So.

Today, we finally got the judge's full opinion, written in response to Bro's Concise Statement of Matters Complained of on Appeal. (Yes, it's really called that. Welcome to Legalese 101.)

I say that we go the full opinion today, because we had half of it last week. The judge sends her opinions/rulings/whatevers printed back-to-back (I know from previous orders), and the secretary at our lawyer's office must not have realized that when she copied the opinion to mail to us. So, we only got the even-numbered pages.

Hilarious.

We were so entertained.

It was both amusing and comically frustrating to read only every other page and have to muse about the pages we missed. We got all this last Saturday, so I emailed our lawyer right away to let her know. She replied right back (is it any wonder we love this lady?) and said she'd talk to the secretary on Tuesday, and explaining that the judge always did paperwork back-to-back. That was, of course, exactly what I figured had happened.

I anxiously awaited the mail this week, and when no fat white envelopes arrived from the lawyer's, I emailed her this morning. She kindly scanned in the odd-numbered pages and emailed them to me this afternoon.

So, I went to print them out, and...

Cannot print. Printer is in an error state.

Say what?

He's so cute when he's sleeping.

I went upstairs and checked. I was the last one to use the printer, after all. I'd printed out an invoice yesterday for my business records, and window had popped up for the printer, but didn't display an error message.

The printer was OFF.

O-F-F.

There was only one explanation.

Weasel!

Darn cat. He likes to chase, catch, and/or play with the pages as the printer spits them out. Any time I print more than a page, I close my office door first, so he won't cause a printer jam. Dingbat cat.

He must have been in there when I printed the invoice (which printed again as soon as I turned the machine back on) yesterday, and pawed it off. Toad.

The machine continued with printing our previously-missing pages of the order, and I closed my office door. (I stupidly didn't check to make sure Pa'ani was not in my office, but that turned out okay; he was on the couch next to where I was sitting when I got back downstairs.)

When I collated the pages together so the order was finally complete, I sat down to read.

Oh, it was lovely. It warmed the cockroaches of my heart.

Have I mentioned before that I love our judge? 'Cause I love our judge.

It's pretty safe to say that she decimated my brother's arguments. I sent Hubby a text with a quote from one of the pages we didn't have before, and he replied back, "Ooooooo."

I've read the full opinion twice now, and Hubby has read it once.

We are once again thoroughly impressed with our judge, so glad we had her, and I'll tell you...her opinion gives me a huge rush of something I haven't felt in a long time about all this.

Hope.

Earlier tonight...

The kids are playing "Hangman."

Large Fry: Pick a letter, Medium!

Medium Fry: [rattles off alphabet, from A to Z, with lightning speed]

Large [frustrated]: No, just pick one letter!

Me [since this is the third go-round of this conversation]: Medium, pick ONE letter.

Medium: Five.

Me [chuckling]: Five isn't a letter!

Today, I choose to PRAISE.

The last week or so here has been kinda rough. Between Small Fry's surgery and recovery, and large bills arriving in the mailbox along with legal paperwork that makes the grief and anger and helplessness all come rushing back, and then me getting sick on top of all that, I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Okay, let's be honest—more than a bit overwhelmed.

This morning, however, my best friend JJ emailed with the news that they'd had another donation come into their GoFundMe account for their adoption (I know who it was, and names are being withheld to protect the guilty and preserve their relative anonymity...at least here on the blog). Great news to start the morning out with!

JJ and I usually email back and forth throughout the days while she's at work. I love that we do that, and days when she's not at work are kind of email-dreary. She made the announcement at one point this afternoon about how much she has to be thankful for, and so she decided to make this a day of praise. She listed the things she was thankful for: working appliances, a refrigerator full of food, a husband coming home from his trip tomorrow, extended family matters working out better than expected, a reliable vehicle, that God continues to work on fundraising for their adoption.

I replied with my own list: air conditioning that I don't have to have running 24/7 right now, dishwashers and clothes washers that clean my things without me having to stand over them and "help" the cleaning happen, batteries, battery-powered clocks (even though the one here in the den seems to eat up batteries like they're going out of style), a husband with a good job, duckies, and Diet Dr Pepper.

Then I picked up the kids from school. And got the mail from the mailbox.

