Weekend Recap

What a crazy weekend!  The craziness started on Thursday night/Friday morning thanks to Charlie.  Charlie dog sleeps at the foot of our bed.  In retrospect, this was a bad move on our (my) part because he’s gotten bigger and takes up a lot of space.  But now that he’s gotten used to it, I feel bad making him move.  Anyway, around midnight, he hopped off the bed (which he never does) and started pacing, then scratching at the door.  We knew that meant he needed to go out.  A took him out and we tried to fall back asleep.  Around 1:30am, same thing.  4am, same thing.  It was clear that he was having tummy troubles.  I got up for the day at 5am and was completely exhausted.  I was also worried about Charlie and didn’t want my mom to have to take him out every hour (she was watching S that day).  Luckily, I was able to work from home.  We did make it a 4 hour stretch, but it was pretty clear that Charlie ate something that didn’t agree with him and he needed to go out all throughout the day.  Not at all surprising since he still chews up everything.

Fast forward to 5:45pm.  We had to take the boys to their final tennis lesson.  SO glad this class is over because none of us like it.  I was nervous to leave Charlie, but he had been able to make it 2 hours between trips outside and we weren’t supposed to be gone that long.

In the middle of tennis, A received an email forwarded from a former student.  The original message was from A’s current student.  I won’t get into the details, but it was clear his student was very upset and may need help.  I didn’t realize at the time that she hadn’t been in school for the past two days.  I’ll be honest and say that I initially chalked it up to typical teenage emotions and drama.  But A was worried and we started researching suicide prevention sources and A decided to call the police non-emergency line.  I’m so incredibly proud of A for taking action and this was a good reminder that even if the situation ultimately amounted to nothing, it’s so much better to err on the side of caution.  This meant we had to wait for the police officer to arrive so he and A could discuss the situation.  We waited a longish time - about 30 minutes?  The boys and I had walked the facility, visited the vending machine, perused brochures, and were running out of ideas when the police office finally arrived.  We came to find out that the officer had already been reviewing the girl’s file and would check on her.  If one of my boys was ever in this situation and feeling overwhelmed, I hope they’d talk to me.  But if they didn’t, I would hope someone was looking out for them like A did for this girl.

After all this, we arrived home about 3 hours later, and thankfully, Charlie was ok!  I was so darn tired and couldn’t imagine being up through the night again, but Charlie made it without any problems.  Phew!

Saturday was uneventful.  We decorated for Christmas (everything except the tree) and worked on cleaning up the house, which took forever.  W and I took Charlie for a long walk and that’s all I remember.

Sunday, after church, we headed to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  Every November, the museum offers a Corporate Family Day and employees of certain companies can get in free of charge.  The boys love going.  This year, I was really excited to see the Christmas Trees Around the World exhibit.  In all of the previous years, we’ve attended prior to the exhibit opening and the trees haven’t been decorated yet.  They were beautiful and viewing them was definitely a highlight for me!  The boys had a blast and we stayed until the museum closed.  It was such a fun day!