Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Endings and Beginnings

Well, it's been quite busy around here since last I blogged.  And it's only going to get worse!  We did eventually all receive our Green Cards, although it was quite the fiasco!  It was timed in such a way that it completely ruined our remortgage application, which had to be scrapped and started over, and we also had a hiccup with our healthcare in which Husband suddenly aged 50 whole years and was pronounced 'dead' by our provider, even though he is the listed owner of the policy!  Apparently us making a fraudulent claim was horrifying to them, but the thought that they had fraudulently issued a policy to a 'dead man' (after all, he'd be NINETY ONE and no-one lives THAT long, said the girl on the phone!) did not upset them terribly.  It took many hours of phone calls, and much banging of heads against walls in frustration, but eventually they fixed their database and I am now married to 41, not 91!  Thank goodness! 

It's finals week for The Teenager, and although she's doing well, the stress is there, and the feeling of it all 'being just about over' is hanging over all of us.  We are relieved to have made it - when she started at the Uni last September it felt like this week might never come - but it's also gone shockingly fast and now we are facing Freshman Year, just on the other side of summer! 

It's also the Final Week of only having one teenager in the family - Twelve turns Thirteen at the weekend, and we will no longer be able to blame her strange out-of-character little turns on 'being Twelve'. 

I knitted a sweater.  A quick knit, and I intended it to belong to Teenager, so when I was measuring it up against Twelve, I thought I was doing fine!  Then I got to knitting, and thought that there was NO WAY the sleeves needed to be THAT long, and so I shortened them a little.  Silly me!  Somehow I have failed to notice that in order to make a sweater fit my daughters, I have to make it big enough to fit ME!  When did that happen?  They've always been so small, and even when they became tall they were very slim, and now suddenly they have shoulders, and long LONG arms, and all-access passes to my shoes and my shirts!  Teenager put the sweater on as soon as she saw it, and wore it for the rest of the day, so clearly she likes it but I'd like it to still fit next week, really!   

Yesterday Teenager put on her dance costumes for us to see, and that should have been a sign to me that the sweater would be a little on the fits-right-now side.  She looks stunning in her black strapless velvet basque and black tutu - a far cry from the teeny tiny little yellow costume she wore 10 years ago in her first ever ballet recital!  There will be pictures, of course, but only after finals. 

And Sunday is graduation, an informal affair in comparison to a general high school graduation, but nonetheless the closest we are going to get to that special day.  There will be a ceremony, and a buffet lunch, and then the kids all go off to camp overnight (having donned the required jeans and t-shirts, of course) for their last hurrah! 

We have some fun things planned for summer - a garden with vegetables and fruit and herbs in it, a vacation or two, a visitor, days out, days lazing in hammocks with a good book and a glass of lemonade, afternoon naps, walks on the beach.  Teenager needs to write a grant proposal or ten, and Twelve is going to be giving flute recitals and racing sailboats.  Husband may also have Other Things planned - he is getting a little tired of the 3 -4 hrs a day he spends commuting and is considering a change of location for his job.  Watch this space! 

And me?  I will be spinning, like a crazy woman, for the Tour de Fleece, where spinners across the world time their craft to coincide with the Tour de France, spinning each and every day that the cyclists race, and challenging ourselves to complete something difficult and out of the ordinary.  For me, this year, spinning each and every day of the tour is challenge enough, I usually fail to find time. 

And then it will be on to the Ravelympics, another craft-based adaptation of sporting greatness, where we knit/crochet/spin/weave our way through the Olympics, again challenging our skills and talents with new projects.  For this, I will choose a sweater, or a cardigan, and attempt to complete it between the starting ceremony and waving goodbye to all the athletes at the end.  It's going to be fun! 

But before any of that can happen, we need to make it to Thursday, when finals are over, and some earnest sleeping can be undertaken, although some of us will still need to get up - Twelve does not finish school for another 20 days - and that sweater needs a wash to see if we can convince it to grow, just a little bit, so that it'll still fit in the autumn!  I wonder if she wore it to bed...