I have to say, Anja’s birthday party yesterday was one of the most fun parties I’ve been to for kids, and considering we were the ones hosting it, that’s saying pretty much.

Our day started out early - we were up at 8 on a Saturday, tidied up the house, made about 5 trips back and forth between housing and the “other side”, where all the stores are - picking up the inflatable castle that they said would need 3 men and a pickup truck that B fit, all by himself, inside of our Coke-can-sized car; picking up balloons; picking up the birthday cake; buying presents; going back and buying the paper I forgot to buy; buying food; going back and buying the drinks I forgot…yeah.

The kids started showing up and they were a pretty rowdy bunch - Anja would associate with nothing less than the rowdiest, of course - and somehow we managed to keep them occupied and even happy the entire time. Aside from someone getting hit in the nose on the bouncy castle and Anja getting hit by the wayward pinata stick, things were very uneventful and just FUN.

I learned that having a fun party costs a LOT of money. But, in the end, it was worth it. Anja, as well as the rest of the family, had so much fun. Here are a few thumbnails from the party that you can click on; the rest that are being shared with the kids in their thank you cards are here. I didn’t get any pictures of the bouncy castle but there are pictures of the pinata…

The presents…

…and the cake.

All in all, a great (albeit exhausting!) day.

I’m thinking the hardest part of parenting has got to be dealing with bullies.  Or rather parenting a kid being bullied.  It’s hard because we aren’t sure what to do.

He’s almost 8.  He comes home from school, does some homework, and then disappears outside to play with his “friends”.  Every day he inevitably comes home angry after a couple of hours and slumps into a chair at the table so we can ask him what’s going on.  Every day there’s a new story.  So-and-so was my friend yesterday but today he’s mean.  I wanted to play a game that I made up but my friend didn’t want to follow the rules and now he won’t play with me.
I can understand those fights.  But he comes home telling me an older kid is trying to punch him in the stomach, that they’re stealing his things, they’re calling him stupid, an idiot, etc.  And the one older kid is turning into a neighborhood gang.  Last weekend a kid knocked on the front door to tattle and say that Isak threw a rock at another kid just now.  Problem was, Isak was sitting in the kitchen eating toast, and had been there for a good hour.  Long story short, that kid got an earful from me and was sent on his way.

And on it has gone since then.   Yesterday, Isak came in, once again, slumped at the table and said how the kids are stealing his things and calling him names and trying to hit him and making up lies about him.  I asked about it and he told me they were trying to say he hit one of them with a rock (this is an ongoing theme around here, the rock story - nice, huh?) when he did not hit him with a rock, he just got scratched by it when he was trying to mess with Isak.  This story ended him up inside and away from the neighborhood kids, yet again.

Today we got a knock on the door by an irritated mother with her 9ish-year-old boy in tow who claims that Isak hit him with a rock yesterday.  At the time Isak was out playing, and we talked to them about it and told them we would deal with Isak appropriately.  As soon as they were gone, B got Isak and I sat down to find out exactly what happened.

Now, I’m not one to think my kids are perfect - far from it.  He knew he was in trouble from the moment he stepped in the house.  The problem was, the stories didn’t just not add up, but I was seething angry by the time the story was done.

It turned out that he did scratch another kid on the hand with a rock (”it was an accident!  He moved his hand when I was throwing the rock away!”) which got him a good scolding and grounding, but the thing is, at the end of the story, he gave a completely different name as to who this happened to.  I told him it was another kid that came over, and at that point he got confused and frustrated and told me the story of how this kid has constantly been bullying him and he was pinned down on the ground and the other kid was attacking his head WITH A ROCK IN HIS HAND and Isak was trying to push him off of him and pushed the other kid’s hand into his face.

I just don’t know what to do at this point.  I told him I don’t want him playing with any of those kids and if they’re anywhere around, to leave and that he is not to play with them.  The problem is, all of the kids in the neighborhood that are his age are playing with these kids.

My biggest regret is that we didn’t call Isak back in to tell her his side of the story and defend himself, because part of me thinks that if he was there, maybe she would have seen that her “angel” is a neighborhood bully that comes over to OUR neighborhood to bully the younger kids around.   Except that I somehow doubt that based on her introduction to us (announcing her rank and command?  for a parent-to-parent issue?  are you kidding me?) and fact that she has never even been on this street before and knows not one child here, that anything would have changed her attitude about it.

So what?  What do I do?  Do I lock Isak in the yard and have to explain to him when he can’t understand why he can’t go play outside like all of the other kids?  Do I hover over the kids and set up a lawnchair in the front yard so I can make sure the big kids are playing nice?  WHAT?

