Cerina

We've been talking about moving out of Texas. We're not going anywhere as long as my grandparents are all still alive, so we've got a few years yet. My sister and BIL are looking at buying a large tract of land in Colorado, and we might do something like build on a small part of it. If that doesn't happen, we've talked about heading to the NW.

Yes. It's only fair.

hotels.com You don't have to stick to a particular chain. Our only hall pass is Britney.

HYPOTHETICALLY...my spouse would be laughing his ass off while I tried to politely faked a stomach bug.

I know I've said this before, but I still just love how hanging out with all of you is soo easy. It's amazing what 20ish years of online friendships can give you, even with people you still haven't actually "met" in person. I'm probably more comfortable and more of myself on these Zooms than I am with most people in real life.

Ahh. Good times. Good times.

I was shocked by the death! I know they haven't done much lately, but they're always just like a comfort character showing up randomly. Just nice knowing that there's someone out there fighting the good fight completely behind the scenes.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5168117350 Something funky was going on with the other link. Use this one.

How do I join the game? Zoom is open btw

Do NOT show this to my teenager. OMG.

My heart truly breaks for the families of those men, and especially for the 19 year-old kid that was with them. But the absolute hubris and privilege on display from all of this is just...I don't know if there's a word tbh. It's anger inducing for sure.

Honestly, I don't have any major issues with Biden. And I doubt too many people do (R's excepted). He's just kinda...blah. I think he was a good solid choice for 2020, but I'd prefer that the party move on. But I'll vote for him over 95% of republicans these days. That party has moved from "conservative" to "crazy" and I just can't with that.

Somebody text me about 10 minutes before I'm supposed to open the Zoom. I might forget because I'm fairly sure I'm perimenopausal and my brain sucks these days

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5168117350

It's not really that. His base does not care one iota what he does. That won't change. But all this culture war bullshit is starting to really grate on many other people in their party, those that care more about their corporate profits than banning books or drag shows or whatever new thing they come up with next. Culture war fatigue. It's real. Even most of the leftists I know have it. People will vote for less drama.

I really don’t believe he’s electable in a general election. Most republicans know this. They know they screwed up by going along with his bullshit all these years because they can’t lose his base, but they also know he won’t win in a general election. It’s why I don’t much care that Biden is on the ballot again. He’s electable. His only real liability with the general public is his age.

He was a baby the last time you and I hung out. A baby. I don't understand this passage of time bullshit.

Yup. They’re both going back. Noah still prefers homeschool, so I told him that if he does well next year, learns good study skills, and then gets his drivers license next summer, I’ll pull him back out to homeschool, but he has to do dual credit at the local community college so he’ll graduate with an associates. We’ll see how that goes. He’s a great kid, but he has little to no ambition. I already know we’re going to have to push and drag him to earn his Eagle.

School update!! Despite occasionally trying to say otherwise, Noah wound up rather liking his school. And he did so incredibly well academically. They just threw him into algebra without testing his math level. We’d just barely started algebra in homeschool. I think he was maybe 4 weeks in, but he picked up right where they were without missing a beat. Even I’m impressed with that! He finished the school year with all As except science, which was a B, and all As on all his final exams. Can I just say how validating that is for me as his main homeschool teacher? This is a rigorous classical school where all the core classes are actually honors classes, and he crushed it. I didn’t even know how much anxiety I had about his academic “readiness” until it all started to dissipate. Noah also has zero social anxiety. I didn’t know that was possible for a 14 year-old. On his very first day of school, he mixed up his class schedule and wound up dressing out for PE only to discover when he walked outside that it was lunch time instead. So there he was, obviously in his PE uniform an hour early in front of the entire class. But he was just like “oh oops”, went back inside for his lunch, and found a table of kids to sit with. The he just went on about his day. When he told me about that after school a part of me was completely mortified for him, but he didn’t think anything of it. I told him that if that had happened to me I would have rather moved to Siberia than go back the next day. He thinks I’m weird. So anyway, he made several friends in the 2 months he was there. Even went to a birthday pool party the weekend after school ended. Luke also did amazingly well this year. He started school in January and was behind in reading and writing, which I expected as we’d barely started formal lessons with him. Since he was in the early childhood program in Houston in ‘19-‘20, they immediately set him up with group speech therapy, a paraeducator for one-on-one reading/writing, and a pull out group for social skills. He, like his brother, totally crushed math. His teacher mentioned to us several times how advanced he thinks mathematically and how quick he picked up new concepts. And by the end of the year, we were told that they recommended that he start 2nd grade without the one-on-one reading support as he has now “caught up” to his peers. Reading and writing skills are so varied at this age that I think he’s still kinda on the lower end of “on level”, so we’re trying to do more reading with him this summer. He’s actually really into a lot of Dr. Suess books and we’ve found him reading them spontaneously on his own several times now. We’ve also noticed an improvement in his expressive language and story telling. One of his biggest challenges is telling or retelling stories and answering why and how questions. He’s started to voluntarily retell events from his day or from his shows, and he even stops to correct himself when he gets something out of sequence. My favorite thing though is how all of his teachers and paras and therapists keep going out of their way to tell us how kind he is to them and to his fellow students. I try to cling to that now that it’s summer and he has a meltdown every time we ask him to do anything that’s not watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft.

