After Long Absence

It has been a looooong ten days since I last posted.  I am so sorry; I never meant to neglect my writing.  Life happens, and sometimes it happens in such a way that I think of brilliant things to write during the day, and then at night I'm so tired I quite literally fall asleep over my keyboard.  Now I'm typing with my eyes mostly closed, lying flat on my back on my bed, snuggled up against my not-quite-asleep 5-year-old.

What to say?  We've had plans.  We've ditched said plans.  Rowan has said cute and funny things that I was absolutely going to tell you and now I've forgotten.  Henry is saying more words, like, "Puhpuh [purple]" and "goat" and "book."  He can count to 10 frontwards and backwards.  It is a great joy to hear his language increase.

Yesterday I forgot.  As in, I forgot the significance of the date until I went on Facebook and saw what everyone else was posting.  I considered writing something up that was suitably patriotic, but it seemed like a rather trite thing to say, "Never forget," when I had forgotten.  So I thought instead, and I remembered where I had been thirteen years ago, fresh out of high school.  Such a changed world it became overnight.

I do not greatly enjoy either television or radio, so I had not heard the news when I left my sister's house in the early morning and went home to help my mom bake pies for the church.  I walked in the house and the first thing that struck me as odd was that my mom had her television balanced on a chair in the kitchen.  Since my mom rarely watches shows, I found this extremely unsettling.  Then she told me what had happened and I found it so difficult to believe that we were really, truly under attack.

The truth is, I'm tired.  I'm tired of politics and congressmen who think they know better than their constituents, and I'm tired of watching our liberties slip further away daily.  I'm tired of people who want to hurt their neighbors, their children, their friends.  I'm tired of wars that never end and don't wind up doing what they were supposed to anyway, unless the goal was to take our National Guard away from actually defending our homeland here on our soil.  All I want is a house in the country that belongs to US--because if you're threatened with removal if you don't pay a fee every year, it doesn't really belong to you--with dogs and cats and maybe a horse or a cow and lots of space for my children to roam.  I want to take care of my husband and grow flowers and vegetables and preserve food for the winter.

I'm tired of struggling day after day to manage children, both of whom are probably autistic.  I'm tired of never knowing whether it will be a good hour or a bad hour for Matt--there are no more full good days--and whether I'll be able to run errands when I need/want to without dragging children along.  I'm tired of crashing and spending too much time on my computer or phone.  I'm tired of having the expectation of cleaning up toys fall always to me, even though I really, really don't want Matt to overexert himself.

Which of those things can I change?  Myself.  That's all.  So I've started hanging clothes to dry outside, which was really for the purpose of eliminating Diaper Odor, but has turned into spending time outside with my children and letting them see me work.  Rowan likes to help by taking down the dry clothes and bringing me clothes pins.

One day at a time, one foot in front of the other--that's how we get by.  And really, that's not so bad.  I'll be more enthusiastic after a night of sleep.