This week....

...we will drop below 700 days left until Thak is out of the Army!

Oh, and also of interest, I am out of the IRR in 33 days. If you don't know, IRR is Inactive Ready Reserve, basically, the pool of recent veterans they can do call-backs of if they need us. I can still be called back for the next 33 days, and they can keep me as long as they want, but after that, I'm done! Uncle Sam can never touch me again! Now, the Army is notorious for calling people back to Active Duty a couple weeks before their IRR time expires, but I don't think that's going to happen to me since my MOS is very easy to get people for, and it's balanced personnel-wise right now. They don't need me back. I don't think I'm getting called. But yeah, no more mustering. No more moment of hesitation before opening the mailbox, nor fear at letters from DOD. No more uncertainty for me. 33 days, and I am free!!! 703 days, and Thak is, too!!! It's about time. We've done ours.

Homemade diaper covers

The aforementioned is my latest endeavor. See, the boy outgrew his covers again. It's always in length, never in width, so it's not like you can have the indication of "Oh no, I'm running out of space on the velcro strip to fasten it. Better order some in a size up." No, it's more like you put it on him one day, and realize that the dipe doesn't fit under it without a lot of tucking and maneuvering, and that he's got basically a hip-hugger dipe when you're done. That is what it's like to have a beanpole for a son.

The only pain in the ass thing about cloth diapering is that there are NO in person cloth diapering retailers in any city I've ever lived in, even in El Paso, a city of 2 million people. Nationwide, there are only maybe 20 cloth diapering stores (or regular baby stores that sell cloth diapering products) and most of them are in California. The nearest one to us is in Albuquerque, which is 5 hours away, so there is no going to the store, picking up 4 new Thirsties covers in the size up from what we've got currently, and coming home with them that day. Uh-uh. We have to order the things. (This irks me. More parents would cloth diaper their babies if the REAL, GOOD QUALITY, products were readily available and visible in stores.)

Anyhow, we decided to take a step back from our Thirsties covers, despite them being the best value of the well known brands, and the coolest colors, and buy three covers from a work-at-home mom right here in El Paso, whom my friend Robin told me about while she was shopping for cloth diapering stuff for a friend. I checked out the girl's website, and her stuff looks awesome, and it's cheaper than Thirsties, so we're giving it a shot. We can't wait to get our new covers! They should be made up and ready to go within the next week or so.

Then something occurred to me. If that girl can sew cloth diapers and covers, what the hell is keeping me from doing it, too? I don't want to make them to sell, but I do want to make them for Orren. We need a few more in the size he's into now, and he's going to be one of those rare babies who goes through 4 or 5 sizes before he's potty trained (again, it's because he's so tall. The rise lengths aren't enough for him in the sizes that fit him fine in width.) so we've got probably a dozen more covers to somehow obtain within the next few years. Why NOT make them myself? I'm going to find some PUL online (PUL is the waterproof fabric that they're made of.) and go from there. I've already got a tutorial for how to make the pattern and stuff, so I'm thinking we're going to be DIY cloth diaperers from here forward. It just makes practical sense.

Kids

Orren is 5 months old!


Erin is still silly. This is her trying to jump from the walkway to the giant rock in the middle of our courtyard garden.

The Urban Agriculture Files

For some reason, our seedlings are FABULOUS this year. Of course, the soil needs work, and on the recommendation of another lady who grows, by many people's account, the best garden ever, and does so right here in east El Paso, we've spent many days hauling bag after bag of cow manure and compost from Lowes to our house, to chop into the sand. We seem to be making some headway, and knowing it's possible helps. This summer, we should have cantaloupes, tomatoes, beans, and squash, in addition to a bunch of types of flowers, some of which are familiar to us, and some of which are not. Either way, hopefully it works. Right now, out of the 36 cells we planted in tomatoes, 23 are up, with more popping out of the soil every time we check on them. Our cantaloupes sprouted almost 100%, as did our sunflowers. Our basil is beginning to sprout quite a few, and although we're still waiting on the parsley, we expected that since that's a slower germinating seed.

Later in the summer, we're going to begin our pumpkin starts. We'll have pie pumpkins as well as jack-o-lantern ones. If they grow well, we'll probably sell the ones we don't need. I mean, how many pumpkins can one family really use? We'll have at least a small surplus if we have much success at all with growing them.

Yeah, all we need is a chicken coop and a dairy goat, and we'd have our own little hacienda right here in a city of 2 million! Since we can't have that, we're just happy to have our vegetables, flowers, and fruits, for our own use or with a surplus, growing our way right here where Uncle Sam dropped us. Urban agriculture. It rocks.

We need rain like, well, the desert needs rain...

This morning, I woke up to a sound I haven't heard in months, not since a while before we left Georgia. Rain was coming down!! It wasn't a lot. Anyone in anything other than a desert would call it a sprinkle or a drizzle, but for someone who hasn't seen rain in months, it was very nice. Thak would differ with me on that. He was doing a road march this morning. Rain and full combat gear do not mix, and I don't care who you are or how long it's been since you last saw rain. Still, it was nice aside from that.

It's cooler today than it has been. We're not even supposed to reach 90 today, far less the 100+ temperatures we have been seeing daily. The clouds just keep rolling our way over the mountains. I don't know how much more rain we're going to see, but the sun is not as intense today as it usually is, which is nice.

From what we're told by a few NCO's who grew up here and are now stationed here, June is the start of the rainy season. Being that we're approaching that now, I'd say this is only the precursor of what's to come. It works for me. Things get so dusty when we go for months on end without so much as a drop of rain.

In the five minutes between dinner and school...

I snapped these. Cute, huh?

Our exhausting new schedule

Thak began school this week. The schedule is no different than what we were told, but oh man, it's exhausting. The days are so long it feels like they never end. Well, that's for me. For him it goes by really fast because he's always running. Me, I'm always running, but I'm doing so with a 20 pound 4-month-old who always wants to be held, and a destructive almost-six-year-old constantly at my heels. I'll just be really glad when school is out for the summer so that we can kind of rework our schedule. Of course, we'll still be doing this around cheerleading practice and whatever else we get Erin into for the summer. Right now, it's just cheerleading, though.

Erin had a sort of rough adjustment to not seeing daddy but a few minutes a day, and that manifested itself the way it always does, in her attitude. Today, she seems to be getting a little better, though. Thak took the few minutes he had with her yesterday to tell her in no uncertain terms that mommy tells daddy everything she does, and if she isn't good, then daddy will be mad. She said, "I don't want you to be mad at me, daddy." and has been much better ever since. I even got her to school without one tear this morning. That's a rarity.

Yeah, it feels like this week has been going on for years. There's just so much to do, and with no breaks because Thak is only home long enough to eat, change uniforms, and go, so by the time the kids go to bed, I'm so tired I just flop on the couch and watch whatever's on, only not today because I screwed up the TV. I have had cable for like three years now, and I still don't get it... Maybe Thak will have time to fix the TV when he's home for lunch. It won't hurt to ask.

But yeah, I better get going. I may be exhausted, but the giant stack of diapers in the corner of the living room is not going to fold itself and magically jump onto the shelf they go on, and Thak's school shirts need ironing, and we're running low on bread, so I need to get some dough rising before too long. Funny thing is, as hard as this schedule is, I don't mind it. It's for something. We have to do this so we can survive in the private sector. It has a purpose, and so I don't mind it. I think I now know how wives who support the Iraq war feel about deployments. Haha!