowing us to understand a bit better how he views the world.

*Schooooooool's out for summer. WOOHOO!!! Annie finished up completely on the 18th, Max on the 19th, and Gray on the 21st. And I sent Annie's and Gray's final reports for the school year. Phew. (Of course, I'm now in full swing planning for the next school year...)

On a somewhat shocking-to-me note, when Max stepped off the bus on his last day of school, it dawned on me that for the first time since August of 2002 when Annie started kindergarten, we are no longer parents of a kiddo in elementary school. How the hell did this happen...

*Annie got her SAT scores. I know she's disappointed in her math score, and I feel her pain...but at the same time I think she should just be happy with how well she did overall. She got 2190, a composite score which puts her in the 98th percentile. But I guess she can't stop seeing that if she'd just done slightly better on the math and got a composite score of 2200 instead, she'd have been in the 99th percentile. Oh perfectionism, you suck! I think her little perfectionistic side should just focus on the 800 she did get on the critical reading section. :) Anyway, more than anything, I think she's just damn glad it's over. And who can blame her, right?

*****
I am still in semi-online-avoidance mode. I hope to give myself one more week of solid, bury myself in school planning mode before I loosen up for summer. But I must admit my resistance is weakening...