Oh, look. The lawyer's bill. Sigh. I hadn't realized we'd exceeded our retainer yet, although it's not surprising. Although...that's a much bigger number than I thought I'd be seeing. Oh, look. More paperwork from the court. (Gee, I'm glad I'm not the one that Bro's attorney is accusing of erring in judgment and abusing its discretion in determining clear and convincing evidence.) It's gotten so that I hate going to the mailbox because I don't know what I'll find there.

I felt the weight of it all begin to settle on my shoulders again.

And I started typing back another email to JJ. I mentioned the paperwork. And then...well...I'm thankful for a lawyer who knows her stuff and has got our back. I'm thankful for supportive parents who are going above and beyond to help us with this, more than just emotionally, and believe that we're doing what's right and best.

"There you go! Overcome the legal malarkey with praise! It's all junk and you know it!" she wrote back, adding in her list: she's thankful that the termination orders are the current orders, so that we are not having to deal with lining up visitations and the additional stress that those visits cause; that the girls are old enough and wise enough that they see what's going on (and that's a whole other blog post, by the way) and know how much we love them; that God continues to supply all our needs, including our fabulous lawyer, and that the same God, while rarely early, is always just on time.

We kept going!

• We have friends who love and support us through this insanity, who rejoice with us, mourn with us, get angry along with us and for us, who let us be real about the frustration, rather than expecting us to Jesus Juke our way through it.
• The judge gets to defend her position on her ruling, and that's something I'm actually looking forward to reading.
• Our lawyer is honest and trustworthy.
• Our God has all this covered, and loves me despite the fact that I know this but fret about everything anyway.
• I'm married to a man with a heart big enough to open it up wide and take in three little girls and love them as his own, enough to want to go to all the hassle and heartache of being determined to make them his own.
• My children are healthy and happy.
• My cats—my furry kids—are also mostly healthy. I am grateful that we have an excellent vet for the times when they need medical attention.
• Kitties. They give such comic relief.
• Electricity and running water and indoor plumbing!
• Our church loves its children so much that they pay half of camp tuition costs to the nearby RGC. My girls can go to camp for a week this summer, and it will cost me less than $200 instead of nearly $400.
• Food to eat. Clothes to wear. A house to live in that more than supplies the space we need. Medical care.
• Plenty of leftovers in the fridge, so that I don't have to cook a meal from scratch tonight!
• I found a lost marble under the couch yesterday! (I don't even think it was mine.)

We are blessed.

We are loved.

There is plenty to rejoice in.

Random Thoughts

A semi-brief update on life here in the last few weeks...

• I survived The Single Mommy Experiment 2014, although it was not without a few hiccups. Here we are, making silly faces at the airport after Daddy got on the plane and we were trying to be brave.
  

• The Fries all decided that they needed Daddy Shirts to help them sleep while Daddy was gone:

  

  Large with Teddy, Daddy's bear.

  
  

  

  Medium needs $1 million in ransom...

  
  

  

  Small could fit in there three times, I think.

• Medium Fry still missed Daddy so much that she put her Daddy Shirt on over her clothes as soon as she got home from school on Monday. 

  

  Still waiting on that ransom money...

• Large Fry's third grade spring concert also occurred while Hubby was away. Fortunately, Gramma and Uncle D came out to see Large perform. She did a great job, along with all the other third graders.

• The appeal-filing deadline came and went while Hubby was in Florida, sufferin' fo' da Lawd. However, we found out the day after the deadline passed that the appeal had indeed been filed on the very last day. It was disheartening, maddening, and saddening. Bro is appealing on the grounds that we failed to make our case that he had failed to act as a parent in the six months prior to the filing, and that the court failed to properly determine the parent-child bond between Bro and the Fries. We had really hoped the deadline would pass without incident, and I hadn't realized how deep my hope was until our lawyer emailed with the news that she'd been served the appeals paperwork.

• Small was scheduled for a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy on May 7, so the night before (naturally) I scooted down to the urgent care one town south just before they closed, because I had a horribly nasty sore throat that had only gotten worse as they day went on. Viral sore throat/tonsillitis, the doc said, and I would just have to let it run its course. She gave me a prednisone taper to help with the swelling and soreness, and said I just needed to be smart and careful (washing my hands a lot and using sanitizer) and I could be at the hospital with Small Fry the next day.

