A happy ending...

So I've been really horrible at updating this and taking pictures of the garden and our lives in general. I was set on doing so today-- I had an hour between getting off work and leaving for my first 1,000 calorie class with Desiree (which I'd packed in for with a Chick'fil'a meal weighing in at just under 1,000 calories, but to be fair it was my only 1,000 calories for the day!) so I was going to finally take a picture of the bean plant that's struck out and is now strangling the large bush by our porch, the bean plant that has instead looped in and wrapped itself around, well, itself, and the first cayenne pepper to turn red! Not to mention the grill!

I sat down to have a yogurt and watch an episode of Angel and my phone rang, it was one of my counselors at the pool. Mine and Jeremy's favorite camper had been pulled from the pool unconscious and the ambulance was on the way. Thankfully, two rescue breaths resuscitated him and he was alert, coughing up water, and terribly upset about the whole thing. Any time you perform CPR on someone, an ambulance is required, and the great thing about living in Decatur is that we have some really great paramedics and we're about 7 minutes from CHOA (Children's Hospital of Atlanta-- premiere pediatric care in the South East). The little guy was sitting in the back of the ambulance when I got to the pool ahead of his mom, so we loaded up and headed straight over there, and they called his mom to have her meet us at the hospital.

We're still not sure exactly what happened-- the lifeguard's story differs greatly from my staff's version and I'm frankly inclined to believe my staff. They were clearing everyone out for adult swim and when they turned around, someone was pulling him out of the pool and calling for a lifeguard. Jeremy says W wasn't five feet from a lifeguard stand and the guard was not the one who pulled W out-- a woman who seemed to be an EMT, paramedic, or the like was the person who pulled him out. W told the doctor he wanted to jump in one more time, so we think there's a possibility he went to jump in and slipped, hit his head, and fell in instead. No matter what happened, it's clear that there's no fault in this. His parents said he's been getting a little reckless with regards to swimming, and he has a tendency to be that kid who always gets hurt.

I have a friend who is a nurse at CHOA and looked in on him tonight-- she says they'll discharge him either tonight or tomorrow morning and he's doing fine. He was chatting with me in the ambulance on the way over, and though he was obviously freaked he was fine other than a slight tummy ache. I hear chlorine will do that.

The parents have all been very supportive, which is nice-- when something like this happens, you not only worry about one of your favorite campers and their family, but worry that other families will be worried about sending their kids your way. Seeing someone that small so scared is traumatic, too, and I managed to hold it in until the nurse walked me out of the ER. I had to go back to camp to write up a statement (since you know some of those kids would have told their parents someone had died) and was given hugs by several parents, and received some very positive feedback through e-mail from others.

It was a hard day, probably the scariest call I've ever gotten (and will get until I have kids of my own), but I hope that I can handle it as well as his parents did-- I know it helps that he's fine in the end, but it made things go smoother that mom and dad weren't frantic, yelling, or extremely upset. When I called his mom she said, "Well, you're calling me in the middle of the afternoon, so that can't be good! What happened?"

Anyway, we're trying to figure out what our weekend is going to look like. We want to see everyone, but right now we're just so exhausted that we can't think about it right now! If we stay home, I'll update with something cheerier and some garden pictures.

Hoo...

This week was camp out week... I hope for Richard's sake and everyone else's that never happens again. Tuesday the K-2nd graders camped out, Wednesday the 3-7th graders camped out, and Thursday was a lock-in with the whole camp in the gym. Now, camping out is a good experience for a lot of the kids, but putting them in tents... *sigh* it was a bad decision for all of us. I think Richard is just going to do the lock-in next year, which will be better for him. Wednesday, I ended up falling asleep in some of those fold-up stadium chairs in the center of some of the tents because their inhabitants wouldn't stop talking! OR sassing me! And most people I know will tell you that I don't take well to being sassed. At all. I think I made that mistake once when I was a kid and my mom picked me up and popped me.

Needless to say, I only got about 2 hours of sleep. Thursday, therefore, was just about hell on earth. We went to the new World of Coke, which was totally awesome, but the boys were just as badly behaved and wore me out. Chris, my partner for this week, was really helpful, though. He can be a little goofy sometimes, but when it comes to making sure people aren't taken advantage of, Chris is right there on it. Thursday night was the lock in and it went SO much smoother than the night before! We had the girls on one side, the guys on the other, and put on a movie right at bedtime. We did get a break that afternoon-- I tried to take a nap at home and just couldn't fall asleep, but DID go buy my NEW COMPUTER!!!

