March 21st

The previous week had gone by somewhat uneventfully.  I rose early.  I went to work.  I saw my children in the afternoons. I went to my place to sleep.

I started on a new painting using bright orange and blues.  A tree was taking form.  I was pleased with the progress.

On the 20th, I collected my kids and took them to my house to sleep over for the first time.  Since my new home was an upstairs unit, I was somewhat paranoid about how heavily we stepped.

A good friend of mine had lived in a situation where her downstairs neighbors would run upstairs and scream obscenities for any type of sound from their footsteps.  My oversensitivity made me caution my son and daughter to take it easy on the floor, to not stomp or jump off the beds.  My floors were wood and I wondered how loudly it was echoing down below.  I really did try to relax and not worry about it.  It wasn't like we were doing high impact aerobics, we were just walking around. 

We went to the grocery store for provisions and then tried to decide what to do at my house.

I didn't have computers for them to play on.  I did have an Xbox 360 that would play DVDs and games.  My son had brought some games and proceeded to get himself involved in defeating enemies while I got some frozen pizza into the oven.  My daughter drew pictures.

We all ate the table and then tried to watch a movie together.  My son was having a difficult time with the split.  At least it seemed to me that he was doing some acting out.  It appeared that he and his sister were fighting a lot more than they usually did.

As I was an only child, I had no idea how much fighting was normal, let alone in this situation.  He called her names.  She bossed him around and found fault with everything he did.

We DID watch a movie together, but I was tense trying to keep them from each other and worrying about how loud we were being.  While we were viewing, I helped my son make various things out of aluminum foil.  He really wanted a foil submarine, but neither his sister or I could figure out how to make it sink.  Finally, about 10 o'clock, I said it was time to go to bed. 

Surprisingly, we all slept fine.  My son said he put a dream in his head and went right to sleep.  About an hour after we got up, he started to say he wanted to go home.  It was only 9 o'clock and I was quite certain their dad wasn't up yet. 

I made the suggestion that we all go to a movie at 11 and then he could go home.

And that's what we did.  There was a part of me that wanted to tell him that it was the weekend he was supposed to stay with me.  But, he needed to know that he could go to either house whenever he wanted to.  Or, I was overthinking it and he was bored and wanted to play World of Warcraft.  At any rate, my son went back to the house he lived in with his dad and my daughter stayed on with me for another night.

We went shopping for small things I needed.  We had some dinner, watched a couple of movies and played a game of Life.  We didn't have the instructions so we made it up as we went along.  I found that to be particularly appropriate.