It's a dismal, dreary Sunday afternoon. It was raining when I woke up this morning, and it hasn't stopped since. In fact, it's only gotten worse. It's coming down in buckets right now. It sucks, as S left last night for a business trip, and so I'm here alone with the boys, and it's so much easier when Lil' S2 can run around the neighborhood. He's just cooped up and bored, and unlike his brother who can entertain himself on screens indefinitely, he can only play video games for so long before he needs to do something active. I could take him somewhere, but driving somewhere in this rain is not a particularly appealing option. Heck, just walking from the front door to the car sounds kinda miserable.
A silver lining is that this is a great test for my waterproofing of the roof on our deck, and everything is holding up very nicely. Despite this torrential downpour, I don't see a single drip anywhere. This is actually my second attempt at fixing the leak. My first one--applying waterproof tape in the area I thought the leak was coming from--failed instantly, so I had to come up with a new plan. This time I just put a tarp on the roof and secured it in place with a bunch of heavy rocks I found in the yard--primitive, but it works quite well. It's not a good long-term solution, because the tarpaulin in not translucent, so it covers up the skylight (thus defeating the very purpose of having a skylight), but it's an excellent proof of concept. I'm going to buy some see-through, waterproof plastic and put that up on the roof, and that should solve the problem. Eventually, we will probably have to get a "real" fix, but I'm not eager to spend the hundreds of dollars it will cost to have somebody come out to try to diagnose the issue (which isn't easy with roof leaks, in my experience, even for the experts), especially since there is a nontrivial chance the conclusion will be that we need to spend thousands more dollars to replace the roof entirely. I'd prefer to push off that potential expense as long as possible.
It's also a downer of a day for other reasons. Lil' S2 came back from camp yesterday, and he left his laundry bag there filled with basically his entire summer wardrobe. Before he left, S took him to an outlet mall and bought him like ten pairs of shorts, a bunch of sport jerseys, underwear, etc., and almost all of it is gone now. He came back with a mostly empty suitcase and the clothes he was wearing. S was furious. It was several hundred dollars worth of clothing, but more than that, it was the fact that she put in the time and effort to find the deals and take him shopping, and now it's all for naught. Lil' S2 felt super bad about it. He immediately put on the I'm-about-to-cry face before running out of the room. I think his reaction is only thing that kept S from really unloading.
On him, at least. I still got an earful. One of the main causes of fights between S and me is the kids making us mad. We are already primed for a row, and there is a whipping-boy element to it, where we know that we can't actually lay into our children too harshly because they are, you know, children, so we take it out on each other instead. We both do this, but I think one of us does it to a much larger degree than the other, and you can probably figure out by how diplomatically I'm phrasing things which of us that is. Then there is the common meta-fight of offering solutions versus offering sympathy and understanding. S actually said to me, "Can't you just listen to me and let me be mad for a little while?" To which I responded, "Yes, but a lot of the time that anger gets directed toward me. Why do I feel like I'm the one who left the bag behind?"
So, it wasn't a great scene, and it happened right before she left to the airport, which now that I think about it was probably a good thing, as it probably sped up the reconciliation process. You have to be really mad to leave for a trip without making up first, and I think we both concluded that this minor spat didn't rise to that level. Also, there's a decent chance we can get the clothes back--I wouldn't say there's a great chance, but there's a decent one, at least. I suspect kids forget stuff at camp all the time, so they must have a place where they store lost things, at least for a little while. It's all together in one laundry bag, so if they have it set aside somewhere, then we can either have a friend pick it up this weekend when she goes to get her son, or we can pick it up when we drop of Lil' S1 who's going to the same camp in a few weeks. S already sent an email to the camp director, and there is a number I will call tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed.
As you probably inferred, we did not pick up Lil' S2 at camp this year. We did a car pool, and he came back with a friend's dad. We aren't super close with him and his wife (but we really like both of them), so it was maybe a little awkward when S texted them to see if Lil' S2 had just left his bag in their car instead of at the camp (a long shot but worth a try). Apparently, the dad was very apologetic, insisting he asked all the kids several times to make sure they had all their stuff. But of course neither S nor I put any blame on him. If anything, we should have drilled it into Lil' S2 to put everything into a single bag before he left, so that he only had to remember one thing.* I did, however, pose this questions to S: If it was a mom instead of a dad who picks them up, does Lil' S2 come back with all his stuff? She laughed, and then said, "100% yes." That might be sexist, but it's probably true, and I'm not sure if it's sexist against women or men, anyway.
*One problem with this is that he insisted on bringing a suitcase for some reason. In retrospect, we should have made him bring a giant duffle bag, as it's much easier for a 10-year-old to dump everything into that than a suitcase.
Another thing about this is that it's all just stuff. We'll be fine without it. I ordered a chub-pack of kids' boxer briefs off Amazon for like $25 last night, and it already arrived. Lil' S1 gave his brother a few pairs of shorts that he doesn't wear much anymore, and we pulled a few more out of the donation pile that he can still squeeze into for a few more weeks. It's all good. This isn't a "real" problem. And this really hit home when we got a text today from one of Lil' S2's friend's mom, who said she was just diagnosed with breast cancer. They caught it early, so there is a high probability of her beating it, but still it's gutting news. We know several other woman who went through breast cancer treatment relatively recently (one of them still is going through it), and it's grueling in the best case scenario. So, yeah... Makes a lot of other shit seem trivial.
Alright, I hate to end on that somewhat grim note, but I am completely out of time.
Until next time...
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