I LOOOOOVE IT!

It's pretty and shiny and has amazing graphics and is convenient and almost has all my old pictures and all my music on it because in a stroke of good luck, the old computer decided to give it one more go and turned on! I'm stuffing the important things on my jump drive and transferring them directly on to the new one (aka, pictures and music).

I'll put up pictures of it tomorrow, right now I'm so engrossed in True Blood (season finale, season one) that even though I'm entirely drained from the last few days I can't seem to fall asleep! I'll also have pictures from this week up, and then Sunday I'll have pictures of Julian's 3rd birthday up!! I'm so excited-- he's such a sweetie, and he's going to be my ringbearer. We'll have to make a special pillow, though, unless he loses his affinity for rings; last time I was over, he took Meg's wedding band (one of the reasons they just got cheap-o Target bands!) and started playing hide and seek with it, put it in the baby seat and we had to turn the thing upside down and take the liner out to get the ring back! It was pretty hilarious. I think he and Ana will make quite an amusing little pair!

Alright, we're about to finale on the finale and I'm about done with my water quota for the day, so I'll wrap it up.

Ciao!

PS- Richard walked on my back a couple days ago and popped that nasty little bugger back in to place!! There's still a little bit of stretching to do, but it feels soooooo much better!

Stone Mountain=Awesome

The kids were pretty well-behaved, though one of them apparently gave his money to a complete stranger instead of someone wearing our sporty camp shirts, and things went smoothly! I really love Stone Mountain, and hopefully when Jeremy gets here we can get a yearly pass. The hike's pretty easy, 1.25mi each way, and the view from up top is nice, too.

I took TONS of pictures (posted here) and really enjoyed myself. The ropes course was a little bit terrifying at first (I have residual height issues and usually close my eyes on roller coasters!) but by the end of it Brandy and I had the hang of things. Here's me and Brandy at the top of the course!
And yes, those harnesses are as tight and uncomfortable as they look!

I drove the black van back with some JCs and the water which was kind of nice since I didn't have to listen to the kids all the way back and we got to tell all the ridiculous stories about the day-- like, how one girl in my group (Touchy, we'll call her) feels that we didn't do anything even though we took the sky buckets up to the top, looked around, hiked down the mountain, went to the ropes course and rock wall for like an hour and a half, then went to the 4-D movie!

Off to make a CD of pictures for Richard of the last couple weeks and make a bed time snack out of some jalapeno hummus and wheat thins!

What a week!

This week I had the K-2nd grade boys and they. wore. me. out. I have a lot of patience for small children because they're still learning, but these boys I think maybe got hit with the stupid stick... all week long I had to keep putting them in time out for hitting each other and calling each other names and nobody ever seemed to catch the point! GAH! I was at my wits' end. Jacob, the littlest one, had some major anger management issues but by the end of the week I found out a lot of stuff that caused some major "Eureka" moments on Friday night!

Six Flags was the most ridiculous day ever-- we rode a lot of good rides since we had the "ride what you want" kids, but we had The Wonder Twins who whined all day long. The one cried every time we went to get on a ride bigger than the Mine Train; when we went to the Wheelie, she ran around the thing screaming and crying like she was being chased by a serial killer! It was really out of line. Again, with the patience of Job regarding little children, by lunch time I wanted to shake them. I took them to the JCs with us and was like, "Keep them before I do something irrational. Like leave them in Monster Plantation." I did tell a kid I'd leave him at Lost and Found for the day, but he was on the verge of getting himself kicked out of the park (because it's SOOOO hard to keep your hands INSIDE the ride!) and he just kind of eyed me like, "I'm not sure if you're bluffing or not..."

After Richard took The Wonder Twins away, the rest of the afternoon was great. We rode the Batman and Mindbender with no trouble and headed on home. The one good girl in my group was a total CHAMP. Sydney was the BEST. She skipped (for the record, there is awesome video with each of these links) Acraphobia, but rode Batman, Superman, The Wheelie, The Mind Bender, she totally rocked it out and I was super proud of her!

We also went to the pool a couple times this week, and on Friday I ran in to a good friend from high school who has been relegated back to his high school summer job of lifeguard! "You know that story where I got a college degree and then had to move in with my parents and work the same job I did in high school?" he opened with. "Yes," I replied, "I know that story quite well, in fact!"

