Who doesn’t love a day at the spa?
Sometimes you look in the mirror and ask yourself how did I let myself get to this point. My hair is a wreck, I can barely see through the shagginess of my hair. The nails are long and pointy, they seem to get caught on everything. They need to be trimmed, shaped and made to look good again. As you leave you stand a little taller, have a little more pep in your step. Your hair never looks the same as the day you get it done. Why is that? Today was a spa day, but not for me. It was for my pups. They were long overdue and are now so much happier. They love seeing Ms. Jenna! They happily visit her while she pampers them for a few hours. She loves them as if they were her own. They look so different in their before and after pictures. I love that I can see their little faces even better now!
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During the first fall of the pandemic, my niece had come home from college to my house. I knew that if I was the one to go get her, she would stay with me. So I jumped at the chance to get her. I drove to and from Saint Louis in one evening to get her.
I couldn’t have been more excited. I can never get enough time with the one who made me an Auntie. I love her to pieces. At that time, everyone in her home had covid. They got it at varying times, so it took a long time for them to get past the 14 day waiting period from the last day of the time they last showed symptoms - or something like that (which is what was happening at the time). She was with me before Thanksgiving and almost until the middle of December. It was awesome! She made a list of all of the things she wanted to do! Here are just a few: Gingerbread houses with my sons Drive around looking at Christmas lights on houses Chris Kringlemarket in Ottawa Watch A Handmaid’s Tale (all seasons and not tell her mom) Make a finger knit blanket It was the one, she finished her blanket and I have yet to complete. She was able to give her blanket to her mom for Christmas. Mine sits in a bag in my room. The yarn is overflowing over the bag. EVERYDAY- I make eye contact with this unfinished project. It has now been about 15 months. It is time to get this blanket finished, so it will stop haunting me. I hope to get it done soon or well, maybe, by this Christmas! This past winter I stepped out of my comfort zone. I taught an online class through our school district. Let’s be honest, I am a social worker, not really a teacher. I already have a tremendous amount of respect for teachers. But doing this class just increased that amount of respect immensely!
I had to navigate creating a google classroom from scratch, an outline for the class, a digital notebook and the presentation for each week. It was so stressful. That was only planning for live instruction and independent learning too. I felt fortunate to have all but one person that I knew personally in the class. I am not sure how much pressure is added to teaching. Everyone was very kind. I asked for their feedback and it is hard to please everyone. But overall they enjoyed the subject and they gave me good feedback on how to make the class even more meaningful. For the next group. I decided that I would try again and teach the same content to the next group willing to listen to me for 7 weeks. Luckily my teacher friends helped me learn how to copy things from the first google classroom to the new one! Such a time saver!! The class is almost full, so my nerves are starting to kick in!! I hope it goes well. Just sitting at home when a call comes in. “Need Diet Coke and fries? I am going to swing over for a few minutes.” She gets me. It is Cindy, she lives close by but our lives can get busy. She is my best friend for over a million years, through a million tears and a million moments of laughter.
Her timing is impeccable, she knows me better than anyone else. We know each other’s ins and outs and always without judgment… with only love and support. I wasn’t doing anything, but watching “Good Girls” on Netflix and still organizing my photos. The fireplace was on and the dogs were snuggled up near me. I told her I would leave the front door open and she should walk right in. It's funny how you are content in the moment of your quiet home, not needing a thing at all. I didn’t know, but she somehow knew that I could use some company. Not for any reason in particular, just because. Just because is usually the best reason for a visit. We talk about everything and yet nothing at the same time. She only had a few minutes, but those few minutes spanned into a few hours. Her timing was perfect. After she left, I knew it was what I needed. I just needed some time with my best friend. As I am getting ready for bed, I make sure to turn off all of the alarms on my phone. I have many of them set. I live by the alarms on my phone, to wake me up, as reminders, for literally everything. My favorite day of the week is Sunday. It is generally the only day of the week that I don’t have to be up by a certain time.
