But, alas, the end is near. We will spend the first half of the week indulging in a few more bike rides, one more beach day, and then begin packing our million point five items (we thought we would have so much space going home, as we brought so many items to give to Lucy, but it appears we might be heading back with MORE) into, on top of, and behind the van. We’ll head out on Friday night, make a stop in St. Louis so the girls can go in the Arch for the first time (we didn’t have time over the past weekend), and drive all night while they sleep. Then we will have just ten days to rest and recover, to rediscover our friends and our home, before reality hits. Reality being, school starts! This may seem overwhelming for most families, but for a teacher it’s double duty. Every year I feel like I’m beginning a new job all over again, and this year I kind of am. I am working with different teams and doubling up on my ESL class and teaching a computer class for the first time! It’s going to be a stressful but exciting new school year, especially since it is Riona’s first (and only) year of preschool and Mythili is entering kindergarten! Oh how the time flies… Seems like we were just pulling up, and now we will be heading out… but life is cyclical, so I’m sure we’ll be back before we know it, on two wheels or four. For now, here are my poems for the girls this July.

We are renting our house for all of June and part of July while we are gone. Karen put the ad up on Craigs List and it only took a few weeks for us to find the perfect couple who needed a temporary place to stay. It was a lot of work cleaning out the house and getting everything ready for them, but it will be well worth it since the extra money will help pay for our trip. It was also helpful to go through all the junk and get rid of what we didn’t need anymore.

We just left Karen’s parents house and before we were 20 minutes down the road we hit a hail storm slamming marble size hail onto our windshield. Of course it wasn’t that bad since we were able to pull over and sit for a few minutes while it passed. With any luck, that will be the worse of the weather we experience while driving.

Hopefully I will have time to write here some more as we go, though I don’t think there will be anything exciting to write about since the drive is pretty boring. At least I can say we will be able to since we now have a brand new iPad with an unlimited data connection! Woohoo! I will write about that later.

In addition to hiking, Isabella and I have been super busy with various Girl Scout activities. In addition to our usual biweekly meetings, we hosted our first bridging ceremony at Isabella’s school. This ceremony celebrates the girls moving from one level of Girl Scouts (Daisies) to the next (Brownies). Our troop learned a bridging song sung to the tune of “Frere Jacque” and they each received a certificate, a patch, and got to put on their new Brownie vests after they crossed our homemade bridge. It was a great ceremony, and we celebrated with homemade brownies, of course! We also went to a recruitment celebration where Isabella learned all about different types of animals such as service dogs, Great Danes, and even a horse. Last week, I took all three girls to another GS event–a mother/daughter event. They had different tables set up where the girls could make a potpourri gift for their moms while we made bracelets for them, they got to wear high heels, and then we took quizzes about each other. Now, we are in the midst of planning for our troop camp at the end of August, which, as with everything else with GS, requires a lot of paperwork and training. We’re also going to be doing early bird registration for our troop (another pile of paperwork), so needless to say, I have been very busy!

Besides the Girl Scout activities, Isabella has attended a couple of birthday parties, participated in a dance night at her school, and is getting ready for an end-of-the-year field trip to the zoo. Mythili has been busy practicing her songs and dances for her preschool graduation, took a field trip herself to the Plains Conservation Center, and just got picked by her teachers as Best Kinder Kid!

We celebrated my 32nd birthday with a prime rib dinner at my parents’ house followed by a hike. Bruce got me one of the best gifts ever–a homemade quilt, made by our good friend Heather. It’s a “sister’s choice” pattern in various shades of green to match our bedroom. The work that went into it is incredible, and I will always remember this as one of my most cherished gifts.

Meanwhile, I have been “training” for my half marathon, coming up this Sunday, via the bike. I’ve had a problem with tendonitis and have been unable to run, so I’ve been riding the bike like mad to keep up some form of cardio regime. I know it’s not the same, but at least I will be able to walk/jog the marathon on Sunday morning.

I have also started “teaching” another University of Phoenix course which will carry over into the summer a bit. And we’ve been super busy getting our house all prepped because we found renters–two doctors and their three-year-old-twins–to rent it for the summer while we’re in KY! Just goes to show–if you do good deeds, good things happen. Seems like that’s been happening a lot lately. I mean, I still have a job next year at my school despite the horrid economy, the massive budget cuts in our school district, and having so few students. Hmmm… it must be the weekly brownies and cakes I bake for everyone! (I know it’s not a direct correlation, but those good deeds bounce back, I swear!)

