The New Normal (disrupted)

Our lives have fallen into a routine and the "new normal" (which involves me driving 152 miles to & from work four days a week and still picking up the boys at school three days a week) feels normal indeed.

That's why last week felt so chaotic when some things were different or had to be done differently.

1) I had Fall Break from my commuting job on Mon-Tue and... thankfully it coincided with a break for my sons, whose teachers had a convention to attend on those days. Things would have gone fairly smoothly, were it not for...

2) The car I use (and which I've been wanting to blog about forever, not yet today) needed to have an oil change and we opted to have that done on Tuesday. However, oil change morphed into a brake pad change which got delayed and made us a one-car family until Friday morning! So...

3) I dropped K off at his university on Wednesday & Thursday, which made it necessary for us to drop off the boys at 7:30 am on Th. at our friends'  house so they could drop them off at school. And having to get off the highway to drop K made me slightly late both days...  (oh, the good thing was that we got to talk a little bit more than we generally do. I think we should "car pool" at least twice a week).

By Friday, things were "normal" again, but by then we were just exhausted with the "different" week, so we planned to "lay low" on the weekend and rest. If only we hadn't wanted + desperately needed to talk and catch up... (which led us to very late nights talking & talking both Fri & Sat).

Other things that were "different" last week:

On Monday I woke up determined to make the days off useful & I called our family's optometrists to see if they had openings for the boys. Lo & behold, they did! So both boys had eye exams on Monday afternoon & Linton took all of two minutes to pick his new eyeglasses (I will HAVE to show them to you, soooo stylish!). I showed the results of Linton's vision therapy evaluation to the optometrist and he took extra long to examine his eyes, confirming that there's suppression going on. He thought that Linton has very good depth perception given his limitations in vision. He thinks that therapy (which will cost over 5K) will help the eyes to work together & help with suppression, but won't improve his visual acuity in his left eye. :(

I went to a yoga class on Monday, but because of dropping off the boys, I got there late & then I had some back-ache afterwards. :(

My sick arm (correctly self-diagnosed "tennis elbow") started hurting more & now I'm back wearing a brace (this one) 100% of the time, so pain is better.

What else? Oh, I decided to take "pão de queijo" (Brazilian cheese rolls) to my class on Tuesday morning -- it was the only day I was actually present in my "tele-teaching" class. So I was late and it was pretty stressful. Being there didn't make the class much better. :(  Let's see how next semester will go.

I've got TONS of other things to blog about, but I will try to do it more later. At least I'm more or less caught up now. And last, but not least... I'm not looking forward to the upcoming week at all. :( But I should! I will have a conference at the end of it. If only I didn't have to WRITE my paper! :(  I see long nights in my future this week. And I should be grading compositions now!! :(