Summer gum

As far as summers go this one is more eventful than last years. My oldest kid has learned about chewing gum in the summer, my youngest has become more hilarious, and my mom is getting worse.

Audrey has hit the legal age for chewing gum. She loves it. This is a pivotal summer for her, she’s five years old, she has picked her brand of gum for the summer, has an ugly above ground pool situation in her back yard, and she’s  staring her first year of school in the face. She’s become more serious. She makes statements like, “I’m worried that I haven’t defined my curriculum focus yet”. Or, “I’m going to have a hard time managing Kindergarten and the back log of ‘Word Girl’ I have yet to watch.” But she loves her gum. We couldn’t find any huge pieces of ‘Hubba-Bubba’ like I used to chew. We found the same bubble gum flavor in thin sticks, which is fine for her since she only breaks off tiny pieces at a time. It’s been two months and she’s still working on the same pack.

The pool is ugly. The pool it’s self is fine, but how we put it in the yard is ugly. Our yard is slanted, so whenever we tried to fill it up the weight of the water would roll the whole thing over and spill out on the grass. Erin’s brother came back from Hawaii for the first time in three years and helped dig out a level area to put it on. We didn’t think about what the result of that would look like, and now we’re stuck with a huge bladder pool sitting a mound of dirt. But this picture makes the whole thing look nice. Go on click it. See the full version. In fact, click all the pictures on this post. They look gorgeous. It’s because I have the new iPhone 4 and the camera on it makes even my photos look beautiful.

I have changed jobs so now I’m working contract and doing work for places like US Bank. Which is nice. If I don’t like things all I have to tell myself is that in a few more months I’ll be onto another place.  Along with that, a few friends of mine and I have started our own company. We’ve got a couple clients already, and finally made our own website only because we missed an opportunity with potential client because we didn’t have a site of our own yet. But  we’re new and doing better than I thought we would at this time. We have some other things coming up that look promising so I’m hoping for the best. By this time next year, if I’m lucky, I won’t have to do any contract and can focus on my own company full time. The site is Spectrious if you’re interested.

Margo is carrying the torch for family jokes. I can tell by the way she finds something funny on a kid show and repeats it over and over.Like I do when watching a movie with a friend. An example is when we were watching ‘word girl’ and some villain called ‘The Butcher’ shouted “wiener-ized” or something like that. Then he magically produced wieners from his hand that shot out like a machine gun. Margo started laughing, “Wiener-ized… Haha… Hey dad! He said ‘wiener-ized!’ It’s funny because he made wieners come out of his hand… Wiener-ized. That’s hilarious. Hey Audrey!” It’s cute. Normally Audrey doesn’t care what anyone has to say when she’s watching T.V., but I make a point of getting into it with Margo. She’s a pretty bright kid and I don’t want her to feel bad when she’s into something because no one is paying attention.

Her newest thing is ‘muscle-jokes’. It was something she decided to pull on Erin’s brother when we were all up north at a cabin in June. He was out on the deck putting his boots on and gearing up to go fishing. He had been pretty quiet most of the trip because he had some personal issues going on back in Hawaii. But he’s pretty quiet normally anyway. When Margo went out on the deck to talk to him, a little part of me cringed at the potential for awkwardness that was coming up. She said hi and asked what he was doing. He gave a few words in reply and she asked, “Do you want to hear a muscle joke?” Scotty laughed and said sure. “Your fishing pole?” She offered, “Has muscles on it.” Then she started laughing, “Get it?!” Scotty laughed. “You see that tree?” She added, on a roll. “It’s made of muscles!” I was pretty amazed. She followed up each joke by demanding to know if he got it.

So generally I should be happy with the summer so far. But then mom got worse. She was having stomach problems. First it was pain in her back around her kidney, but then it became something where she would be sick all day and throw up throughout most of it. She held off for something like four months before going in to the doctor, because she was waiting for Medicare to kick in. It turns out she has a tumor the size of a grapefruit that has grown on top of her left kidney. It had grown to the point where it was pushing up against her stomach and blocking some of the food from getting through. She’s in radiation now, and though she doesn’t feel much different, it’s growing smaller. To think that two years ago we were all prepared for her to die within 6 months to a year because of her lungs and she’s lasted this long. But now she’s fighting other growths. The newest is one that has developed in her right arm. A few weeks ago I had to take her to the E.R. because she was throwing up from 3a.m. to 5p.m.. We were in the I.V. room getting her re-hydrated at 5:00 and she was still throwing up massive amounts of food. When we got her home and my sister stayed the night with her, it dawned on me that to continue throwing up that much might mean that she was backed up. The food wasn’t getting through her stomach and into her intestine. She said she could see things in the puke that she ate three days ago. When I got home I went in the basement office to get some work done. Then I just started crying for no reason. I’ve said this before, but crying is weird because it’s something your body just does on it’s own. It’s like I’m standing back watching someone else cry because I know it’s happening, but I can’t get it to stop. When it was all done I went back to working and listening to podcasts. Now that she’s in radiation the doctor said that it probably was blocking her stomach, so now she’s only eating things like Jello. She looks really thin.