A Day in the Life of a Carpooler

So this week it is my week to carpool, and though it does make for a tad bit longer of a week, it does provide great material. FYI, I deliver 6 children to school on my week, 5 girls and 1 boy, MY boy, the youngest. Yesterday was his birthday, so imagine one little 6 year old boy in the car with 5 girls ranging in ages from 7 to 12.

This morning, I delivered my middle schooler, then I delivered my junior-higher, and next stop was the elementary where I would deliver the remainder of my goods. The drill is that Ethan scoots over and gets out and flips the seat down for the last 3 girls to get out. They are 8, 7 and 6. As Ethan was flipping the seat down a teacher arrived behind him for some much needed help and assisted the girls out of the car. After doing so, she looked at Ethan and said, "Don't worry, they can't kiss you today, they're already inside." Then she looked at me and said, "They kiss him every day, and it makes him so mad..."

It's Saturday, for Crying out Loud

Ok, it's been a few days, but in my defense, the last week has been C-R-A-Z-Y.

Hello, my name is Ginny. I'm an introvert. I have been around people for a week, solid, and I'm going nuts.

So one day last week, can't remember which day, one of my sweet little carpoolers had the unfortunate experience of getting carsick. In my car. In the seat belt receptacles of my car. In the stitching of the leather seats of my car. Underneath the seats of my car. In the - er - places where the seats attach to the "metal" part of my car. In the carpet of my car. Well, ok, so this is not so bad because my car needed to be shampooed anyway, and also because my husband recently purchased a shampooer for me. How sweet. Only one TINY little drawback - the prospect of dealing with someone else's kid's puke. yeah. Lovely. Ok, so when I dropped her off at home, her mom seemed very embarrassed (which I would have been also) and ran out to mop up most of the mess, and most of the chunks. Thank god. Still. The smell. Was. Unbearable. Even after I spent 3 hours shampooing the vehicle, it still had a bit of funk, but what can you do? I discovered things I didn't even know my car would do in the process of cleaning it out. My shampooer had a nice little shampooing crevice tool which came in handy when I found a little pool of puke that needed to be sucked up. I think it's ok now, but the kids might be irrevocably scarred....

Night Time Carnage

It is getting creepy in here. Since we lost our dear old Aussie, we have become over-run with critters. It is almost like Shally had them all held off to the border of our property and as soon as she vacated the premises, they converged upon us in a ravenous stupor. A couple of weeks ago, we were awakened to the sound of cackling chickens in the middle of the night, which is ALWAYS a danger sign with poultry. We jumped out of bed in our t-shirts, slapped on some boots and stormed the chicken pen, shot an opossum with a 22 and this has been the beginning of what I shall call The Great Battle of Marsupials. In the days that followed, we have caught an opossum and a raccoon in the live trap and relocated them to other areas which I am not sure were receptive to "extra animals" but I digress... (By the way, the raccoon was a fluke, I'm not stupid enough to think he is a marsupial) Last night was probably the worst yet. Again, we were alerted to a cackling chicken pen in the dark of night and again slapped on our boots and.... you know the rest. The only twist to this repetition was that Brad eventually gave up the hunt and took his gun back to the house. Almost immediately, I found the marsupial soldier poking his pointy little nose out of the top of the chicken house grinning with his pointy little teeth. Brad returned at this point sans gun and proceeded to beat it to death with a mag lite. Now don't turn me in to PETA people, this was a CHICKEN VS MARSUPIAL situation and someone had to go. I felt it incumbent upon me to delegate the ethical treatment to my chickens in this particular situation. I told Brad that I had no idea he was capable of such carnage. A few minutes after this shindig, we ran a live possum off of the front porch where he was dining on cat food. What next?