Home but not home

After spending all of last week childfree, I flew out to LA last Saturday and have spent the past few days at my childhood home with my boys.
First of all, my week last week was pretty good! Ben and I got our new french doors sanded and stained and varnished and they look great! I will not miss that horrid sliding glass door.
I also spent a lot of hours working on a scrapbook. I don't do real scrapbooks, not with pretty paper and embellishments and themes and all that. I'm not creative enough and I take WAAAY to many pictures and can't decide which ones not to include, so I just include all of them. So my scrapbooks are basically a whole bunch of pictures, cut and cropped and glued onto the paper with journaling to say what was happening. I did ones for each of my twins for their first 2 years of life, one for Mosey's first year, and none since then. Well, my boys have been begging me to make more, and it did seem kind of weird that as picture-happy as I am, I have almost no pictures printed.
Anyway, I got 6 months taken care of last week. Only 60 more until I'm caught up. :-)
As I was working on this, I went back to read a bunch of the letters I wrote during that time (before the blog I wrote emails home as my journal), and got really sentimental. And freaked out by how many things I had forgotten. I used to write every single day. It's not interesting blog reading, but I think I'm going to go back to that style because I really loved reading about those days and I really don't want to let the experiences we're having now just disappear into the ether because my memory is so crummy. There are a bazillion blogs out there that are a million times more funny and clever and beautiful than mine, and I just don't care to compete with that, and I'd rather just remember my life anyway. I hesitate to post on my blog when I don't have pictures. So I end up not writing about certain things because I don't have a picture, or the pictures I took are not ready to post, or whatever. That's dumb. So anyway, I doubt I'll update every day, but I am going to try to go back to my daily life chronicles, boring as they may be.
This week has been fun! It was awesome to see my boys Monday morning. They were waiting for me at the baggage claim when I came wheeling over to them, and they all came running. That is such a mommy-rush, to see your babies running to you. They all looked big and tall! And they all wanted to talk to me at the same time, and it's sort of been that way ever since. :-)
Brigham very proudly showed me his certificate he got at the end of Grandma camp. "Practically perfect in every way." Which he is.
It was actually really awesome having Joseph away, not because he was gone, but because for the first time in a long time, he actually became really talkative on the phone. Last year when I was in the hospital and I'd talk to him, it was a little like pulling teeth. He'd either just say silly stuff, or say "nothing" when I asked him what was going on. But last week, HE called ME a few times, and talked and talked, so excited to tell me everything. It was so awesome. This past year has been rough on Joseph. But the last few months I think he's been coming out of whatever the trouble has been, and it's been so wonderful. I've worried about him so much. But my mom told me what a good, obedient, friendly, cooperative, peacemaking boy he was while I was gone, and I almost can't believe it. I hope it lasts!
Mosey is so cute, and he's wanted to sit right next to me at every meal and snuggle up next to me on the couch, and tell me about everything.
So this week we've mostly just hung out at home, but we've done a few things as well. We went to the Norton Simon Museum yesterday, which is an art museum in Pasadena with the largest collection of Degas works of any museum. I wasn't sure how my boys would do in an art museum, but Brigham LOVED it. (Ok, I was pretty sure he would). Joseph liked it for a while, and then was ready to go. Mosey lasted a little longer than Joseph. But over all I was impressed with how they did. When my mom mentioned that they all deserved a treat after the museum, Brigham said, "I don't need a treat. Going to the museum was a treat for me!" Where does this kid come from?? He's way too good to be mine. :-)
My mom and I went to see Julie and Julia last night which was great. I loved it and now I want to learn to cook French food.
Today the boys and I and my mom took a tour of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories) here in La Canada. This was perfect as the boys and I are just about finished with our Space unit we've been studying this summer. JPL is the place that has planned and made and been in charge of all the spacecraft that have gone up to explore the various planets. My mom has a friend who works there and she gave us a personal tour which was amazing. We went through the museum they have their with scale models of a bunch of different space craft, then a movie about the history of JPL, and then our personal tour. The boys got to see Mission Control, the Spacecraft Assembly building (where everyone has to wear gloves and hair nets and masks and coveralls to keep every speck of dust out, and the machine room (more like warehouse) where all the tiny precision pieces are made for the spacecraft. It was an awesome tour, although really hard with my wheelchair. JPL is built up in the foothills, and is really not wheelchair accessible. We had to go up and down hills, around buildings because everywhere is mostly connected by stairways. My mom and her friend helped to push me up the hills, and my arms are really sore now. But the boys had a great time and spent the rest of the afternoon drawing pictures of space ships and building the model space shuttle and eating the freeze dried astronaut ice cream that my mom's friend gave us. She was totally generous. I let the boys pick out some souvenirs and when I went up to pay, she took them right from my hands and paid for them herself. Sooooo nice.
I also raided my parents' bookshelves today and I'm bringing home about 30 books that my boys are ready for. My parents have thousands of books (no exaggeration), including hundreds of really great children's books. It's so exciting to me to see my boys reading and loving the books that I read and loved as a kid. Especially Joseph, he's my book worm.
So that's our week so far. We go home Saturday morning, so one more day at "home" before we go home. The boys are ready to get back, but I'm not! As soon as we get back home, we need to get back into our full-time school schedule. Which will be good but exhausting. At about the time most other parents are getting ready to get some of their own time back, with their kids going back to school, I'm about to not have ANY time again! It's worth it, though, and I'm excited about this coming year.
OK, bed time for me. My dad just came in from his soccer game. My dad is 60 years old and is a star on his over-40 soccer team. They came in 2nd in their league this past season, which is pretty great considering soccer is arguably the most popular sport these days in Southern California. When I saw him on Monday, he had this enormous lump over his left eye, and the worst black eye I've ever seen. An injury from a soccer game he played on Saturday with another team he's on, an all-ages team in which he got headed by an over-enthusiastic high schooler and was lucky not to get a concussion. Yep, that's my dad. The son of my 90-next-week grandfather who recovered from a brain-bleed from a 4-wheeling accident last Thanksgiving. Probably the only 89-year-old out there gallivanting in the Sanpete County mountains on a 4-wheeler. :-)