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Month: January 2017
1/26/17 going to grandmas…
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1/25/17 applications and packing…
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1/24/17 Maggie is going to Grandmas…
The kids grandma is sick. Not my mom, their other grandma. She went to the doctor and he wanted her to go to the hospital. She said no. She is ninety years old and still gets around good, except for the cold. She asked if Maggie could come live with her for a while. Maggie said yes right away. I thought that she would think about it for a while. Maggie has dropped out of college and has put an application in at the pet store but they haven’t called her. She will need to put in a lot of applications before she leaves because Grandma doesn’t have internet. When she said yes I felt so sad. I know that she will be a good help and she is ready to go, but I miss her already. It is suddenly so empty here. All my years of thinking about what hobbies I would like after they are gone doesn’t fill up the quiet, and she hasn’t even left yet. I asked Maggie to start filling out applications. She looked at her e-mail first to see if the pet store had emailed. They hadn’t. She is filling out applications now. She needs a phone so that we can keep in touch with her.
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1/23/17 college and Christmas trees…
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1/22/17 the last driving lesson before the test…
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1/21/17 driving lessons…
Beth and I went driving last weekend. She needed to learn to drive backwards. A friend of mine said that they had taken their kids to an empty parking lot and had them drive in backwards figure eights for two hours. It sounded like a good idea to me. So…Beth and I stopped at a McDonald’s and got a Coke and went to a parking lot. There is a vacant parking lot by us that doesn’t have the parking spaces drawn on it any more but it is still in good shape and it only has one light which is by the curb on one end, not in the middle of the lot. We got there and Beth asked what the driving directions were today. I said she needed to do backward figure eights for two hours. She said OK and started. First she drove making the figure eight really short. I asked her to use more of the parking lot. She made bigger ones. Then she stopped and did the figure eights going the other direction. After about twenty minutes she asked if we were done. I said no. She needed to do this for a full two hours. I said she still seemed shaky and unsure how the car would react when she made different turns. So many times when the girls are driving and they try to back out of a parking space they can’t figure out which way to turn the wheel to get the car to go the way that they want. We were now out of Coke and she was not ready for another hour and forty minutes off backing up, so I suggested that we go back to McDonald’s and get another Coke and come back to the parking lot. After we got the Coke we went back to the parking lot and she asked how much time she had left. I said an hour and forty minutes, I think she was hoping that the driving time to McDonald’s would count towards the backing up time. We do need to do the whole two hours. So she started driving. Beth did figure out how to do small enough circles that it turned my stomach. She didn’t do that all of the time, just when she could catch me off guard, then she would look at me out of he corner of her eye to see if I would react. She made big figure eights, and small ones and many too close to the light pole, just to watch me squirm. In the end she said that this had been a good idea. She felt a lot more confident. She was driving better too. We had spent so much time having her learn to drive forward it was good to have some time learning to back up.
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1/20/17 hats and cats…
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1/4/17 ACT admission ticket…
The ACT web site has been down for at least a week. Beth is taking her ACT test this Saturday and we still need to print her admission ticket. I disconnected my printer from my computer a while ago by mistake and can’t get it reconnected so I have been going to the library every day to print the page. I have gone into total panic. If we can’t print this she can’t test. I should have gone to the library the day she signed up, but I didn’t. Today the web site came up, I was so excited.
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1/3/17 volunteering and friends…
Maggie is volunteering with one of her classes clearing burdock in a local neighborhood. They go every other Sunday for a few hours and get extra credit points for going. The burdock was brought to the neighborhood as an ornamental plant and took over the neighborhood. They have been clearing a field. Maggie is another one of my quiet kids. I am hoping that she will make a friend when she volunteers. She says that they cut the burdock down separately and don’t have conversations while they are there. When I drop her off at the school to go, we get there early and she does go over and talk to the other students that are waiting. It is OK with me if she and William are quieter ones, but they will miss a lot of life if they don’t ever talk to anyone. I had asked Maggie to join a club this semester. College isn’t just about the classes but about making a friend and about going to the games or a play or out for pizza or to a party or to something. She said that this semester she couldn’t join a club because she has too many classes.
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