And The Living is Easy

Road construction in front of our house.  We have been living on a dirt road for two weeks as they ripped up the pavement in preparation for the new pavement.  Which hasn't arrived yet, and might not for a while.  First they tore up the curb in front of our house and we were stranded with one car in the garage and one car parking on the street for two days.  Luckily we were able to hobble around in the one car and Hubby didn't have any big trips.

We are Horse Owners.  Or will be in a matter of hours.  The original understanding was we would lease this horse, Bones, for a year and at some as of yet unspecified point during that year we would approach the owner about purchasing the horse.  However, Thing 2's riding instructor, who is the go-between in this situation, and the one who talked the original owner into taking Bones out of early retirement and putting him into a lease situation told me we ought to just bite the bullet and offer to buy him.  I was inclined to agree, despite all my fears of horse ownership and horse health problems.  I have been watching all the other barn moms struggling to find a horse for their daughters for the past four months or so. Thing 2 was happily riding and then sadly losing Doc, and then shuffled around for a bit until Bones was pulled into the barn.  In talking to the owner I can see what a trick our instructor pulled off because they really had no intention of selling him.  They were happy just keeping him as a "pasture pal" but she became convinced that as an athlete he wasn't really happy just hanging out in her field.  And he's a perfect horse for Thing 2.  Though his price wasn't as low as we'd hoped, Hubby pointed out how much time and effort would we would have to put into a horse search hoping to find something that has Bone's qualities for 2/3 the price.  So we bought a horse today.  I wanted to hold off giving her the saddle I bought on eBay until her birthday, but with all the summer camps and clinics going on and it is becoming a pain for me to jockey for tack for her, so I gave it to her last week.  The rest of it will wait until her birthday, but the saddle she got already.

I am not doing too well on the summer balance of keeping them occupied and letting them goof off.  There has been more goofing off, especially on Thing 1's part, than I'm happy with.  This mostly comes up when there's something she needs to do, for either me or her art class, and I have to remind her repeatedly to put down the stupid iPad or computer and get back to it.  The trauma in her life was she got her braces put on, finally, a couple of weeks ago.  She has a pretty good overbite, and to keep her top teeth from banging into and knocking off the braces buttons on her bottom teeth, they attached two big plastic things to the back of her front teeth to keep her from closing her mouth.  She felt quite violated orally.  They told me to take her out and feed her a big lunch before the pain set in, but  between the pain and the frustration of her teeth not meeting, she didn't eat much lunch and continued to basically starve herself for a little over a week.  I tried to ply her with smoothies, milkshakes, anything I could think of but she found something wrong with everything, yes, even milkshakes, and she lived on a very sparse diet of scrambled eggs and milk and …  well I'm not sure what else she ate. She lost weight, but finally started perking up and said the pain was lessening, and now she's pretty much back to eating whatever she wants.  Her teeth still don't touch much but she can at least chew enough to live.  The funny thing was when Hubby returned from a trip and went straight to pick her up from her class the day after she got her braces and texted me in obvious alarm that her back molars didn't even meet!!  Did the orthodontist know?  Can we make an appointment for tomorrow to alert them to this unacceptable situation?  Calm down, honey, I'm sure when they glued the big plastic things to the back of her front teeth they were aware that it would screw up her bite for a while.

We took the girls fishing a week ago Sunday.  What started out as a leisurely drive for a hike turned into a fishing trip when I googled the lake we were going to hike around and read to Hubby that there was good fishing there.  He pulled over in the next town and bought a couple of pole and bait kits and licenses for him and Thing 1, and we proceeded to the lake to go fishing instead of hiking.  We expected to not catch anything and so were quite surprised when Hubby caught a nice sized trout.  Thing 2 and I took the dog back to the car to get the foam cooler we bought just incase, and by the time we walked back Thing 1 had caught a fish too!  She caught two more and she and Hubby both caught  little ones that they turned loose.  The whole fishing thing was fine, but I found that I am lousy at deboning them.  It took me almost two hours to debone them when we got home.  So we froze the fillets and got take-out for dinner.

We had fish for dinner on Monday, a week later.

Thing 1 went to a church girl's camp yesterday, and though the camp goes through Friday morning, I'll be going up tomorrow to pick her up so she can go to her art class.  We all miss her a lot.  She's pretty quiet, but she's a pretty big part of what goes on around here.  

We're counting down to Oregon, 1 week before we leave.  That will probably be one of the big highlights of the summer.  The problem is nothing will be able to live up to last year, which was just magical in every way.  But we'll give it a try.