Hallelujah! It's (not so terribly expensive) gasoline!

So today I spent 1.98/gallon on gas, and you should have seen the look on people's faces when I did a happy dance and gave a whoop right there at the gas station as I filled my nasty, honking Suburban up (cause you gotta have somewhere to store 124 kids, right?) for FIFTY FOUR DOLLARS. Shall I say it again? FIFTY FOUR! At the height of the recent gas "crisis", for lack of a better term, I had hit 100/fill up.

There are tears in my eyes right now.

In unrelated news, the older kids' Halloween outfits turned out great-- pictures coming soon (when I figure it out :)). They are Olympians this year, and are wearing suits that I absolutely love because they were a) cheap, b) reuseable, and c) required no makeup. Just some matching sweatsuits, some laurel wreaths made out of a cheap silk greenery stem, and some even cheaper gold medals picked up from US Toy for less than .50 each. Success!!! The funniest part of it is that Annemarie chose to wear her leotard under her sweatsuit so as to portray the image of a swimmer (for perhaps obvious reasons, she looks like a gymnast, but I've not mentioned this -- who wants to burst that bubble?). When people ask Cole what sort of Olympian he is, his response has been to simply hop on one foot, his newfound skill.

So bring on the trainers, people! oh yeah, and let's rally for singular-foot hopping and gymnastic swimming to make it to the Olympic lineup soon. Cole and Annemarie are on their way!

Perhaps in my first blogpost I should explain the name of this blog. Since I had my first child five years ago, in the middle of a Ph.D., and just about as far from my family as I could get while still remaining on the continent, it seems that most everything that has transpired has been at least 50% out of my control. And that may be optimistic.

It's not that I'm complaining, for after all, everything has turned out amazingly well -- really. We've had two more kids, I'm working on my dissertation, and we live in a place that we like very much and we get to see our family often, as well. The problem -- or more accurately, the confusion -- is that despite having been in this very chaotic, yet joyful situation for five years now, I'm still not accustomed to the randomness that pervades each day, the utter spontaneity of my children, the sense that no matter what project I undertake, it can be undone in a matter of minutes by otherwise well-intentioned juveniles. Part of this confusion, no doubt, stems from the fact that I am a creature of habit whose control-freakishness borders on the pathological at times.

But at the end of the day, if the choice were mine, I think I'd still choose the random happenstance, despite the cognitive inconvenienice. Why? Because this happenstance is the result of living with people who have an endless capacity to find almost everything interesting, who find the ordinary to be rather extraordinary, and who don't spend much time in mindless worry. Happily, things are already this way, so there's no choice on my part involved. I just hope to be able to appreciate the happenstance as long as I have it.