I missed posting on my 3 year “Blogiversary”, which was earlier this month…I think on July 3rd.  Happy Blogiversary to me.

So have you ever been on that carnival ride called the Himalaya?  You know…the one that spins you around really fast and has sirens and strobe lights and blasts obnoxious 80′s music while a scary carnie DJ yells into a microphone imploring you to scream as loud as you can so you will go faster?

Yeah…I used to ride that kind of thing all the time too.  I loved it.

From April 6th to mid-June, I felt like I was back on one.  Non-stop action and thrills…one thing to the next.

Then, about mid-June, that crazy ride shot me right out of the seat and on to solid and rock-steady ground.

ahhhhhh….

quiet.

still.

it’s not moving.  no more non-stop insanity.

I’m home.

It’s taken me a few weeks to kinda get my bearings again (just a wee bit dizzy from the madness) and I’m settling in to our new life in our new home.  I’m eight weeks post hysterectomy, and with the exception of a few setbacks, I’m healing nicely and getting back to normal…I’ve even started to run a bit again.

So here are a few random and rather disjointed musings about life in the Teel home right now…

• Our new home rocks.  Especially the back yard.  It is completely shaded and the boys are enjoying their swing set…even in the middle of 95 degree plus weather.  We’ve still got lots of work to do, but there’s no rush to get to it all.  The novelty of being seven minutes away from church has yet to wear off and I’m still rather giddy when I think about it.  I have NO idea how we did the 45 minute commute for all those years.
• Noah finished summer school last week and has five weeks off before school starts again.  His teacher is working on a new reading program with him.  That program will continue next year, when Noah gets a new teacher in the classroom.  Noah’s teacher for the past four years is moving to a front office position, but will still work with Noah every day in a reading group.  I’m a bit in mourning, but I completely trust that the school has hired well…Noah’s current teacher did all of the interviewing with the principal (22 candidates!) and chose the teacher to be hired.  Noah will still have his same paraprofessionals, who we love, love, love.  All of his VBA/ABA, Speech and OT will remain the same.  He will be in good hands.
• Isaac will start kindergarten at a private school this fall.  He will be in class with one of his good friends from church and he is getting really excited.  My baby is growing up.
• Doug has a special gift for ruining perfectly good songs for me.  Like how he turned Journey’s “Open Arms” into “Broken Arms”.  (Although it does work both ways and he can make horrible songs even worse, which actually makes me like them because now I have a way to mock them.)  So on our ride home from Atlanta post-hysterectomy, I was snockered on too many Advil and bloated up like I was 6 months pregnant, riding in the front seat of my parents’ van with a pillow on my belly.  Any sudden jarring or motion HURT and I was trying to just stay still and quiet.  Doug went on a tear with a few radio tunes and I cannot even tell you how hard I was laughing and how hard it was to laugh.  I can’t remember any of his revised lyrics, so I can’t let you in on it all, but it was just WRONG.  I was lucid the other day, however, when he transformed that perfectly wretched “God Blessed the Broken Road” song’s closing line to “God poked my open sore and made me think of you.”
• see?
• So far, the only casualty of our move is our camera’s battery charger.  This annoys me.  I know that I saw it at some point in this house, but I have no idea where it is now.  Our camera battery has been dead for three weeks now, and if I don’t find the charger thingy soon, I will be shopping for a new camera.
• Speaking of cameras, I’ve got some wicked adorable pictures of Isaac to share.  My Dad took him to Strasburg, PA last week for a three day train holiday.  Isaac had the time of his life riding trains and touring train museums and staying at a caboose motel.  He has not stopped talking about it since he got back.  When I get the files from my Dad, I’ll post some of the pictures.

Well…that’s about all I can think of for now.

I hope that you all are having a lazy and relaxing summer…

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I have officially LOST MY MIND.

It’s happened to me many times before, so I am well aware of the symptoms.

anywho…

1:00 P.M. Thursday came and went and we heard not one whiff of a response from the bank re: our offer for the house in Park Place.  True to our word, we walked away and at 1:01, sent in an offer for the Mount Dora house.

