Why I'm happy here

It's the last day of July. I'm so happy that July is ending and August is beginning. I feel such a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, I'm starting to feel nervous about school starting. What should we be doing to prepare? How am I ever going to get the twins to go to bed before 9:30? Is there some wonderful special summer thing that we forgot to do?

It'll all work out, I keep telling myself. It's been a hard, but enjoyable, summer, you've almost survived it, and you'll survive the fall too. And the winter. And next spring. And on and on.

Every time I go out of town (even just to Louisville, the next town south of us, as I did twice today) and then drive back into town, I look at Boulder spread out before me and I think: I'm back! I really came back!... and then I think, am I really happy about that? I am, I am, of course I am, but it's hard to remember that sometimes, in the chaos of how we live our lives right now.

(An aside, to try to give a sense of our chaos: this past week, for Weight Watchers, I "tracked" very carefully, meaning I filled out my food diary at every meal and calculated all the "points plus values" and wrote them down and subtracted them from my daily total and my weekly total, and it was a total pain in the ass because I couldn't find my little WW calculator, so every time I needed to figure something, I had to run to our office and fire up my computer and bring up the WW site. I kept thinking the calculator would turn up, because hadn't I used it just a week or two ago? but it didn't, so I figured I'd get a new one at tonight's meeting, because I had a coupon for a free one. So this afternoon I opened the pouch where I thought the coupon would be, and there was not only the coupon, but the calculator, plus a bunch of other WW stuff that I thought I'd just "misplaced" a week or two ago. I'd PACKED it in that pouch, back in late April, in RIDGECREST, and not opened it until today. How is it possible that for two months I've been thinking I just "misplaced" all that stuff and that it was probably just under something on my desk??? This, my friends, is chaos. My life is so chaotic that I have no idea what is going on.)

So sometimes it's hard to remember that I'm happy.

But then something will remind me of why I'm happy we came back. Take, for example, swim lessons. In the early part of the summer, in the twins' first swim class, I made friends with the mom of the other two kids in their class. We'd sit and talk about our kids and our lives while we watched the lesson. Then that class ended and the new one began, and I made friends with the moms of the other two kids in THIS class. OK, I'm using the term "friend" loosely -- I haven't exchanged phone numbers with any of these women. But I know all their names, and something about their lives, and if I see them around town after this, I'll happily go up to them and chat.

This NEVER happened in Ridgecrest. NEVER. The twins went to the same daycare/preschool for four years, and I never once had a conversation with the mom or dad of any kid in any of their classes -- EXCEPT at ONE birthday party, with ONE set of parents, a few months before we moved. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of conversations I had with other parents at parks. This makes me angry to think about, actually. I never figured out what the problem was -- did I look alien to them? Did they only speak to people from their own church? Is it just part of Ridgecrest culture to be cold and distant?

Here in Boulder I almost always get into conversation with other moms (and dads) at parks. Maybe nothing deep, and it doesn't always happen, but it happens. A lot.

And the kids get to play with other kids. Baby A will play with anyone, but he particularly likes to run around with groups of other boys, even if they're a few years older (or younger).

 Baby B is happier talking to little girls. To each his own.

I did eventually make some friendly acquaintances in Ridgecrest, but only by joining clubs and getting very involved with them. Nothing happened easily. Here in Boulder, in addition to the people I already know, I feel as though there are so many people I could be friends with. I'll still have to do the work -- and I don't have much energy for any sort of work right now -- but they're here, these potential friends of mine. They're all around, and they're friendly. It's an amazing feeling.

And also there are magpies.