Today was Susie's wedding and it was beeeeeautiful! I'm so excited about my own wedding. She also has the exact same color palate, so I joked with her that it was a good test run for mine! They had a lovely ceremony, short and sweet to boot, and Susie looked just gorgeous! They had a little cocktail reception for an hour and then a sit down dinner and dancing-- of which we did quite a bit. I'm waiting for everyone to put up pictures on Facebook so that I can compile away. For now, the 70 that I took (and here I was thinking I hadn't taken any pictures!) are up on Flickr since Facebook is being a butt. I do, however, get very sad when I see all these spring weddings, I wanted one so badly...

No pictures from camp this week, I didn't think it wise to bring my camera to Six Flags, but here will be plenty next week from Stone Mountain and the ones of my girls last week at The Aquarium are also game.

Jolly Roger

I'm watching the premiere of Deadliest Catch. I love this show. It makes me want to a) visit Alaska, and b) spend a season on a crab boat-- of course, Jeremy wants to work the crab, I'd be OK sitting in and cooking for the crew!

Not too much happened today, but I've been really surprised by the number of campers who have caffeinated drinks in their lunches-- there was a third grader who had a 20oz Mountain Dew!! I never got that kind of stuff in my lunch! I also already have the reputation of that kid with the good lunch-- the youth volunteers are very intrigued by the fact that I cook really good stuff for myself, and all I've brought was my home made meatloaf and a leftovers sandwich (roast chicken and pesto) so far!

Oh, and I made my first meatloaf ever the other night and it was AWESOME! There was garlic, cayenne pepper, oats, and BBQ sauce involved. It was absolutely delicious. I froze half of it since I figured I wouldn't want to eat meatloaf all week, so I'm going to try and hang on to it until Jeremy comes up to visit so he can try some ;)

Ciao for now! Hopefully tomorrow I'll have pictures of the group tomorrow from the Aquarium trip!

Excuse me, please but...

Could we possibly stop killing each other? It would be awful nice if we could all just pause for a moment and realize that no matter what God/dess we believe in (if any), no matter what color our skin is (as it's really just an accidental evolutionary response to the climate in which our ancestors lived), and no matter who we love, we are all people and we all live on this planet together and we may as well make the best of it. Stop being so bloody hateful.

No pun intended.

That's all I have to say, I won't rant, but it would be nice if that could happen. I'm sure it would also be nice to solve world hunger and cure AIDS and cancer all in one fell swoop.

First day of camp went really well, the campers are all pretty well behaved (for a large group of kids between the age of 5 and 14) and I'm in charge of the kindergarten to second grade girls with another counselor, Brandy, who is a junior (I believe) at Georgia State. There are a couple of girls in the group who have given us trouble, and I'm hoping one of them is just trying to act tough (I had to talk her out of a corner this morning when she was crying for her mommy) while the other may just have an attitude problem a few sessions in time out will fix. We also have a couple of celebrity look alikes in our group-- one who looks like Jane Krakowski and one who looks like Catherine Zeta-Jones, and I'm not talking resembles, I'm talking LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE. It's totally crazy. They're also getting along pretty well so far, we haven't had to tell any of the girls to be nice even though the same aged boys have been giving Stephanie and Scott absolute fits.

I think there will only be a couple of people who are going to try my patience, but they're also going to try the rest of the counselors' patience so I don't feel too bad about it. I'm also going to like working with Brandy a lot, she's a lot of fun and we think a lot alike. I've been looking up a lot of info on stuff to do with kids in the area since we're supposed to come up with fun things to do with our groups to get brownie points, if you will, with Richard and avoid the monotony of duck duck goose and freeze-dance. The library has a few story times, but they're not really convenient to our schedule, so I think instead I'll just talk to Brandy about doing a storytime with the girls to try and match the theme of the week, and maybe even doing a movie to match the theme. We didn't get the pool this week, Glenlake is still recovering from a massive makeover this summer, and we'll be able to go Friday weather permitting-- the weather doesn't look like it will permit, however... perhaps that would be a good day for Finding Nemo since it's Aquarium Week!

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'm going to watch the rest of Quantum of Solace (which is making much more sense now that I've re-watched Casino Royale) and fall asleep. With luck, Casey will refrain from cranking the air down to sub-zero and I won't keep waking up freezing cold!

Ciao!