That’s right - I went another month without blogging. Here’s the synopsis…
May 1 ~ Usually, we would’ve gone out for our annual BBQ dinner on May 1st, but we decided to go a little early this year and went over the weekend. That evening, I was a little sentimental about my sweet boy turning 5 the next day and made this collage to celebrate him.
May 2 ~ Caleb’s 5th birthday! Of course, this warrants its very own post. We took cookies to daycare to celebrate and then had a spaghetti supper and chocolate cake at home. We gave Caleb a Razor scooter for his birthday and he loved it!
May 4 ~ Nola spent her morning catching up on current events while the rest of us got ready to go to school:
May 6 ~ I got these beautiful flowers at school with a sweet note from Rudy telling me what a wonderful mother I am. I loved them!
That evening, we celebrated Caleb’s birthday in style at the Naturals baseball game. We took 5 boys, 2 toddlers and 12 adults to the game and had a blast!
May 7 ~ Mom and Mr. L went to Caleb’s T-Ball game and spent the day/night with us.
May 8 ~ Mother’s Day. I spent the day quietly being lazy and enjoying it to the fullest! Caleb went home with Mom and Mr. L. for the week. Rudy took Nola to convenient care because she had some congestion and her eyes were goopy. We thought he was taking her as a preventative measure so that we would have a note for daycare saying that she didn’t have pink eye, just allergies or a cold. Just as I sat down to blog, he called me to say that she DID have pink eye and would have to stay home. Ugh. We started immediately looking for someone who could watch her, since I have no sick days left and he had a concert coming up. We couldn’t find anyone, so he stayed with her. This whole sick day mess has been awful this year!
May 10 ~ I had a job interview for a supervisory position in my school district. I won’t go into details, but I applied for a few jobs this spring that would give me the opportunity to use the admin degree that I worked really hard for. Apparently, it’s not my time, because I didn’t get any of the jobs. I’m trying to focus on the fact that God has a plan for me and maybe He knows that it will be important for me to be with Caleb for his kindergarten year. As hard as the rejection has been, I know that my time will come. Patience is not my strength.
May 11 ~ We went to a going away party in Fayetteville for a band staff member. While we were there, Nola discovered a basket of Build-A-Bear clothes. She pulled out 2 sparkly purses, put one on each arm, said “bye-bye” and walked to the door. She is so sassy!
May 13-15 ~ We went to Hot Springs to spend the weekend. My Memmie was in the hospital in North Little Rock and I wanted to go see her. Rudy and I left the kids with Mom and Mr. L. and spent Saturday with Memmie, Poppie and Uncle Ron at the hospital. It was a tough day – so hard to see someone who has been such a source of strength for me all my life struggling to be strong for herself. It turned out that her calcium levels had gotten way too high and caused her to be confused and lethargic. The hospital was able to get her leveled out and she’s now home, feisty as ever. While the guys went down to get some coffee, I had a chance to just sit and hold her hand, talk and pray.
After that quick trip to the middle of the state, things got really crazy at work. I buckled down and started cranking out reports, paperwork and billing like a mad woman. I snapped this picture one evening as I was catching my breath at my desk, well after the kids had gone home.
As I write this, there are 2 more days of school left and I’m still cranking out paperwork. Almost done, though…
May 17 ~ We may need to put a lock on the pantry door:
May 18 ~ The Villines kids had a rough week at daycare. When Rudy picked Nola up on Tuesday, he was given an incident report to sign. Apparently, another child tried to take a toy from Nola and she bit him. While it just horrified me to think that she had bitten another child and we were going to be “those parents” with “that kid” in the class, I had to laugh at the fact that the incident report said that the workers had disciplined her by telling her to “use her words.” She only has two words – mama and cracker. Which one of those would have been most appropriate in that situation? As if that weren’t enough, when Rudy picked Caleb up on Wednesday, Caleb only had 2 of his 5 behavior sticks left in his cup. Caleb almost always has all 5 and has never had less than 4. Rudy gave him the what-for about it at school and I made him sit down with me after dinner and help write an apology letter to his teacher…
May 19 (and every day since then) ~ Caleb had 5 sticks in his cup.
May 21 ~ Caleb’s t-ball game was cancelled due to the fields being wet from all of the rain we’ve had. We had a good family Saturday and had some guests over for dinner. One of Rudy’s co-workers, Chris, and his family came over. Rudy grilled an amazing dinner for us. Chris has a daughter who is just a little bit younger than Nola. It was fun to watch the two of them play around each other. Caleb was enamored with little Sara Kate and she thought he was pretty funny too.
Also – here is a picture of Nola’s new shoes. They are Tiny TOMS and they are ridiculously cute. I love my
TOMS and I love their “one-for-one” giving. But, mostly, these are just plain adorable…
May 22 ~ HAPPY 12TH ANNIVERSARY TO RUDY AND ME! This day honestly deserves its very own post. It was quite eventful. Until I get that post written, I’ll just say it started out great and ended up very eventful. It involved friends, a trip to Fayetteville, a surprise date, tornadic weather and a dead rabbit. If that’s not a teaser, I don’t know what is!
May 24 ~ Was supposed to be my last day of school. But, does anyone remember
Snowpocalypse 2011? And, so we added 10 days to the end of the year. It was a bummer to not be getting out of school, but these two went to daycare looking awfully cute anyway:
Throughout the day, we kept hearing reports that the weather was going to get bad that night. We were told to prepare for the worst storms we’d seen this year with a high likelihood of tornadoes. I’m not typically scared of bad weather. I've always had a healthy respect for the power of weather, but I know that we have a solid home and have always felt pretty comfortable in the safety of that shelter. The weather reports that day were enough to truly scare me. Rudy and I waivered back and forth about going to a friend’s house with a basement. I have friends who got hotel rooms in a place with a storm shelter. Many, many people in our area left their homes and went somewhere with a basement. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided to ride out the storm at home. I kicked into high gear and prepared our laundry room to be the safest place in our house. I was nervous all night as we watched the storms roll in on the weather reports. Miraculously, we were spared. The storms did produce tornadoes in Oklahoma and south of us in Arkansas, but our area only had severe thunderstorms. Our friend Chad was in town and spent the night with us. I’m sure he thought I was crazy because I was so nervous, but I was being a protective mother bear and I don’t apologize for that one bit.
May 26 ~ I drove to Hot Springs for another interview. It was oddly quiet in my car as I drove those 3 1/2 hours by myself for the first time in a very long time.
May 27 ~ I had my interview in the morning and drove home in the afternoon. I was passing through Fayetteville when Rudy called and said that Nola needed to be picked up from daycare because she had a fever. Ugh. More about that in a separate post.
May 29 ~ Nola figured out how to answer the question, “Where’s your bellybutton?”
Whew – no wonder I’m tired!!! Just reading through all of that made me need a nap!
