Raven's Beak

The weather for the past couple of days has been way too reminiscent of Ohio weather. On Sunday, when we got home from church, the temperature was 92. By the time I got home from the grocery four hours later, it had dropped to 63. Nice cold front, unfortunately, no rain. Last week, we saw something we have never seen in Ohio, though. We watched a thundercloud form and travel over south Austin. It was neat to see in real life what I’ve only seen in textbooks.

We discovered that the three plugs that we plugged the electric heaters into on Sunday night were all on the same circuit, as they popped the breaker in the middle of the night. I decided it wasn’t cold enough for me to get up and do something about it when I discovered this in the early morning hours.

By Monday, it was still cold, but misted a majority of the day. Most of us kept out of the cold, misty weather by helping at the church’s clothes closet work day. Fun, but tiring, and of course, the children brought home several pieces of clothing. I’m impressed that the younger girls only had a small box each! The weather is warming up fairly quickly. Hopefully, it will be nice enough by Friday for us to hit the beach one last time before we head to Pittsburgh.

There seems to be something exciting going on around here every day. Below are just a few of our highlights from the past week.

Apparently, our bathroom door is so fragile that it can’t even take being slammed and then having an angry child “gently lean” against it. It took a little while, but Bob was able to free the scared child who had managed to push the door past the trim so it couldn’t be opened. Two hinges and a few adjustments later, the bathroom has a fully functioning door again.

Then there were the ants. It seems I have seen so many over the past couple of days. Maybe I just wasn’t aware of them before. Yesterday, Abigail and Olivia were watering some of the flowers for Carol, one of the owners here, when Abigail stepped in an anthill. Olivia called out for help, and Carol got to her in time to prevent any major encounter, but Abigail still got about a dozen bites on her feet. Now, everybody is on the lookout for anthills, reporting them to Donny, one of the staff here, who has the ant killer on his golf cart.

Changing the tubes on Adam’s bike was yet another learning adventure. Adam and I tried it last night, but couldn’t make it work, so I spent a little time researching how to change them. After that, Adam and I started working on it again. Donny came by and asked what we were working on, then proceeded to walk Adam through it. It’s interesting that when Adam and I tried to do it on our own the night before, we did it the wrong way, trying to put the tube around the rim, and then putting the tire over it. It did not seem possible that the tube we had would work on the rim we have. It just looked too big. But when we did it the right way, putting the tube into the tire, and then working it onto the rim, it fit fine. Hmmm. That sounds like life sometimes. When I try to do it on my own, I do it wrong and get to a point that it doesn’t look like anything will work, whereas if I ask God for some guidance and do it the right way, and it will work just fine.

While Bob took three of the children back to Columbus for two of them to get retainers fitted, I was left here with only four children. The dynamics of only five people, rather than the usual nine was pretty different. There still weren’t enough Clics for all of the children’s ideas, but overall, they played together and helped each other out really well. I didn’t sleep much past 4:30 am any of the three days, thanks to Abigail on Monday and Wednesday and thunderstorms on Tuesday. I’m not a big fan of thunderstorms in a standard house. They are even more unnerving in a house on wheels.

After running laundry most of the day on Monday (only five loads this time!) and having Midtown RV Services out to repair a water leak in the back bathroom, we were off to the grocery. I know, fun times, right? Midtown was easy to deal with, fair in their prices, and came to us. Gotta like that.

Ian has gotten hooked on Myth Busters, so the children managed to use all of their screen time fairly early, watching Myth Busters episodes. While I attempted to catch up on scanning receipts and other important papers, the children passed the time with Play Dough, K’nex, Clics, fashion shows, a pretend party, and Zhu Zhu pets, since it was too cold to play outside.

The girls love doing fashion shows, where they dress up, come show off, then return to the dressing room to change outfits seven or eight times. Today, Eli just couldn’t take it anymore and had to join in. He’s pretty funny when he’s pretending to be a girl. The fun of the moment is running Zhu Zhu pets around the table, trying to keep them from falling off. We are so easily amused.

I got the task of dumping tanks for the first time today. It’s not really as bad as might be imagined, and according to Ian, I did pretty well for my first time. Thanks, Ian. Unfortunately, we won’t be going to church tonight, since Abigail has an eye infection and I don’t want to risk spreading it. On the brighter side, that means we’ll be home when the others get back, road weary though they may be.

My song of the week is Francesca Battistelli’s “This Is the Stuff.” It’s so easy to get caught up in our little frustrations, but God can use even the trying times to draw us closer to Him. Great song and great reminder!

