Goodnight, Irene

We were right along the path that Irene was due to hit.  As a member of the Hopkins "Go Team," I take disaster preparedness pretty seriously.  I was reviewing our household plan and current level of preparedness, and decided to seek Oldest Son's review to see if he had anything to add.  Since we were both at work, I sent him a list of where we stood and what last-minute things I was picking up on the way home from work.  Here is the list I received back from him:

• Also charge Kindles and iPods. Make sure Kindles are set with wireless off, and iPods are on Repeat None to conserve power.
• Unplug your laptop and printer when not in use. Mine should be fine until the outage, what with the UPS.
• Gas up the bikes too, if it’s not raining when we get home.
• Make sure any important documents exist locally, in the cloud, and on hardcopy.
• We might also want to stock up on handguns, shotguns, long-range sniper rifles, ammo, throwing knives, body armor, concussion grenades, land mines, trip wire, portable generators, ATVs and EMP devices in case the zombies, robots, ninjas, demons, secret dark magicians, clone armies, scientifically resurrected velociraptors or all of the above choose this time of chaos and vulnerability to strike.
• Oh, and protein bars. Can’t run a guerilla war against the clone armies without protein bars.

HSAs: Two down, two to go

We've been dying all summer to get the results of the High School Assessment tests Charlie took back in May.

All high school students have to pass 4 HSAs in order to graduate.  There is an alternate way for special needs students to graduate (called "Bridge Projects") if they don't pass all the HSAs, but colleges don't look as kindly upon students who didn't actually pass the HSAs. 

Charlie passed the Algebra HSA last year on the second attempt.  We knew English would be a problem.  The first time he took it, he was around 60-70 points from being able to pass.  The second time he took it, he was still 40 points away from passing.  Last May, he took the English one again and he took the US Government HSA, as well (which is about to be phased out, but would be really great if he passed). 

We just got the results.  He passed the Government HSA with a good margin, and he is now WITHIN 9 POINTS of passing the English.  He is just thrilled!  He is scheduled to take it again in October, and since he has been working with a tutor all summer and learning some grammar, he really feels he will be able to pass it this time.  Then the only one left would be Biology (which he is taking this fall, and already knows and likes the teacher he will be taking it with). 

So, we now have two down and two to go, and he is feeling more confident about being able to pass the remaining two.

I decided this was something we just had to make a big deal out of, so I went out and bought a Snickers Ice-Cream cake and put two candles on it.  We'll just keep up that tradition until he passes the last one, when we'll have 4 candles and some sort of little present to go with it. 

Gotta celebrate the small victories, KWIM?  Wahoo!!

Conversation @ Costco

So, do you want that huge, plush, overstuffed bear you're standing there hugging to death?

No, it's fine.

Sure?

Yeah, let's get checked out.

(after we have checked out and the goodies from Costco are loaded in the car):
Y'know, I think maybe I want that bear for Christmas.

This store doesn't work that way. If you see it, you like it, you want it, you gotta buy it now, because they won't get it again for a long time.

Okay, let's go back and get it.  Pleeeeeease???

So we get out of the car, leaving our perishables in the 100-degree heat in the back of the car, and head back into the store.  On the way, he suddenly hurtles himself into my arms and gives me a big hug.

Some moms will do absolutely anything for hugs.

Ten minutes later, we are exiting Costco for the SECOND time, him hugging to his chest a stuffed bear that is almost as big as he is (and people are doing the swivel-head thing to get a second look at this gangly teen-ager blissfully snuggling into this bear's neck), and I'm left ruminating about the fact that he missed out on this kind of stuff throughout his whole childhood and that there is still a trace of that abandoned little 3-year-old in there who just wants a mommy and a teddy bear.

Who is that MAN in my house?

Charlie's birthday was a couple of days ago--he just turned 18.  Where did the time go?  Wasn't it just a few jet-lagged days ago that we got back from China with a 13-year-old???

He has done an amazing amount of growing up in a very short period of time.  But he's still rather gullible.

I'm afraid I've inherited a mean streak about gift-giving jokes from my parents. They are the absolute masters of the game. They once managed to hide a piano for Christmas right in the living room--had me convinced it was something else entirely and I had to keep the secret from my little sister. I was so gullible back in the day...

We had Charlie's birthday dinner/party tonight.  Rick and I had gotten him a (used) Kindle, and I had loaded a whole bunch of free books (Goosebumps, Animorphs, Hardy Boys, etc.) on it.  Everyone else gave him some sort of accessory to go with it. 

He had said about a week prior to his birthday that he wanted a Kindle, 'cause he sees Rick and me sitting around reading all the time and wants to be just like us, I guess.  We already had it by then--this has been in the works for a couple of months.  When he said he wanted one, too, I gave him a bunch of stuff about how expensive they were and there's just no way we could afford to get him one.  He bought it, hook, line, and sinker, since he sees me constantly trying to cut corners and save pennies.

So, party time.  We started with the accessories.  He opened the reading light from my former husband, Ted.  Wasn't sure what it was, so we explained that it was for a Kindle, and now he would be ready once he had saved up enough money to buy his Kindle to read in the dark.  He nodded sagely.  Good to be prepared ahead of time.  Then he opened the Amazon gift card from his godfather--oh, wow, this is so you can decide ahead of time what books you want while you're saving up for that Kindle.  Then Rick gave him the leather cover....hey, cool, now you even have a cover to protect that Kindle you're saving up for! 