We’re no longer speaking to my MiL or her brother. I’ll have to post the whole story in the morning or when I have the bandwidth to do so. That woman just went completely batshit on us. a few random comments: My birthday is now a federal holiday, so hopefully I never have to work on it again. I should probably also tell my boss this since it’s in like 9 days. Apparently, we’re not at the top of the list to get my sister’s daughter if they die. We’re on the list, but our income bracket knocked us down a bit. Their best friend is their #1 choice at this point, but he’s single and my BIL doesn’t want to burden him with a kid if it might keep him from having a family of his own which is his goal in life. We were all a little drunk last month having this conversation as a group hours after my grandpa’s funeral. We actually “discovered” (everyone totally already knew) that their best friend is now dating my BIL’s little sister during this whole conversation. So I guess he secured that spot. We also found out that my BIL’s sister considers Trevor and I third on her list to get her 11 month old baby girl. I was pleasantly surprised. My sister and BIL are 1st, then her newly announced boyfriend (who she’s known for 20 years so it’s not really as irrational as it sounds), then us. She and BIL have a married older sister who has twin girls, but apparently they’re not in the running. And we all promised each other that no matter what, none of our parents would ever get custody of any of our kids. That said, I would take any of y’all’s kiddos in a heartbeat. I’m all about keeping kids away from crazy family members.

Y'all. Just. I don't even know what to say. We have so much shit going on. I could update each thread with new nonsense. But I have a therapist now. And she told me today that I have poor self-esteem and a core belief that I'm a total screw up.

I don't understand Den Leaders who don't "plan" meetings. The Den Leader guide literally plans out every single meeting for you including opening and closing, all activities, songs, games, everything. It tells you exactly how to do everything, gives you a list of supplies needed, and even provides extras like printouts if needed.

This has been a fucking nightmare, y'all. Not the house itself so much as dealing with these particular family members. For 2.5 years now we've been trying to get my mother-in-law to homestead this house. She's refused. The taxes on it are now absolutely insane, and they're making buying this house a damn nightmare. The tax value on this house has almost doubled since 2020. Homesteading it would have capped the increase to 10% per year. Now we're running into lender after lender being scared to finance us because the monthly tax bill is larger than the principal, interest, and insurance combined. And my MIL and her brother (the two people who own this damn house) are throwing regular hissy fits because it's taking us longer to find a lender than we'd originally anticipated. All because they refused to listen to us about the taxes.

He starts next Tuesday. He and I took a quick tour of the campus this week. He's still trying to pretend that he's not excited about this. But today he was talking to his great-grandma and he was going on and on about the campus and everything he learned. I think he's secretly excited about doing something different. I did find out that his English class is finishing up reading Fahrenheit 451 this week and will begin a writing assignment on it next week, so I'm trying to get him to listen to the audiobook. He's listened to the first chapter.

I think he's actually looking forward to it more than he's letting on. And I think he'll actually enjoy being around people all day. We have to buy his uniform shirts from the school, but we can buy the pants, shoes, belt, and socks from wherever. He's man-sized now though. So we just have to find khaki pants, flat front, no sewn on pockets. I'm thinking we'll start with like 3 pairs of pants and maybe 4 shirts (2 short sleeve and 2 long sleeve) and go from there. It's the shoes that will cause us the most issue because of his oddly shaped feet. And we don't skimp on shoes for him, so we're probably looking at spending $200-300 in shoes alone this weekend (1 brown and 1 black pair).