• Small's surgery was a success, and her ENT said that her tonsils were enormous (no surprise) and that her adenoids were severely obstructing the passages at the back of her nose/throat, so both had really needed to come out. He assured me she came through surgery like a champ. It was horribly hard to come back into recovery and hear her moaning, crying, and gagging. I knew she wasn't quite awake yet and was hurting. Mom came out bearing gifts, and Small and I spent the night in the hospital just to be safe. She's doing great, and is able to eat soft foods already, although she's still favoring jello and Pediasure shakes. Anything that keeps her hydrated is fine with me.

• I traipsed over to the local walk-in clinic this morning since I've been barking like a seal ever since we got home from the hospital, and it was only getting worse. Sure enough, my viral sore throat brewed itself into a nice sinus infection, and I feel worse than Small Fry does. I'm heading to bed soon as a result.

It's a Word Lover's Holiday!

Today is generally acknowledged as William Shakespeare's birthday, and, were he still alive, he'd be a very creepy 450 years old. Eeew.

However, potential zombification of the Bard aside, for a wordnerd like me, this is a day bordering on sacred. The English language owes much to this imaginative man. In fact, I have a flip book that allows me to create my own Shakespearean insults. It was a gift from my parents one Christmas, and I love it. (I really need to use it more. But the good gendarmes in the local burg where I reside have this thing about reading whilst driving, so I'd have to memorize lots of it to use the insults on fellow drivers. Or create an app. But I digress.)

While some might think of Shakespeare as inherently stuffy, and iambic pentameter a curse of the gods, there's a surprising number of phrases coined by the man that are still in use today.

Don't believe me?

Here's twenty words credited to Shakespeare's invention and ingenuity with language.

Still not convinced?

This is a list of fifty words and phrases that have entered the popular lexicon because the Bard penned them first. (There are a couple of duplicates with the other list, but these two are by no means exhaustive.)

In fact, Shakespeare is so embedded in our language that references often show up in the most punishing of ways...

In fact, Shakespeare got quite often rewritten during cold and flu season at my house:

TB, or not TB, this is the congestion

Consumption be done about it?

But of cough, of cough...

But not for a lung, lung time.

Oh, come on. You knew I was nuts already.

Shall we compare the Bard's words to a summer's day? Or shall we apply them to...say... wrecks?

Shakespeare! The gift that keeps on giving!

And since I'm such a giver today, I'll offer you this. Ever wondered what Redneck Willie Shakes would sound like?



Now you know.

You're welcome.

Tribute

On Saturday morning, I received the sad news that my dear friend Brigid's big brother had lost his battle with cancer.

It's rather odd to grieve the loss of someone you've never met in person...but that you feel you know well, because of his sister's occasional stories about him.

I confess, he sounds very much like the kind of big brother I would have liked to have, except that I have that small problem of being the eldest child in my family. (I've had to "adopt" big brothers.)

This was somewhat unexpected news, but unsurprising, since I knew that B's Big Bro had been fighting stage 4 cancer for quite awhile. He was on my personal prayer list, and I knew how deep the love between Brigid and her brother was. I hated the thought of her facing another loss, especially so soon after losing her dear Barkley.

And so I prayed for Big Bro, as I thought of him, for his healing. For his family's strength. For their dad, who is also in frail health. For Brigid's strength and peace as she watched from so many miles away. For Partner in Grime, as he supported Brigid through whatever might come. For Big Bro's wife and kids...it doesn't matter how old you are; losing a parent is like losing a part of yourself, and a very scary prospect.

As I read the email Brigid sent me, my heart dropped. The odds that I ever would meet her brother this side of glory were slim to begin with, although I would have liked that. I had a physical ache in my chest, for I could only guess at how deeply Brigid was grieving. Like me, I know both she and Big Bro have a bedrock-deep faith that assures this "goodbye" is really just a "see you later," but that only slightly eases the pain of having to wait an indeterminate time before that "see you later" reveals itself.