Once he'd gotten all the accessories, we switched to non-Kindle-related presents.  I gave him the information on a jewelry class he wanted to go to that month (more about jewelry later!), and my parents gave him a nice little wad of cash to put towards the class supplies he would be needing, since this would be a somewhat pricey endeavor.  His godfather's twin sister and her partner gave him a gift card to one of the craft shops where he loves to shop for beads.  So he figured the Kindle bonanza was over.

He still never suspected, when I gave him an over-sized box that actually had the itty, bitty Kindle inside, what was really in there.  His jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing.  Wish I had a picture of that face, it was great. 

Nice party.  I think he'll enjoy being 18.

The Next Belt/Mohawk Minus

Charlie is ready to test for his next belt. This one would add a black stripe to his brown belt, signifying that he is now a first-grade brown, the highest level prior to black.

He was originally going to attempt it back in March, but his instructor felt that he should wait one more session so that he could fine-tune things and turn in a more perfect performance. Charlie wisely and graciously accepted this wisdom and waited and honed his routines and skills. He is now as ready as he could possibly be.

But he has this mohawk. And it's grown longer since the prom. I warned him the judges wouldn't take him seriously if they were distracted by this wild hairdo--they wouldn't be able to concentrate on how precise his moves were if all they could see was an overgrown mohawk flopping in the wind.

So Charlie promised he was going to shave it off prior to the test.

He came home the weekend prior to the test with his newest "do," which his roommate at the dorm had ever-so-kindly helped him out with.

I told him that was even worse than the mohawk...it looked like he had a bottle brush on his head. He went back to school on Monday saying he would get his friend to cut the rest off before coming home on Wednesday (the night of the test).

He came home Wednesday and still had the bottle brush on his head.

"What happened? Why do you still have that mess on top of your head?"

"Roommate didn't bring scissors back."

"C'mere boy..."

I'm no hairdresser, as my former husband would testify. (He once came to me in desperation with a pair of scissors in hand, asked me to get the hair off his collar and his ears because he had an inspection the next morning. By the time I finished, he passed inspection, but hid the scissors where I would never, ever find them again.)

But desperate times called for desperate measures--the test starts in an hour. I grabbed the scissors my mother uses to cut my hair, and I started hacking. Can't be too hard, right?

Twenty minutes later, I had the top reasonably level all over.

He absolutely refused to let me cut off the orange rat-tail in the back. He said the judges would get over it.

Sure enough, they did. He turned in a practically perfect performance and got his first-grade brown. Now he can actually start studying for black.

He also won the performance achievement trophy for having such a flawless test performance. I was told later that when the judges were voting between him and the other candidate of choice for the trophy, every single vote went to Charlie--even the other person's instructor.

Graduation

Guess what?  A post that isn't about the boys!

I FINALLY finished practicum and managed to CLEP the one remaining course I needed for my degree.  This was a special day for me, considering that almost a year ago I was in the ICU recovering from a heart attack and an appendectomy.  I didn't really expect this to hit me, since I wasn't emotional at my high-school graduation and I've interpreted several other graduations since, and I was fine through the whole graduation ceremony (even when the friend sitting with my parents blew an air horn when they had the summa cum laude graduates stand to be recognized), but when we processed back out and there were all of our faculty lining the pathway we had to walk back to the disrobing location, and they were applauding for us, I started crying.  Really, that's why my nose is so red in the photo and I look like I'd had a little too much wine too early in the day. 

These pix show the people who made it all possible.

Top: Oldest Son (Rick) and ChinaBoi (Charlie). They have both supported me and made it possible for me to go to classes in all the little ways that add up to so much--taking care of my dogs after work on nights when I've had to go straight from work to class, cooking me dinner when it looked like I would come home from a late-night class and go straight to bed without eating at all, and forgiving me when I didn't have enough energy to keep up with both work and school and still be supermom.

Bottom: My parents, who financed my education even though I'm a little long in the tooth and should be able to stand on my own two feet financially by now. Finances have been so tight since the adoption that I would NEVER be standing here in this stupid hat if they had not provided the funds (and the encouragement) to get this done.

I think it's finally time to rest and spend some quality time with the boys.

Prom Blackmail

When we went to get Charlie's tux for this year's prom, Men's Wearhouse was having BOGO sale.  After looking at the price of the tuxes, I started doing some mental arithmetic.  Charlie has 3 more proms to get through (including this one).  Renting a tux every year would come up to more than just buying one, and if we bought one, he would still have a tux left at the end of 3 years that he could sell if he wasn't ever going to use it again...AND he would have a nice business suit, too!  Didn't take much to sell me, huh?

So we bought a tux and a suit.  Next year, all he will have to buy is a different colored tie and pocket square, and he'll be set. 

Tux: $450
Shoes: $70
Prom ticket: $45
Flowers: $30
Picture of him wearing a tuxedo with a mohawk for future blackmail purposes: PRICELESS!!!!