still thinking

I have no new photos to post. We are still here, busy thinking of adventure. Our small handy dandy camera is broken and likely to cost almost as much to fix as to replace so that is at a stand still. Our good camera is big, and I'm less apt to have it on hand when a good photo op arises. We have The Spark's rescheduled b-day party this Saturday, so I will try to take some party pic's to post.

We have had some good brainstorming conversations at the dinner table with all seven of us contributing. Cupcake announced during a discussion about the various activities that make each family member happy, "HOCKEY!" And she said it clear as could be. Oh dear. I hope she wasn't serious. Zippy has been talking about it too, and it simply does not fit in the schedule with snowboarding. Not if we ever want to do anything as a family again in the winters.

Back to our quest to shake things up...maybe I'll post a poll. I probably should not do that, however, since I know I am a person who stops wanting to do something as soon as someone tells me to do it. No, I have never wondered where #1 gets that trait from. But maybe I'll throw some ideas out there, and y'all can vote and then not get your feelings hurt when we decide to do something totally different and in complete disregard for anyone else's suggestions.

So far the list would go something like this and this is without Cupcake's addition of hockey: Start a childrenswear design business, move to China, live at the beach in Maine and take more design classes at Maine College of Art, take a job-y job in an office working for someone else with very limited vacation time but a nice paycheck and health insurance and other educated adults to converse with, help build treehouses in Vermont, lobby for more international/multicultural education in our NH schools, homeschool the kids, write a book together, travel the world, go on a project with Firefighters Without Borders, live in Steamboat, Colorado for a year where they have two halfpipes (!) AND horses, spend the fall in Costa Rica learning to surf and again with that book idea, go to law school, sail up or down the east coast or hey, around the world since this is just a brainstorming pie in the sky list in the first place.

That freedom for something new coupled with the fact that trying to get lice out of a house this size with this much stuff and the kids (girls at least) missing school b/c of the lice has given us a new perspective on 1) having the kids out of school and just being with us and 2) realizing that we really do not miss anything that has been tied up in a giant black garbage bag for the past three weeks. Okay, two things have been missed, but I am too scared to open the bags when I think of putting all that crap away somewhere and that there might be dead lice all over the stuff anyway. I promise to at least rescue The Spark's unicorn softie and our king sized pillows which make reading in bed much more comfortable. The rest of the stuff is just stuff. We have not missed any of it. The unicorn and the pillows are the only two things that anyon ehas even asked about in the last three weeks. And vacuuming this house as much as one must when trying to rid a household of lice is a full time job. And we have to yell all the time because this house is too damn big for anyone to really hear anyone anyway. If there wasn't enough room to really gather speed when moving through a home, then there wouldn't be as much need to constantly remind the kids to slow down, stop running through the kitchen when I'm about to open the oven that has just baked a lasagna at 400 for almost an hour, and stop playing chase because when they play chase, Princess Eee always ends up crying. They get going fast in this house, and she is the least agile of them all not to mention the least tough physically, so they all know that she will be the first down with the most tears in any indoor game of chase.

Plus, we are both dreamers and we want our children to see more of the world, to know by experience that this is one round planet full of all sorts of people in all kinds of colors, with all sorts of beliefs and customs, and our way is not always the better way. There is so much to do.