Miser-Family update: Otherwise engaged . . .

So, despite my half-hearted efforts to do Everything, and also to do it all beautifully and with whole-hearted enthusiasm, I have instead been doing Almost Everything that I need to do.  The blog seems to be one of those things that has not made it into the action pile as often as I'd like.

In previous years, I deliberately let the blog hibernate during winter (meaning, school-year) months, but I always missed it when I did that. So this year, I'm going to try something different, to see whether that works:  the weekly family update.

I've started sending out an email to my family (sisters, uncle, far-flung step-daughters, dad, etc) with quick highlights of our week.  They're not quite as philosophical as my blog posts, and they never get into the behavioral sagas that provide much of the excitement in the MiserMom household, so they have quite a different flavor from what I've been writing here.    BUT . . . I figure it's easy enough to copy-and-paste, and then remove names.  And they'll keep me posting, and make it easier to jump back in if/when I do have something blog-worthy to say in a moment when I'm free from the grip of grading or committee reading or such.

So here, in all its glory (??), is the first of what might (or might not) be a weekly series of updates. 

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Family

We celebrated J-son's long-awaited birthday last Sunday by going out to a restaurant.  Total extravagance, I know! But it was worth it.  We were joined not only by my two nearby daughters, but also by a married couple who are long-time friends and godparents to half of our kids.  We ate a lot and had a wonderful evening.

J-son celebrated his birthday by buying some awesome (he tells me) shoes with his birthday money, and by registering to vote.  He's actually quite nervous about voting; as you probably know, Pennsylvania is a swing state, which means he has ardent Clinton supporters AND ardent Trump supporters as friends and mentors.  The shoes, on the other hand, he loves and cares for without any trepidation.

N-son had a big week, with a drum performance, a choral performance, AND a fashion runway appearance. I didn't get pictures of the runway performance, but he was apparently a huge hit.  I did get very blue photos of his drumming -- he rocked the place!

My husband and I observed the 20th anniversary of the day I said I'd marry him -- an anniversary that somehow I always manage to remember better than our actual wedding anniversary.  True to form with that actual day two decades ago, Thursday was a day full of lots of work and childcare obligations, and so we wished each other "happy anniversary" by email and in hasty greetings as we rushed past one another.  We're planning a more leisurely moment tomorrow night when we ditch the kids and head out for dinner (which will mean two restaurants in only 8 days, a shocking development).  

Those 20 years have seen a lot of excitement -- many job changes for my husband, tenure and promotion for me, bike crashes, a tour of Iraq, donations of body parts, an IronMan, a transformation into quasi-pathological frugality on the part of yours truly, and of course accumulating our collection (the complete set!) of a bunch of wonderful children.  I think, when we do go out to dinner tomorrow, that we both have a lot to be grateful for.  I'm glad I said yes.