It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

Problems always come in threes. Right? I hope so--because I've had my three and I need some time to recover.

This picture has nothing to do with the three things. This is a picture of my ballerinas in the tutus Becky made them. Thank you, Becky!! Cowen got to go be manly at the hardware store with his Dad and Grandpa Young--this is how I distracted Miriam from the injustice of it all.

She hasn't taken it off for very long since.




























This is Miriam's bedroom with the insulation in. It now has sheet rock. Don't the windows look nice? I think so.

This picture also has nothing to do with the three bad things.













This is Cowen racing to the truck to continue his manly hauling in of building supplies.


















This is Cowen helping Grandpa unload.
















This is Cowen hauling in a pipe. Notice how dirty he is. He loves it downstairs.











This is Miriam being a conflicted ballerina.

















This picture starts the bad news. Do you notice the layer of white that is covering every surface. That's not concrete dust. No--that was last week's problem.

This is baby powder. Two full bottles of baby powder bought only a few short days ago from Target.






During nap-time on Sunday--when I was trying to deal with one of the other bad things, I didn't check on Miriam and Cowen every thirty seconds. This is the result.










Oh yeah, did I mention the two packages of wipes strewn around? Or the oil spots from bum cream?
















It's a lot worse than it looks like here. I had to wash every item in the room. All the clothes of all three kids. Every book (there's several hundred), every toy.

I don't really want to think about it. It isn't cleaned up yet, but I still have to take care of problem number one.







This is Cowen's window. I just wanted to throw in something good.











Miriam in time-out. Do you notice how strangely white her hair is?

















This is where Emeline was during the fiasco. She had a bit of a fever and we wanted her to actually sleep-so we removed her from her siblings. Good thing.










I put this picture in because Cowen is so cute. It didn't really help him yesterday or this morning.













He's pretty baby powdery.







On to problem number one. I did a bunch of grading (several hours on two or three days) while I was at my parent's house. When I got home, I had messages from several of my students, indicating that they couldn't open the rubrics I had attached to their forums. Apparently, everything I did at Dad's came up as zipped for the students and me. Dad had already deleted everything off of his desktop. So, Tim spent an hour yesterday getting stuffit on the computer. He eventually figured out how to unzip things, but they didn't unzip in rubric form. So I had to cut and paste everything back into rubrics and re-attach them to the student's forum. Very, very time-consuming.

Then, I realized that many of the powerpoints pulled up on Dad's computer without speaker notes so I docked points for not having them. When I pulled the powerpoints up on my computer they had the speaker notes. So--I'm regrading most of what I graded. It wasn't that fun the first time. And now, I'm behind schedule.

I wouldn't worry too much about that normally because I didn't plan on teaching after this go-round, but Timothy came home at 10:30 this morning (while I was crying in the kitchen and the kids were crying on the couch--something about the kids climbing over the backyard fence and going to play at the neighbors when I'd told them not to, and my losing my temper--unfortunately, a wooden spoon was involved--I'm not at my most emotionally stable), only to announce that he'd been laid off.

I'm sure you are all familiar with the "last hired, first fired." Timothy's company, Wiggins and Co, is on the small side and one of their biggest clients just declared bankruptcy, so Wiggins is going to be struggling to stay in business. And so--we're unemployed. Again. Welcome to the recession.

Call me crazy--I'm still too hung-up on problem number one and two to really be all that concerned about problem number three. I'm sure it will hit eventually. In the meantime--I'm off to find some chocolate to fortify me for more grading. I have to be diligent--I might be teaching quite a bit in the future.