I’ve never been too enthusiastic about working out, but I finally got to the point where I was tired of being out-of-shape and wanted to do something about it more than just the minimum to pass my physical fitness test. 

So about a month ago, I started going to the gym.  I have been going for at least an hour a day, 4-5 days a week, every week.  I’ve been playing racquetball, running or using the elliptical machine every day, adding in pushups and situps and some weights, a little at a time.

For the last month that I have been working out, I have not lost one pound.  Not one, single, stupid, measly little pound.  And I’m not overeating; in fact, I’m eating quite a bit less than I used to, and still - not one pound.  I’m (so far successfully) resisting the urge to soothe myself with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a few bags of Cadbury mini-eggs.

To say that I’m frustrated would be to say that the Mississippi River is a little stream. 

Add on top of this that I have hurt my back now for the second time since starting (and no, I am not doing too much too soon; I’ve been adding things very gradually) and succumbed to going to the doctor who prescribed Percocet AND Flexiril AND 800mg Motrin (of which I’ve been taking 2 at a time), and still I can barely walk by the time the Percocet wears off. 

I’ve cut back to using weight machines for doing crunches and have cut back to a low resistance on the elliptical machine, because I cannot stop working out with the physical fitness test looming ahead.  I was doing so well (weight loss aside) and had improved my run by 15% and this is just such a big setback for me. 

Mississippi River, meet Karyn.

For some reason, I can’t access my webpage from home?? so I couldn’t post this the day after…but here’s a picture from the lunar eclipse from this weekend.  There were tons and tons and tons of pictures posted on Flickr, and mine made the “most interesting” archives, for a short while at least!

We’re so excited. We finally got a patio set - a round table with 4 chairs (and an umbrella! Yay umbrellas!) as well as a high table with 2 barstool-height chairs. We put the patio set on the patio and the high table in the courtyard which is blossoming into quite the little sanctuary, complete with rosebushes and strawberry plants starting to bloom. And as moving sale season starts, we’re going to start buying more flower pots to mount on the walls of the courtyard. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get a little water fountain and some fairies to come and throw fairy dust at us.

Speaking of fairies, B put on his tutu and frilly apron and grabbed his pink elephant watering can and put all of our new flowerpots on the front of our house and it’s starting to look like home. You think I’m kidding about the watering can, don’t you? I’m not.

A few pictures from the outside of the house…the only thing missing is the kids’ area of the backyard, and that’s just one of those things where we just don’t want to go, do we? No. No, we don’t.

The courtyard, which is what you see looking out of the kitchen. We’re planning a lot of work; we’re going to move the wire contraption to the middle (that’s where we’re growing our strawberries. The ugly green stuff is protecting it from the frutarian bugs that will feast on the plants) and we’re going to fill the empty spaces with gardeny stuff, plants, more flowers, fairies in cages, that kind of stuff. This is where we’re going to hang lots and lots of flowerpots on the walls.

The backyard, complete with the Grilling Husband, the 1972 model, sans the tutu and frilly apron (I had to wrestle them off of him for the picture). You can also see our semi-finished garden which we’re going to border off and add a few more flowers to. There’s an aloe plant and a rosemary bush growing. If you look closely, you can see Isak handcuffed to his bed in his room. That green thing hanging above the umbrella is a roll-out shade, because the umbrella for the table and the shade for the swing just aren’t enough.

The little table that matches the patio furniture:

The front of the house…I’d like to add something to it still but I can’t figure out what. We don’t want to dig up the grass in the front, but I feel like the walkway needs some sort of plant along it. I just don’t know what.

So that’s the grand tour of the outside now that our house is becoming more of a home, nearly halfway through our tour here. Look! It’s almost time to start spackling!

Not only has the outside of our house gotten a lot of attention, the inside has gotten some attention from a different direction these last few days. I was thinking these days that while uprooting every couple of years is hard because you can never really get “roots” anywhere, at the same time, man it has eliminated the ability to retain clutter! Granted, when you’re someone like me, you’ll get clutter no matter what, but I can only imagine how bad it would be if we lived in a house with a black hole for clutter. Over the years, a large amount of paperwork has accumulated - lots and lots and lots of papers from the military (multiple copies of each), old receipts (from 1998!), pay statements (from 1997!), etc. Well, after enough years have passed, we can throw things away. I don’t need receipts from child care from 2001 or credit card statements from Hlollabatar, no matter how good Hlollabatar sandwiches are.

This recent push to organize all our papers was for a good reason: It’s time to get my package ready for the Chief’s board. Board results came out today and I. MADE. IT. The significance of the test is debatable; once you’ve made board, the test results are pretty much irrelevant. But - if you don’t make board, that’s it. There’s the end of the road for that year. So while my test results don’t matter much, what matters is that they got me to the board. One step closer.