I make sure that the bathroom door is closed all the way, so that the sunlight doesn’t reflect in my eyes (if there is any). My curtains are the blackout kind - so no light gets in. I am lucky that my dogs do not wake me up in the morning. They will lay with me until I get up in the morning. So I will play ‘possum until I am ready to take them outside. No eye contact with them until that time. We will lay in bed, enjoying the quiet and stillness of the house… until I am ready to get up! I can do this on repeat all week since we are on Spring Break. I take a lot of photos, I mean a lot! I have them on my phone, on a regular camera and a video camera. There have been many cameras over the years, so many disks full of photos and videos.
It was so much easier years ago. You would take pictures on a regular camera and then go to Walgreens. You drop off the role of film and then you pick up the pictures. Then you slid the pictures into a photo album - then done! Now it is digital everything! How do you organize it all? This part paralyzes me. Then I just don’t even bother. I have 100’s of thousands of photos, if not more. The photos start all the way back to around 2002. How many duplicates are within all of these files? Today, I decided that I am going to spend the week working on this insurmountable task! This is years of disorganization at its finest, I am not sure how long it will take, I feel like it will be forever. I don’t usually go shopping near where I work. Not that I don’t want to, but I just don’t live out that way. When I lived closer I shopped in the community. Sometimes I would run into students at the store or at a restaurant.
I haven’t lived in the area in about 10 years. So running into families from school is a little less common. I went into the Kohls and as soon as I walked in…. I saw a familiar masked face! I haven’t seen this mom in over two years. I instantly remembered her name and her oldest son. But I was totally drawing a blank on the younger two’s names. Then she told me that it was her son in front of her in the line. I could have fallen over, he was no longer 11, he was now 16 and has a job! I have such a hard time seeing the little faces I remember in these grown up looking faces. It just amazes me how quickly they grow up, yet they still seem to be little in my head. Whether they are former students who have bridged into adulthood or their parents who stopped to say “hi,” it is always good to see familiar faces! I have this weird thing, my eye twitches. It is usually my right eye that has an uncontrollable movement - it's so annoying. I can’t tell if other people can tell, but I sure can. Hopefully they can’t tell, it is kind of embarrassing.
I wish it was that I am going to win the lottery or that it was some other kind of premonition that something was going to happen to me. Unfortunately, that isn’t at all what that means. It usually means one of two things is about to happen. One of them being that I am feeling stressed. Not just stressed but extremely stressed. The second thing is that I could be getting an ocular migraine. All migraines are bad - but that kind literally makes me sick to my stomach. So I definitely do not want to let it get to that point. The crazy part is that I don’t feel particularly stressed, but it is a sure sign. I need to beef up the self-care that is usually lacking. I need to prevent this from getting any worse! UGH! I hate tax season. I feel like most people are totally on top of getting their taxes done as soon as they get their w2s. I am not one of those people. I am one who dreads the thought of getting everything ready to get my taxes done.
I swear I try to get better at gathering what I need every year. You would think that I would get better at this by now. It has only been about 30 years of me doing my taxes. I still feel like I am scrambling to find all of the paperwork that I need. I know what I should have been saving, yet here I am backtracking to find everything. Every year I am looking for the final three items. I can never remember the passwords or username. Where do I find the info for my property taxes again? The stress of it consumes me. Next year, I am going to plan better and hope to do a little better than I did this year! Today sparks the start of the high school baseball season. Ryan is a sophomore and since tryouts he has been practicing with varsity. This has been an awesome experience for him. However, he and another sophomore both have been practicing with varsity this whole time. It wasn’t until last night that he found out he would be playing with varsity for the first game.
I am not sure if he will stay with varsity for a game, a few weeks or the entire season. Either way it is a great experience and I just hope he gets to play. He is so dedicated and takes instruction very seriously. Ryan is so much more motivated than I could have ever been. I am very excited that he will get to play on varsity with my best friend’s son. My best friend and I met playing softball our freshman year. So it is awesome to think they will play together. We have never been able to enjoy a game that both of our baseball players have been at - especially on the same team! They are both catchers and have a love for the game like none other. They are not competitive with each other. Ryan absorbs all that Brendan has to share with him. Even if Ryan doesn’t get to play as much on varsity as he might on sophomores - I could not be more proud of him! BTW - Brendan did great catching and their team killed the other team! |
AuthorI have worked in social work for over 25 years. The past 19 years have been within an elementary school setting. Archives
March 2022
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