In the middle of all this, our house was being emptied with the help of our wonderful friends Ofelia and Steve and Sonya.  (If you ever want to see a freak show, watch Steve pack a Pod.  He’s got like 65% of our house packed into about 25% of the container.  My jaw drops in wonder every time I look at it.)  I sold our big sofa and breakfast table (thank you, Craigslist) and moved our photographs and important papers over to my parents’ house.  It was a day full of crazy.

Thursday night, we drove up to Mount Dora to take another look at the house.  When I walked in the door, I was suddenly hit with the sickening waves of buyer’s remorse.  (Not that we had purchased anything yet…all we’ve got is an offer on the table.)  This was a shock to me.  We saw the house two times previously, and both times, I absolutely loved it.  One of the times that we saw it was during a hard rain, and as I looked out of the family room into the backyard, I muttered to myself, “It feels like home.”

So imagine my confusion as I walked around the house and suddenly began to see all of the things that we might/could/would have to spend money on.  Air conditioning.  Electrical?  Plumbing?  ewwww…master bath.  Wave after wave of OH MY WORD hit.

yeesh.

I told you that I am crazy.

After confessing to Doug my feelings, he was calm and supportive.  We decided to sleep on it (after all, it had been an exhausting and overwhelming day) and see how we felt in the morning.

Yesterday morning came, and I continued to feel the same way.  We decided to leave the offer on the Mount Dora house on the table but continue to look at other houses.

Last night, we looked at three more.  The first was a new home in a defunct subdivision (with the curiously hilarious street name “Myopia Hunt Club”…Doug had fun with that one as we looked around the subdivision with street after street full of empty lots…a developer with a sense of humor, no?).  The owners are underwater on the house and are looking to unload.  It’s a great house, but has the same ridiculously high volume ceilings that we have in our current house…ceilings that we know jack up power bills and make it hard to change out light bulbs.  The next house was an immediate no.  The floor plan was one of the most whack that I’ve ever seen.  The third and final possibility was truly a lovely home.  It’s over in Tavares, right off of Lake Eustis.  The owners have done a lot of work and upgrades, but I just couldn’t get with the floorplan.  It had a weird flow to it.  I kept walking around the house, willing myself to bond, but it just didn’t happen.  So no on that one.

We stopped for dinner to relax and talk things over.  While there (sorry guys…there’s really no ladylike way to put this TMI revelation), I discovered that I had started what is likely going to be my last period EVER (Hysterectomy coming on May 19th…can I get a woo-hoo?!).  Suddenly, Doug and I had the knowledge that in the middle of all of this, I’ve been in full on PMS mode.

I don’t like anything when I have PMS.  This morning, Doug said, laughing…”You don’t even like ME when you have PMS”.  (I still love you though, honey.)

This morning, true to my crazy form, I woke up and realized that I do indeed again love the Mount Dora house.

Somebody needs to lock me up and throw away the key.

So, now we wait.  It will likely be Tuesday or Wednesday before we get any kind of response from the bank.

In the meantime, we found out that the closing on this house has been delayed for a few days.  It will likely be on Wednesday or Thursday.  While my PMS addled brain kept going to a doomsday scenario of this deal falling through, the small shred of common sense that remained in my head told me that a few extra days for us to finish our packing is a good thing.

Well…that’s it for now.

I hope that ya’ll are having a relaxing and wonderful weekend…

So this is what Doug wanted for his birthday…

Yep.  That would be MarioKart.

This is one of the many reasons that I married this man.

46 years old and still loves to play.

Happy Birthday to my forever young man.

I love you…

oh. my.

Have ya’ll ever seen the movie “Vacation”?

Yo…I won’t judge you if you have.

So our family vacation this year pretty much rivaled the Griswalds’ trip to Wally World…minus having to tie our dead Aunt Edna on the roof of the car.

seriously.

Here’s a little rundown of the good…the bad…and the ugly…

The Good:

• We are still laughing and having fun together.
• By being gone, we managed to escape the 96 degree weather that was making life miserable here in Central Florida last week.
• We were enormously blessed by a couple in our church, who gave us use of their vacation rental for two nights when we could not get into the one that we had already paid in full for.  (More on that under the “bad”…).  Their place was a little slice of heaven on earth, and we loved, loved, loved the time that we spent there.
• We enjoyed (sorry ya’ll Central Florida peeps) the beautiful fall foliage, blue skies and daytime temps in the low 70s.
• It could have been worse.

