Long Time No Blog

I've been lazy and keep forgetting to update this blog. Awyn is starting to try standing on her own, but only for a few seconds, and she has the most success when she does it accidentally. Speaking of dentally, she's teething again, and it looks like all top four teeth, starting with the front two. She's pretty miserable, and having a much harder time of it than her brother did. He also punched multiple teeth at once, but he rarely ever showed signs of discomfort. Awyn lets us know that it hurts.

Last night we went camping on the river road. We didn't change the batteries in the inflatible mattress, so we slept on the ground. Worse, I forgot a pillow. But we had a wonderful evening, watching the stars overhead, the mice on the ground, and playing with Sam until he announced that it was time for bed. We let him into the tent, he curled up on a sleeping bag, and promptly fell asleep. Awyn took a little more effort and time, but soon joined her brother.

We are working on weaning Awyn at night, which means that we are trying to let Eric take care of her when she wakes up. Some nights are better than others, and Eric is trying very hard to meet her needs at night.

We went up to Midland for doctor's appointments for the kids, and of course I forgot to write down the stats. Awyn is still just barely over 17 lbs, but we expected that. Sam is nearly 40 lbs, which is lighter than we expected, but it suits him just fine.

I had the tires rotated on the van at Sam's Club and they didn't get the lift low enough and tore some plastic bolts out of the front end, and we had to come up with a temporary fix, as the local parts stores don't seem to carry the right part. So after 3 hours of work, we finally got ready to finish our shopping and head home. That's an hour of Eric lying on the pavement in a parking lot, opening every package of plastic bolt in the shop, and 45 minutes of the manager of the shop trying to help us, eventually joining Eric lying on the ground, trying to make something fit, until he pulled a plastic tie out of another guy's pickup and tied our bumper back on. And a whole lot more time of me arguing with Sam's Club about liability and the fact that we simply didn't have any more time to go find a dealership (we were in Odessa, not familiar with where things are) and wait on them. I had to impress on them the fact that we still had a 4 hour drive home through raging thunderstorms, my husband was sitting in the van with two screaming kids, and would likely shred the next person wearing a vest to approach him, and we weren't going to come back until MAY, because we live 250 miles away. I especially loved the mechanic telling me to go to the dealership in Big Bend, since that's where we are from. Gotta love the clueless. I guess. So no resolution yet, the manager didn't want to refund our $15 tire rotation fee, but will let me fax her an estimate for repairs, and insists that it won't cost any more than $5. I tried explaining $50 in gas, $65 hotel room, 4 hours in a dealership waiting room, if lucky, with 2 very young children, 4 hours driving each way, etc. I'm not sure she understood just how inconvenient those cheap parts are really going to be. So now I don't know where we're going to buy tires from, as Sam's seemed to be the only place that carried the tires for the van at anything less than $150/tire, and at that I have to order them in advance. (tip here: Honda Odysseys take very expensive tires! and I thought we'd traded in a tire hog)