a post for this poor neglected blog site 'o mine.

This is going to be as brief as 3 months can be and sloppy.
I am going to be cross-blogging this everywhere, so if you are a member of another one of my many blog communities - be forewarned.
The past few months have been pretty durned stressful for my family. Trask found out in November that he would be out of a job by the end of December. This seriously sucks as it meant we have a pretentious apt we can't afford, 3 loan payments each month to really worry about, and now I can not afford to get the medical insurance on our boy as we need as much of my paycheck as possible.We did manage to nestle our account with some savings in the meantime. That helped.
Poor Trask was applying like a madman for a new job during this time.
At the end of November, our tenant found out she needed to downsize. So now we have our mortgage to worry about as well as the various other house things that had been taken care of by the rent (insurance, property tax, etc).
December went alright. Abby's ex was shot and killed. That was pretty much the only excitement and was unfortunately not altogether a surprise. I hope he finally found some peace.
Now January.Trask received quite a few interested employers. Pretty varied too. Insurance sales to teaching. Two local high schools interviewed him and one offered him a position yesterday. He asked for the weekend to think on it as he has another phone interview for a health physicist tech position in Olympia, WA coming up.We discussed the teaching position today while I was having lunch at work and he decided to go ahead and take it just in case another offer does come.Before I left work, he had called me up to tell me that he now had a job waiting for him in Richland, WA. It was completely unexpected and exactly what we were hoping for.
He starts Feb 4 and will be moving out there before Sol and I head out there. I will be staying in Florida to help with arranging for the sale of our house and getting our stuff ready to go west.
The hard thing here is leaving my mom, mom-in-law, and dad-in-law. They have been so incredibly, beyond words, helpful to us. They also all have an extremely close bond with Sol and this is going to be hard on them and on him. Yet another reason to delay our move by a couple of months. I am considering staying until just after Sol's 3rd birthday, but I want to make sure Trask will be able to celebrate it with us.
So yeah. Our lives pretty much did a 180 in the past couple of months.

Kids....

So. I am watching my sister's son. She's not really a blood relation, but I consider her close enough to be my sister.
Anyway, this has been a most interesting experience for me. For some reason I am good with kids. I don't really understand why. I feel like I have no real connection with most people, yet kids under age 8 seem to adore me and will mostly listen to me.

Z~ has been pretty good for me in the month since I started to watch him. There have been a few bad days, he is 5 after all, but my days have been pretty good so far. He has been trying to be very good around my son also. I have noticed that Sol has been speaking more coherently and he seems happier in general to see a "big brother" type figure almost every day.

What has surprised me is that I have learned a great deal as well. I have discovered the power of charts and x's and check marks. I also discovered that I am a pretty good teacher. Z~ has been learning to swim and I have also been making him learn his alphabet better. His number skills are already really good, for his age. Probably the most important thing I have learned is that places like Chuck E Cheese turn kids into demons.

I just never expected to be very good at watching kids. I've been having fun with my 2 boys.

Hmph.

I do not know why I created this. Prolly cuz I know so many other people who also have a blog on blogspot. I guess I thought I would give it a try. We'll see.