As we were ruthlessly downsizing, we knew that we would make some mistakes, leaving items we really should have taken and taking things we really didn’t need. Last week, when I went back to the house, I was glad the trash and donations had not been taken care of yet, because I had discovered that I missed having a towel warmer, of all things! This was a Christmas gift from my dad. My children were the ones who actually encouraged me to set it up, and I figured I might as well use it since I had it set up. I loved it! I am not fond of coldness, so having a warm bathrobe was amazing. Moving into the RV, space was a big issue. We have a lot of storage, but fitting everyday life stuff for 9 people into 400 square feet was a challenge. I decided there was not room in the tiny bathroom for the towel warmer. Only a couple of showers later, I was regretting that decision. We arrived in Columbus last week to discover many things still in the house, one of which was the towel warmer. I was so excited to use it again that I decided it had to come back home with us. The only place I could find to store it is between the toilet and shower. Having to move it to the top of the dirty clothes hamper each day in order to be able to plug it in is only a minor inconvenience and so worth it for the joyful luxury of a warm bathrobe each day!

Why is it that most errands seem to take so much longer than anticipated? Erica had an orthodontist appointment on Tuesday, 3/15. We were hoping to get Adam in also, so we were planning on a trip to Columbus for me, Erica and Adam. We knew this when we sold Girl Scout cookies, so made plans to pick up and deliver cookies while in town. For some reason, Ian thought this would be fun and decided to come with us. I do admit to a sense of excitement as we tried to quietly make it out of the rig at a quarter till 6 CST on Monday morning. We hit rain a few miles up the road, and didn’t turn the windshield wipers off until about 6 pm EST. That was about the same time that I noticed the excitement had completely worn off! We were so ready to be in Columbus!

After fourteen hours of driving, we arrived to find many more items still at the house than we expected. We thought donations had already been taken care of and what was left in the house was left for trash. I finally calmed down enough to sleep. The next morning, I was relieved to find out that donations hadn’t been taken yet.

Tuesday morning, we made it to the orthodontist’s office, expecting a short appointment. While there, the staff was able to fit both Erica and Adam in to get their braces off. Although their teeth are not in perfect position yet, we decided it was best to go ahead and remove them. When we gave Erica and Adam the option of having them taken off, they restrained themselves from jumping up and down, although barely! We were very glad to have been able to get this done today, even though we ended up being there 2 ½ hours. We made it home in time to grab some lunch and meet with the Time Warner tech before heading out to pick up and start delivering cookies.

We must have been more worn out than we expected, because all four of us woke up late on Wednesday. We made it to the library about 11:30 so we could get our internet fix, including getting Adam signed up for Facebook. He had been so looking forward to this that I couldn’t make him wait all week until we got back to Oklahoma. We delivered more cookies and visited with friends before heading out to the visitation for my grandma. She had been ill, and passed on Saturday. God worked out the timing perfectly so that I could be here for the funeral, which was Thursday morning. It was good to be able to spend some time with extended family.

Later, we were able to deliver the cookie money and visit some before finally having a little down time at the house. While we packed and prepared to head back to Oklahoma, there were a few odds and ends that I was trying to wrap up as well as cleaning the house a bit.

As Friday morning dawned, we loaded into the van and were able to roll out about 7 am EST. Unfortunately, we knew what lay ahead and were ready to be done before we even got out of Ohio! All except for Erica, that is. She had made herself a nice little cave in the second bench, and was quite happy. For a while.

We had done such a good job of only eating the food that we took with us that I had planned to stop at McDonald’s for supper on our way home. The timing seemed to work out, since we hit a quarter tank of gas for the second time at about 5 pm (I think this was Central time already!) I spent the next half hour watching for an exit that had both a McDonald’s and a decent gas station. After a while, I decided that wasn’t going to happen, so I stopped for gas at the next stop. About 15 minutes later, we finally saw a sign for McDonald’s at the next exit. It didn’t have a distance marked, which should have given me some clue. We ended up having to drive a couple of miles into the little town to find it.

Back on the road, the children started counting cows as we entered Oklahoma. If you’ve never played cows, you get one point for each pasture with cows that you call. Instead of competing, they cooperated to count over 200 from the state line to Muskogee. We also found 29 states in the license plate game. You’ve got to do something to keep focused while driving mile after mile! I decided the children should not be allowed to sleep for a lot of the trip and then eat McDonalds for supper. It gave them way too much energy during the last two hours of the trip, when I was exhausted.

Overall, it was a good week, and I accomplished much, but it is good to be home!