Rocky Road

Summer 2012 has been a little bumpy. Last week was not the happy first week of summer I thought it'd be. Luke acted out a lot. Every day. I know a lot of it was transition. He missed preschool and his all of his friends at preschool. Shane wasn't on summer break yet. There are some other things going on that just made me stressed and sad, but I knew it would get better because hey, SUMMER.

And then out of nowhere, my car started making a funny noise. That funny noise led to my car needing new brakes. New brakes are expensive. The next day, I woke up with bright red eyes. I've been struggling with this off and on. It tends to happen to me seasonally. I have seasonal allergies and occasionally, seasonal allergies plus my contacts will become a bad combination. No big deal. However, after a great trail run with Barb (fortunately, summer 2012 hasn't been all bad), my eyes just kept getting redder, to the point where I knew I needed to see an opthamologist. Fortunately, they were able to get me in that afternoon. I wasn't concerned about pink eye. Although my eyes were pink, I've had pink eye enough times to know the symptoms and I had none of them. No itching or any of the other gross stuff associated with pink eye, which I will refrain from listing here. But as I soon found out, pink eye is a jerk and can actually spread to your cornea, in which case it will not present with the normal symptoms of pink eye. Since it didn't present with the normal symptoms, I was all, It'll clear up quickly, right? HAHA, no, because this is the summer of 2012. Recovery means 8 weeks of steroid eye drops and 8 weeks of no contacts and no eye makeup. This is super, because I have one pair of functional glasses that is about four years and four prescriptions ago, which meant that I needed to order new glasses, as well as prescription sunglasses because it is summer and I need to be able to SEE. I also need to be able to figure out how to run in my glasses, so that will be a barrel of laughs.

Anyway, because I am not made of money, the fraud department at Chase was actually concerned at all my expenditures this week and contacted me. No, sadly, all that money on brakes and glasses was me, but thanks for having my back, Chase. The end result of all of this is that in two days, I completely spent what we'd budgeted for our anniversary getaway next weekend. After a short cry, in which my eyes turned completely demon red again, I realized that it would not be happening. In the five and a half years that we've had kids, we've had exactly one overnight. Because that's been our choice as parents, I've been completely okay with that. However, I was really, really looking forward to next weekend. We'll make the best of it--we always do--but it's still been a little rough.

That said, it's summer. There's sunshine and no 8th graders. I can't complain about that. Yesterday, we took the boys mini golfing. It was so much fun.


Tommy actually used the club to hit the ball, although he eventually got tired of it and just started placing his ball in the hole.
He was also a huge fan of intentionally sending his ball into water traps.


And Luke got a hole in one!



So, the road has been a little rocky. That's okay, because it's summer and in the rocky road, there is bound to be marshmallows.