The Bad:

• We arrived at the rental agency in Waynesville at 5:30 Monday evening.  As promised, our keys were in an envelope in their mailbox out front.  We followed the enclosed map to our vacation rental and tried to get in.  After 15 minutes of trying to make any of the three keys work in one of the doorknobs, we concluded that we were locked out.  Repeated attempts to use the emergency pager number that the agency provided were unsuccessful.  No return calls came after about 20 attempts.  We loaded the kids (Isaac now crying because he wanted to go inside “our vacation cabin with the upstairs”) in the car and headed for our favorite Mexican restaurant in the area…figuring that surely we would hear back from the rental agency while we were at dinner.  After one hour of waiting for a return call, we concluded that we were sunk, and it was time to look for another place to stay for the night.  This was a bit irritating to me, as we had already paid in full for our rental (and it was supposedly non-refundable) and I knew that finding another place to stay would not be easy…it was peak tourist season up there.  (The end of the much too long story is that we ended up at Jan and Keith’s for two nights…they just happened to have vacancy in their vacation home before their next renters came in on Wednesday.  They rocked our world and blessed our socks off…giving us a glorious place to stay.   This gave us the time to settle up with the original agency…who refunded our money in full with great apology…and allowed us the time to find a different place to rent for our final three nights.  Otherwise, we would have been shacking up at the local Motel 6.)
• On Wednesday afternoon, we decided to visit The Cove…Billy Graham’s Conference Center…for a tour.  When we arrived there, Isaac told us that he was cold.  He looked a little puny, but I didn’t think much of it.  About 15 minutes into our tour, Isaac said to me…”I think I’m going to frow up.”  I know from past experience that when Isaac utters the words, “I think I’m going to frow up”…I’ve got about 30 seconds to prepare for impact.  I picked him up and ran full speed away from Reverend Graham’s serene little Chapel in the Woods…holding him away from me Superman style as he barfed into the forest.  When I got him back to the car, he had a temp of 102.  Are we having fun yet?
• Isaac was the first of three of us to get all kinds of wicked sick on the trip.  Noah woke up at 4 am Friday with a cough and a fever and I was about one hour behind him.  Noah even popped a 104 temp yesterday morning.  Impressive.  I still feel horrible and am about to yak up a lung with all the coughing.  And no…it’s not swine flu, apparently.  Kris ran a rapid flu test on Noah last night and it came back negative.  I don’t know what we’ve got, but all I know is that I don’t want no more of it.
• On Wednesday night, we moved to our second location…a lovely little vacation cabin in Maggie Valley.  Thinking that a fire in the fireplace would be both romantic and relaxing, we ran to the local grocery store to pick up one of those fire-log thingies.  The fire was all that we hoped it would be…for about 5 minutes.  Suddenly, smoke started to fill the cabin and the fire alarms started going off like crazy (seriously…do you really need 5 fire alarms in a little 1200 square foot cabin?).  The boys did not like this one bit.  Doug and I ran around the cabin, opening windows and turning on ceiling fans.  When that didn’t work to clear the smoke, I decided that I needed to put a stop to that fire and I mean right now.  While my first inclination was to use the fireplace tongs to pull the flaming log out of the fire and throw it into the pond in front of our cabin, I decided that a fire extinguisher would be best.  It took me a while to find it (!) and figure out how to make it work.  After blasting the romantic little fire-log, even more smoke came billowing through the cabin.  Nice.  After a while, the smoke finally cleared and the fire alarms shut the heck up.  Well…that was fun while it lasted.
• On Thursday afternoon, we decided to pay a visit to the Biltmore Estate.  I know…I know.  Our two boys at the Biltmore estate?  Well…file this one under “almost bad”.  While Noah thoroughly enjoyed our visit, even saying “good time in house”, Isaac was less than impressed.  About 10 minutes into our self-guided tour through the big honkin’ mansion, Isaac decided that the portion of the rooms behind the ropes looked much more exciting than our roped out tourist route.  I caught him by the blue jeans, just as he dived under the “keep you fanny behind this rope” rope and headed straight for the chess set that used to belong to Napoleon Bonaparte.  oh. my.  After realizing that our time in the house was extremely limited, we managed to blow through the entire tour in about one hour.  Most people spend at least two in there.

