Catching Up Again

Things have been crazy lately and I have just not taken the time to blog.

James has graduated! Woohoo! He looked so handsome in his cap and gown. We got lots of pictures which I plan to upload and just have been too sidetracked to do. I bawled like a baby, twice during his graduation... Once when the class was asked to stand and once when they called his name. I felt so rediculous for crying like that. Although, my stress level was off the charts, any emotion was sure to be over felt at that point.

We had many many people here after his graduation. Unfortunately there wasn't much time to visit with adults... we had planned to be outside and invited many people w/ many many children, then it rained. The adults were in the kitchen chatting and James and I were left to protect our house from the children. Lots of things were broken while the adults were chatting. Poor James, the party was supposed to be for him and he was alone in the living room for most of the time.

Things w/ Christian the last few weeks have been tedious. One time he will come over and be an absolute terror and the next time he is an Angel. Two times now Rachel has called saying he missed his dad and lets Christian ask to come over, then she won't let him come.

Jessica is getting ready to turn 5. We are having her party this Sunday at Bumpass Park. She is making her own party hats and she is going to help me make a cake. We are planning to do a few outside party games like... bobbing for apples. I think it will be messy... and fun. She is also getting ready for Kindergarten. She finally has writing her name down. Now we are working on writing other letters and numbers. We are doing alphabet flash cards and number flashcards and I made some flash cards for sight words too. She seemed a little bored with the sight words until I put a few of them together to make a sentence, now she is very excited about learning to read.

Jordan is talking more and more. The other day, James and I were kissing in our own room, minding our own business and Jordan came in and said "Guys, Guys! GUYS!" We stopped and looked at her and she said "No Kissing!" HaHa! She is too much. We had a bad day in the yard yesterday. She decided that she could leave the backyard without an adult. Twice! There was much time-outage to follow. Ha! (I do know that time-outage isn't a word.)

We had court again on Wednesday. It went pretty good. It could have been better but it could have been worse. We went from having him 9am to 8pm on Sunday only, to having him the same hours on Sunday but now we drop him at her house, and picking him up from school on Wednesday and keeping him 'til 9pm when Rachel is supposed to pick him up from our house and Saturdays at 4:30pm until 8pm. We go back on 6/29 to discuss overnights.

We went to pick Christian up like we are supposed to on Wednesdays and Rachel had already checked him out of class roughly 15 or 20 mins early. She didn't pick him up until 9:37pm. I felt bad for Christian, he was so tired and almost falling asleep on the couch waiting for her. It was a great start to the new arrangement for her... not leaving him where he was for James to pick him up and then being over a half hour late to pick him up.

We are basicallly back to where we started on visitation before she filed for full custody, as soon as we get overnights thrown in there, we will be exactly where we were. And we haven't even seen the judge yet. Our lawyer says our next goal is to get it bumped up one more day, that will give us the majority of time and that will set the status quo for when we do see the judge. All of this and we still do not even have a court date set for the actual custody trial. This seems like it will drag on forever, but at least things seem to be going in our direction for a change.

A few points of interest from that day were My grandad had a heart attack in the early morning, our lawyer was late, Buddy's cell phone went off in the court room (twice), the GAL said she had recommended that Rachel seek anger management classes, the GAL did say she doesn't think Christian should spend so much time w/ Buddy, and we got an idea of how she is expecting the counseling to occur. She wants Rachel and James to go to counseling for a couple of weeks, then Rachel and I to go to counseling for a couple of weeks, then Rachel, James and I to go to counseling together. This should be entertaining.

Christian did very well on Wednesday. He was mostly well behaved, he did slam a door on Jessica but that is small compared to past behavior. We did some flash cards for sight words and he knew several of them. I was proud. After we'd been home about 10 minutes I got a hug that I didn't even ask for. He and James were playing football in the front yard for a bit while waiting on Rachel to pick him up, I got to help him throw once before I came in to leave the guys to their guy thing. He did a great job and he was having so much fun.