But I'm sitting here listening to Melanie Shankle's new book (thus my writing style may sound like hers - I have a tendency to chameleon and possibly haven't found my "voice" as my eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Coffee, said we should all do), and am texting with one of my best friends and can't seem to get up off the couch to actually go to bed.
So, I might as well blog.
If you're reading this from Facebook, that means you're friends with me on Facebook and that means you've already seen most of these pics and heard most of these stories. But for the sake of archiving and not failing to live up to the over documentation standards of the twenty-teens, here goes.
For spring break we went to the Lubbock windmill museum. Because who doesn't plan their vacation around what an 18 month old is interested in? It was a precious little family trip, and relatively easy given that we were the only car headed TO Lubbock for spring break. Once we were there though it was apparent how sick Howard was, I may have made him change our hotel from the sketchy side of Lubbock to a less sketchy side of Lubbock, and things generally seemed to get hard.
But we persevered and oh was it worth it. After a stop in Abilene to spend the night with Great Gape, a pullover in Roscoe to see the wind farm, and a sweet night catching up with my dad's side of the family, we spent the whole next day touring the American Wind Power Museum and left with trinkets and books and a documentary about windmills that has been on a loop at our house ever since and that my parents claim "is really well done and even won a Telly." They've seen it, because if you spend any time with us at all, and they have, you watch the windmill DVD.
Jonah's windmill obsession has even inspired aspiring artists and real artists! I started this knife painting for him:
And our kind friend Paul De Luna, who actually knows what he's doing as evidenced by the fact that he does it for a living, is sketching this for Jo:
It's a sweet, exhausting time. My house is never clean. It's a chore to feed people - particularly because one needs several different meal options, one has certain health requirements (butter is ALL NATURAL people, get on board with me here) and because one doesn't actually get the chance to eat anything but has heard rumors of people dying if they don't so stuffs the non-windmill part of a cut-out peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her mouth or takes the last of the chicken nuggets and chips only to return most of that after discovering that it's soggy because someone else has already almost eaten it.
And it's just like my dad said it would be: everything is sticky. I didn't know what he was talking about but it's become so true. Everything. Every surface in our home is sticky. And the disturbing part is I don't really know what it's from. It could be Children's Tylenol. It could be finger painted yogurt after deciding spoons were too cumbersome. But most likely, it's my spilled coffee. I can't multitask when I hear the cat being pulled by her tail because she's been mistaken yet again for a stuffed animal. The poor thing. This was supposed to be her castle.
But I wouldn't trade the sticky and the tired and all this newfound knowledge of windmills (like the mechanics of the pumping cylinder or the fact that the Halladay Standard was the first self-governing windmill) for all the world. And I especially wouldn't trade last night when I have Jonah a funky hair do in the bath, showed him, and he flipped out, fearing it was permanent. I had to show him the final product before he stopped calling for Papa.
Nor would I trade watching him savor with giggles and sheer delight his first blueberry bagel while we strolled around HEB...
...or snuggling with me on a rainy morning, or reviewing all the animal sounds (the owl saying "owwwwl" is my personal favorite), or patting me goodnight at the day's end...because this IS the world. I already have it.
And this leaves me to conclude once and for all that I will actually be the crazy lady in "I'll Love You Forever" who hikes up a ladder to her grown son's window in the middle of the night so she can rock him. Because that's completely normal.
