Category: Life

Help Me, I Have A 7th Grader!

I have been parenting longer than anyone should have to.  In 1988 my first kid hit middle school.  He was in the “gifted” class and that meant all kinds of craziness was accepted.   I was young and could handle it.  It is now 2011 and I am still dealing with a middle school age child and it is not fun.  I’ve done two others in between – a boy and a girl – and quite truthfully I am tired of school.  Tonight I am listening to a long list of my 13 year old son’s issues.

“The teacher doesn’t like me”, ( Eight times now I’ve told him to get a new piece of paper and get to work.)  “This is all stupid”.  (He’s been dragging this on for hours).  For two days in a row I’ve had calls from his social studies teacher saying that he is way behind all the other students with this project.   He is grounded and can’t play video games or go to the lake with his friends.  It doesn’t seem to light a fire under him.

run the race

I can’t even begin to explain all that has been going on, but I am tired.  I never, in my wildest dreams, thought that I would be doing this in my mid- fifties!  Oh, I did picture time for myself and going out to eat and traveling in my mid-life years.  I pictured myself doing adult stuff, watching adult shows and hanging out with other adults, not making cookies for the end of year school parties (for the 100th time it seems) and dealing with teacher conferences.  As I write this my son is flipping his pencil around with his leg up on the chair (he can’t seem to write with his butt in a chair) and mumbling about some reason that his teacher hates him – once again.  Anything to waste time.  He could have had these pages written hours ago.  Now he is drawing on a penny, next he will HAVE to pat the cat, and on it goes.

I’ll do what I usually do, tell him to finish and leave it on the table for me to view in the morning, and go to bed.  It is exhausting.

I have long believed that every couple should start out with a teenager.  No baby, just a teenager.  It would be great birth control.

I don’t know how I will survive the next five years of school with homework and drivers ed!  I know what is coming and I am dreading it more than ever.  My other three kids are grown and they turned out to be great kids.  My child rearing was suppose to stop there, but nothing in my life seems to go as I plan and when I ended up pregnant at 40 the one thing that depressed me most was thinking about all the years of school I would have to do again.  That nightmare is here.

Well, we do what we have to do and if we are lucky we have help. I have no help.

Walking the trail New Hampshire outdoors
Walking with my daughter

Skip Ahead to 2021

Yes, time has flown by and now my 7th grader is a grown man. He lives with his girlfriend and is a kind and caring young man. As I have re-read this post I realize I’ve forgotten the tough times, thankfully. My son has turned out well and I am still relatively sane.

I’m still alone, and no one will ever give me credit for all the years I nearly lost my mind raising kids by myself, but the job is finished. My own peace in knowing that I did my best and my kids are okay to go on into adulthood well-equipped is thanks enough, I guess.

Life goes by pretty fast. My kids will be fine without me, and I can go on to wherever we go next knowing that.

kids in summer on a raft at a lake swimming and playing
My son (that difficult 7th grader) and daughter

Staying Busy in the Midst of Winter

Christmas mailbox moving noticeI keep a journal and don’t write in it often.  I would like to say there are new and exciting things going on in my life, but there just aren’t.  I applied to my back to get pre-approved for a mortgage so I can stop renting and was told I need to wait six months since my divorce was just recently final, so that is on hold.  I am working on getting my taxes together – which is always exciting.  I’m hoping to get them done for free again this year by the folks at the River Center, where I met my tax guy who came to my house and I paid him in cookies – no kidding!  My deck is buried in snow that is more like cement, and my face hasn’t been in the sun since the last time I walked across the parking lot into the grocery store a week ago.  All this is very boring, I know.
snow
I also began using a day planner for my work.  The trouble I am having is that I never seem to get the lists finished and they carry over day after day.  I get sidetracked easily and must have a touch of my son’s ADD.  I always check my e-mail first thing and see what my recent store sales look like.  Most everything is selling from Sandpiper Wedding and I attribute that to the fact that the blog is being updated every day by my daughter.  Updating daily will bring more views, and more views transfer to more sales.  It’s also filled with images of beaches and tropical things.  Maybe that is the reason for the views.

So goes life in winter. Just keep plugging along.

The Searles Castle For Weddings

Searles Castle wedding at night
A romantic castle wedding

My son and his wife were married in January 2007 at the Searles Castle in Windham, New Hampshire. It was an elegant and romantic wedding in a historic old building and this picture is one of my favorites. They were brave to plan a wedding in January and if it had been this January, they would have had tons of snow. In 2007 there was relatively little on the ground, but just enough to make it pretty. After the ceremony, the wedding party and parents went outside and braved the cold to get some photos and then the newlyweds traveled around the grounds with the photographer and got bunches of great pictures.
Just a few days ago I was asked by a customer at my Narrow Road store if I would make her a “Save the Date” card with the Searles Castle on the front because she was getting married there later this year.
The picture above was taken by a professional photographer and my photo (below) was taken in the summer when I went with my son and his fiance and her daughter to check out the place.
The castle sits on a hill and is surrounded by trees with a long winding driveway to the main entryway and the grounds provide a wonderful background for wedding pictures.

Save the date: New England
Save the date: Hydrangeas
Save the date: Beach / Tropical / Destination

Castle Wedding Save the Date Postcard postcard

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Chicken Duty For Thanksgiving

chickens in a coop
How I Spend Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Just a quick note today before I attempt to cook my turkey, to wish all my faithful readers a happy turkey day!!

It’s 6:30am and in about a half hour I will go to my neighbor’s house and release their chickens from the coop. The cute chicks have grown and there are a lot of them!  Then tonight at about 4:30 (it gets dark so early now) I will go back and close the door on their coop and hook up the electric fence so the bears and coyotes won’t have a feast. The chickens go in on their own when it’s dark.

I’ll do that all weekend while my neighbors are away because they have places to go and people to see, whereas I don’t. It’s pretty much like that for all holidays. I spend it taking care of their chickens, which I don’t mind now that the rooster is gone. (He’s in their freezer I’m told).

I almost had to quit my chicken duty when the rooster insisted on trying to slash me with his talons. You wouldn’t think that a “bird” could be so scary, but they have sharp talons on the back of their feet and he would fly up at me and kick out his feet just because I was in his pen!   Fortunately I had a bucket with me and he’d hit that instead of me, but I didn’t like that and since I get paid in fresh eggs, I figured it wasn’t worth it!

So the next thing I knew the roosters were being “harvested” – I didn’t even know there was more than one -and now it’s safe to enter the pen again.
Other than that my day will be filled with cooking and cleaning up and watching football – Go Pats! It should be a relaxing day. Enjoy!