A Mixed-Bag Roller Coaster of a Week

First of all, Beverly and Walter are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Wow! Beverly posted a really cool, inspirational post about it on her blog. Despite the fact that Jamie and I have both been divorced before, we deeply believe in marriage and with all of our blended family/divorce/etcetera wackiness, it's really nice to have Jamie's parents and my parents (who are approaching their 44th wedding anniversary) as awesome examples for our kids of marriages that work and last.

And--not secondly, because this is also just way too cool, Jason landed an awesome job in Chicago and he starts in September. Way to get a PhD in physics and get an awesome job in Chicago while also running marathons, Jason! WOOO!!!

Third thing: Jamie joined a jazz band this week! So exciting! It's the same group of people I'm playing with, but they have a separate jazz band. He had his first rehearsal on Tuesday and their first concert is on the 30th. The thing about Jamie is, he's really good. He has talent. And it's going to be really interesting to see where he goes with this because playing with other people, especially other people who are really good, like this group of people, is a great experience for so many reasons.

Good things are happening at my job in that it's morphing into a position that affords me a lot more opportunities to be creative and also this week I got permission to start a program to assist people seeking a certain type of assistance (sorry, not comfortable being less vague when discussing my job) and I'm really excited about it. This is something I'm somewhat passionate about in my personal life, but fitting it in with everything else has been a problem in the last several years, so you can imagine how I feel to be able to do this at work.

And.....school started, we had various daughters having sobbing melt-downs around 11pm every single night this week (oh, yes, that IS way after bedtime), and Jamie and I were up until at least 2am every night dealing with stuff and filing out all those fucking forms. Oh, and one night, Jamie was at Kroger after midnight buying construction paper we didn't know was needed, which is a long story but let's just say at this point, we're kind of loathing Claudia's 7th grade advanced english moron of a teacher. But by Friday afternoon, progress was made, settling in was happening, almost all the school supplies had been located and purchased and at this point, I feel that we're poised in a position to make this a really exceptional year for all three. I can see it, it's right there! So rough start (and actually, seems like every year's a rough couple of days at the beginning), but I think this year is going to be awesome.