DATELINE SKATCHLAND…

 

Oy, ‘tis been a while.  My apologies…as always, there’s a lot going on.

 

1)       NEW JOB – Having been presented with an escape ladder from the house of pain and stress, I jumped slightly sideways into an (oddly enough) far less stressful and far better paying (albeit temporary) job.  I love it.  The best part?  It ends before I have a chance to get pissy about it.  The worst part is that I have to head to a city 3 hours north of here for as whole week which means abandoning my kiddos for that time period.  I could say a lot about the old job but I won’t bother – suffice it to say that I am happier…bordering on serene…especially when I hear from those still on the inside that things are far too the same for their liking and mine.

2)       I’M OLD – My eldest kid just turned 7.  That’s less than a decade before she’s old enough to drive a car and she’s so smart that it’s disturbing (seriously, she’s reading at about a grade 4 reading level in English and 3 in French and got 100% on a science project and is acing math.  Her only “b” grade on her last report card was Phys Ed which is not a big worry for me.)

3)       BOYFRIEND FINALLY GRUDGINGLY ACCEPTED BY MOTHER – After hearing that his parents, who see me all the time, are always very nice to me, my mom snapped and invited the boy for dinner some time in January and he’s become a permanent fixture – every 2^nd Saturday.  Things seem to be going well (although I know she’d still rather I went with her pick than mine) and there has been no further weirdness.  This, due to the final item on my list, is a massive relief.

4)       NEW ???????? – On or around September 10^th, the new (he really isn’t that new anymore) boy and I will try our hands at joint procreation.  Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s we had a bit more fun than we bargained for and now we’re doing our best, demented version of the Brady Bunch (his two kids, my two kids, and this one).  Despite the fact that this was absolutely NOT in our plans for now (we had just entered the “possibly/maybe/perhaps in a year or so phase of our relationship) we’re both delighted.  Now we just have to figure out how to pay for this.  I did have a bit of a freak-out when a friend of mine had a baby almost a full month premature but all is well with them, and pregnancy and childbirth are, oddly enough, two of the things that I am extremely good at.  My brother and his partner are having a baby a week before I’m due so it should be a very surreal fall.

 

So that’s all the news that’s new and approved by the censorship board that lives in my head.  I’ll keep y’all (very) sporadically posted if anything interesting arises.