I had no doubt that God had answered my prayer. Big Bro had been healed, spectacularly so, and was whole again—no more pain, no more nausea, no more failing body, no more ravages of the disease that claimed him too soon (not that there's ever a good time to lose one you love). Was it the healing we all wanted? I'm pretty sure I can safely say no. But he's healed all the same. The Big Bro I am confident I'll meet someday has his glorious red hair back.

I'm sure Barkley is wiggling all over Big Bro. There's been a joyous reunion with Big Bro and Brigid's mom and stepmom. And, in the meantime, we on this side grieve and wait.

Big Bro died on Good Friday...in a way, oddly appropriate. Even as my heart broke for my friend and her family, I couldn't help but acknowledge the hope that we, almost 2000 years after the crucifixion of Christ, know is embedded in the pain and despair of Good Friday itself. Without Good Friday, there would be no Easter Sunday, no resurrection of Jesus, putting Death in its own grave. It is because of Jesus's resurrection and triumph that we know death here is not the end.

It's how I can say with absolute confidence that they will meet again, the next time in a place with no sorrow, no pain, no death.

Big Bro, thank you for helping to shape Brigid into the woman she's become. I'm honored to call her my friend. In a way, I miss you. I look forward to the day when we meet. Until then...

More Things That Should Not Go in the Wash

I decided this morning that, clearly, the overflowing hamper by the twins' room indicated I needed to do some laundry.

Hubby was going to be gone all day for Ambush Paintball (lucky him) with the teens, so it was going to be just me and the Fries.

I figured that giving myself the easy goal of washing and drying two loads was doable. That way, I wasn't going to stress or panic over not getting enough laundry done over the course of the day.

Of course, the fact that I'm now writing a blog post about laundry has probably clued you in to the fact that things didn't go as planned.

Everything seemed to come out of the washer juuuuust fine.

I tossed the load from the washer and several shirts of mine into the dryer. (My shirts had sat in the dryer too long, and I am far too lazy to just iron the dumb things. I'll toss 'em in with a load of wet clothes and everything will come out mostly wrinkle-free as long as I get to it in time. Which is a whole other story.)

And then I started another load after lunch, reset the dryer to finish drying the load (that 30 feet of dryer pipe from the dryer to the vent on the outside wall of the house is a real bear sometimes)...and thought nothing of it. I took the kids over to the playground behind the school around mid-afternoon and stayed until dinnertime.

It wasn't until I got home and pulled out the load in the dryer that I spotted the problem: pink. In irregular splotches. Everywhere.

The load of clothes was a bunch of jeans and blue/purple shirts.

No pink anywhere.

Except, of course, whatever had hitched a ride through (presumably) a pair of the kids' jeans. But...what was it?

Other than pink, of course.

I went up and questioned my three most likely suspects (to be fair, that's only because I had deliberately checked the pants pockets of Hubby's jeans before I tossed them in the washer). The only one who remembered putting anything pink in her pocket was Medium Fry. She said she put in a piece of pink chalk in her pocket, and thought she took it out later, but wasn't sure.

Medium is my elephant, and remembers almost everything with startling clarity, so I had to kind of trust her "thinkerator" (a term she'd coined earlier this afternoon).

I had to wonder, though, why chalk would've stained. Or adhered. Or whatever it had done. Theoretically, shouldn't chalk just kind of go mushy and wash out completely?

"New rule!" I announced. "Chalk does not go in pockets! It goes back in the chalk bin when you're done with it. Never in pockets!"

I spent quite a bit of time pre-treating everything in that load. Then I spent another ten to fifteen minutes cleaning out little bits of pink from the inside of my dryer. Once I was satisfied I'd gotten it all, I threw in the clothes from the washer.

It was when I checked the lint trap that I got the biggest clues of all.

From upstairs, I heard Medium ask Hubby, "Where's Mommy?"

"I'm downstairs in the laundry room, playing CSI," I hollered.

Itty-bitty pieces of heavily-laundered crayon wrapper.

Oh, Google...

I did a quick search for how to get crayon out of clothes that have been both washed and dried. Hey, look, a solution!

Fingers crossed that this works, because I simply cannot afford to buy all new jeans for my kids when they are on the ankles'-edge of outgrowing these ones.

"New rule!" I announced yet again, this time to pajama-clad Fries. "No crayons in pockets! Ever!"

Sigh.