And yes, we are still spending the summer in KY. Baby Lucy is awaiting our arrival, and we’re almost all set to go. We leave the night of May 28, returning July 31. Exciting! If I don’t keep up with this blog, you can check out my other blog–my resolution for 2010 is to write every day: Step Write Up.

It started with Riona getting bit by Elizabeth’s dog and having to rush her to the emergency room in Aspen while we were visiting Glenwood Springs for the weekend with my family. It’s amazing how quickly a happy, relaxed weekend, filled with bike rides along the Colorado River and Glenwood Canyon, dips in the one-of-a-kind hot springs pool that is a block long, and hikes where the girls never complained and climbed rocks to their hearts’ delight, can turn sour and stressful. A shadow will always hang over that trip in my mind, darkening the happy memories, as Riona and I both couldn’t stop our sobbing when we wrapped her up in the blanket, held her down, and had four stitches tied into her lip. It’s not just the pain that she felt that hurt me so much, but the awkwardness of knowing my sister’s dog had done this to her, the worry that Riona would forever be afraid of dogs, and the nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that somehow I had brought this on. And as if all of that mess wasn’t painful enough, as I was standing there with tears pouring out of my eyes and snot running out of my nose, the nurse practitioner turned to me and said, “When is your baby due?” Ouch. Times ten.

When it rains, it pours. For more than three years now, we have been receiving strange bills from the hospital where Riona was born, and have been calling the hospital and the insurance companies to try to figure out what went askew. It began with incorrectly billing us, then led to them sending the claim to two incorrect insurance companies, to the latest event of, despite the multiple calls I’ve made and the many attempts to resolve the issue, the hospital sending the bill to a collection agency. Now, some people might not think it’s a big deal and just move on with their lives. But to people like Bruce and I, who are so careful with our credit that we rarely have any debt, always pay every bill on time, and are 45 points below having a perfect credit score, this is a real blow. Especially when, apparently, Riona was supposed to be covered by an insurance company that we didn’t even know about, and the last hospital billing specialist who I spoke to had to make rude remarks to me like, “Well I just had a baby, don’t you know how it works? You have to call your insurance company to let them know you’re having a baby.” Could she add more insult to my injury?

In the midst of this, my car broke down. I should have started this paragraph with, I love my car. I’ve had it for nine years, it’s twelve years old, and other than regular maintenance and gas, I have spent exactly $350 fixing it. It’s one of the cheapest cars money can by, it has a million dents, the bumper is held on by zip ties, the front headlight is  attached with packaging tape, and the internal lights don’t work, but damnit, that car gets me where I need to go. So when it first began having issues starting up, and then just died on the road one day, I was only a little miffed at it. And since I’m already trying to ride 400 miles on my bike this month anyway, I just rode to work every day instead of four days a week. But inevitably we had to take it to the shop, where it sat for two days mystifying the mechanics who could find nothing wrong with it. After a week of wind and constant rain, and one 12-hour day of sitting through school, then parent-teacher conferences, then riding home in the dark and rain, I decided to try driving it again. It promptly died on the street right in front of my school. Needless to say, after a stunted attempt that evening, we eventually made it to the shop, and they were able to figure it out this time.

But three things just aren’t enough. Now my poor bike needs a tune-up. Will probably cost more than $100. But I can’t just garage it for the winter, it’s not even October yet! So I have to suck it up.

It’s not the money that stresses me out. It’s what I wanted to use the money for. I taught a University of Phoenix class over the summer–my first–and am in the midst of teaching two more right in a row. I already ordered about twenty books from the library to plan what I hoped would be a Disney vacation for spring break… and, stupidly, already told the girls about it. And when everything happens in a row like this, I think about those scenes from that movie Up, where they have a giant jar of money saved up for their dream trip to South America, and then the tire goes flat, a tree crashes down… one thing after another. I know it’s not the end of the world, that things could be a million times worse… but it still hurts. It’s still a reminder of how hard it is to get ahead, no matter how careful we are.

So even though this blog is a celebration of our family life, I think challenges still fit in. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? And we will get through this, we will still have beautiful pictures to post, beautiful stories to tell, and in so, so many ways, we still have the perfect family.