Busy Day with Jet

[liralen]

John had meetings all day due to the search committee doing their last interviews and then meeting to talk over all the candidates.

So Jet and I were pretty much on our own from about 9 am this morning, at the church. All the committee met there in order to go to a neutral pulpit to hear the last person preach somewhere.

But Jet and John happily played foosball until that time, while I got the first batch of coffee into the pots for the pre-Sunday school crowd. There weren't very many people, and not very many showed up for the service itself. Lots of folks taking advantage of the holiday weeks. A good thing, I think. Jet and I then spent the rest of the day together.



Jet and I sat together for the service, which had the kids in church instead of at the children's worship, which they usually do, but we sang carols and his Sunday school teacher had gotten snow globes for all the kids. There was a slot in them so that they could put their own picture inside the globe and it had included a picture of Joseph and Mary with Jesus for them to color and insert. He liked it, but he really liked that he could just slide the bar at the bottom and change out the picture any time he wanted. Hee.

He got out of the service the same time I did, which was after a bunch of carols and a story for all the kids. We got our early in order to finish off the coffee service, pour the lemonade for the kids, and get plates out for the folks that brought the treats for the coffee time after the service. Jet helped out a lot during the set up time, and he got things that I asked him to get and did the things he could reach and felt confident doing. That was good enough. He was also patient during the coffee time, knowing that I had to help with the clean up of all the coffee stuff. The folks that brought the food were really great and helped with the cleanup, that isn't always the case, mostly because they don't exactly know what to do, usually. So I took advantage of the fact that these folks did, and left after I'd just cleaned up all the coffee related things that I could find.

From there, Jet and I called another committee member's family, in order to meet up with them, somewhere. Jet had suggested going to McDonald's and doing the tubes with them, but they wondered if we could go sledding. So we went home, had a quick better lunch for us than MickyD's, and tried to find a bunch of cold weather gear that we just couldn't, for the life of us, find. Yeesh. But we did figure out Jet's sled, and I just put a pair of water resistant pants on top of his other pants, and he said that he was warm enough. He wore his heavy coat, his elbow high mittens and his hat and he was good.

We met the other family at the overflow run off area for a park and for the neighboring areas. It's just a huge bowl, with lots of good, steep sides that were perfect for easy, safe sledding. So we got there, and Jet and I walked around to the edge of the bowl and met up with the eldest boy of their family, which Jet loves to try and keep up with and compete against. It's interesting to watch the dynamics. But they do great together, and Jet loves following him everywhere. So they sledded and sledded and climbed back up over and over and over again. I mostly just stood at the top and watched, which was all to the good as I couldn't find my boots at all. Grr...

We were there a good two hours, and the wind picked up and the clouds darkened, and then a huge black mass blew in from the south west, and came up north and gradually ate the sun. It got bitter cold once the sun stopped shining, and all the kids got cranky pretty quickly after that. So us moms called a halt, and I lured Jet home with the promise of hot chocolate. I made him a mug of it as soon as we got home, and added a few drops of peppermint oil and he was very, very happy. Then he got to help with making some Rice Krispies Treats® with the last of the big marshmallows I had in the pantry. He really enjoyed that and really liked eating the results as well. He said that they tasted like Rice Krispies®. Hee.

We played some Crash of the Titans as he'd had his activity time, already. We've learned that Jet really needs some physical activity pretty much every day or else he doesn't sleep nearly as well as when he does some real running around and real workout time every day. Of course, the great side effect of that is that John and I get our workouts as well. Though I'll admit I wasn't climbing hills the way he was. But he wasn't carrying coffee pots this morning, either. I did get about 13k steps in today, which is quite good for me.

Then John got home, and I made a baked mac and cheese with ham. I used Orgenzola (a blue cheese made in Oregon) as well as cheddar, and added some caramelized onions because I really enjoy them and decided I might as well caramelize the ham as well. It didn't hurt that Kathy had mentioned beef sandwiches with bleu cheese and caramelized onions recently. It came out really, really nicely and used up a lot of the ham bits from Christmas. John made salad to go with it. Jet ate cheese pizza with bonito, seaweed, and sesame seeds on it in the form of furikake. *laughter* I have a son with very, very strange tastes. He won't eat macaroni and cheese, but he'll eat pizza with dried fish on it.

But it was a good dinner, and Jet ate half of one of my Maverick Harry and David pears. They sell the blemished pears for a bit less than the normal ones, and since we went by the outlet store instead of doing the mail order thing, I didn't have to pay shipping, either. So they're still expensive, but they're really, really good, and Jet will actually eat half of a half pound pear. So I'm not going to argue. He got his fruit in for the day and then dug into a very crisp Treat quite happily.

I had a great day, all in all. I only lost patience with Jet when he walked across the sled hill, right in front of a couple of adults about to go down the hill, which was a safety issue thing, so I felt not too bad about that.

Most of the rest of the day was pretty cool, and we got along really well and did a lot of stuff that we both pretty much enjoyed. So that was very, very cool.

I've been having a weird dichotomy between day time thoughts and my dreams, and I think I finally figured it out today. During the day I've been wondering if I should regret getting out of business right at a point where I was really feeling like I was doing something that I was good at, and something that I'd built up years and years of experience in order to do well. Sure, it was something that, really, I'd only do because of the money it would make that sense of accomplishing something that others valued enough to pay money for, but that's something that's pretty powerful in and of itself. I don't knock it. But it really was something that other people really did value that I did well, and I was really wondering if I was stupid for giving that up.

At night, I've been having dreams about princess conventions, Tom Cruise as my hair dresser with Bernie Mac vying for the spot instead, and the usual dreams about the tricks to Crash of the Titans to really do well at it. But I'm realizing that, perhaps, some of those dreams are all about me taking myself way, way, way too seriously and, maybe, I should just lighten up on myself. Take the rest while I can, and even if it does mean starting at square one again with everything in my life that... maybe... it's just time I did that again.

The cool part is that I get to learn again, and I needed that, badly.

I'm studying seed catalogs now, dreaming about what I'm going to do with the two new bed George and John made for me this last fall, and about what I'm going to do at the OUR center. It should be interesting.