And the Ugly:

• On said visit to Biltmore estate, Isaac had some wicked and horrible gas.  I mean…really.  Surrounded by lots of folks who were dressed up rather nicely and clearly had more money than we will ever see in our lifetime, Isaac managed to fumigate the historic estate with a whole new kind of stink.  We kept moving him toward open windows, but there really wasn’t much that we could do about it.  Other than laugh.  We’re so seventh grade.
• On Thursday morning…before we headed out for Biltmore, Doug backed straight into a rock.  The back bumper on my car was trashed…still attached…but trashed.  Oh well.  We headed for Biltmore anyway.
• As we exited the interstate last night to stop for dinner at Cracker Barrel, we heard a horrible noise coming from the back of the car.  When we parked, we got out to see that the lower half of my back bumper was off and dragging on the ground…just hanging by a thread.  I sat at the table in the restaurant and laughed my fanny off as I looked out the window and watched Doug crawling under my car with a pair of pliers.  He removed the bumper piece and threw it in the back of my car.  Was this the best vacation ever, or what?

Doug put the perfect summary of our vacation together as we drove away from Cracker Barrel.  (This just after a bottle of Sprite exploded in the car.)  Reminding me of the rainbow that we saw as we drove into the Cracker Barrel parking lot, he said…

“You remember that rainbow?”

yeah. I said.

He continued…

“It’s God’s promise to us to never again smite the Teels by vacation.”

oh. my.

I think I’m done with vacation for a little while ya’ll.

It sure is good to be home.

Today is our 17th wedding anniversary.

We had a “date day” yesterday.  My parents kept the boys for the afternoon and evening.  We went to see “Up”…had a great dinner at carnivore heaven (Texas de Brazil) and capped the night with a trip to Ikea.  It was wonderful.

So “Up” had me bawling in the first 10 minutes.  I won’t give it away if you haven’t seen it yet…but it’s just. beautiful.  (Some scary scenes for the young’ins though…you might want to screen it first before you take them.  I won’t be showing this one to my boys just yet.)

anywho…

I wrote this post on our anniversary last year, and I can’t think of anything that I would rather say today.  It holds true today just as much…perhaps even more…then it did when I wrote it one year ago.

Here’s the part that I would like to repeat…

…I was musing about our wedding day…

.

.

.

I don’t remember thinking too much about the future at that point. I suppose if you had asked me that morning, I would have told you that we would start having children in a few years…I would stay home with them and home school…and we would be active in our church. I thought that Doug would work at Disney as a musician forever. We even joked about when he would “age out” of a theme park gig and become one of the old guys playing in the jazz combo at the Grand Floridian. We pictured how I would take the kids to the lobby to listen to their Daddy play saxophone.

If you had told me that day…

That I would become a pastor’s wife…

That we would struggle for years with infertility…not having our first child until after our 8th wedding anniversary…

That we would have a child who has severe autism…

Well…

I would have laughed hysterically at the first revelation and asked you if you were high.

The second two revelations would have frightened me to death. If those things had been revealed to me on our wedding day, I would have probably decided that our married lives would be characterized by sadness and heartache…and likely not very happy.

Thanks be to God…I would have made an incredibly erroneous assumption.

Yes…we have been through some intense periods of heartache and trial. But God has helped us…and our marriage is stronger, happier and more fun than it has ever been.

God’s Word is Sure and True. The counsel that we have received from it has rescued us and given us hope time and time again.

There were no guarantees of “happy” times when we made our vows 16 (now 17!) years ago. There are no guarantees still…we’re well aware that trials of life are normal…and that we may well face some intense times of testing in the future.

I cannot fathom walking the road ahead of me with anyone else.

Would I do it all again…knowing what I know now…trials and heartache included?

a thousand times yes.

And to Doug…

I love you. love you. love you. Thank you for being the greatest husband on the planet and for putting up with this lunatic chick who is just. freakin. crazy. And for sticking when so many others would have walked. Have I told you today that I love you?