What is it about life that whenever you think you've got everything working ok that it has to find a way to make it more complicated? And right when you think it's completely sucker punched you, something absolutely wonderful can follow up right behind?

So Renee has been having a few problems at daycare lately. She's gotten herself in a clingy phase, and really just wants to be around Julie and me constantly. Consequently, she's been crying at daycare a lot. But up until yesterday, Lynn, the person who runs it, has been making it sound like while she has been crying a lot, babies will be babies, and that's ok. Yup, right up until we go to pick Renee up yesterday and Lynn hands us a note giving us written warning that Renee has been kicked out of daycare for crying, and that two weeks from today will be her last day. She does slightly modify that in saying that if by some chance next week is miraculously better she'll take it back and let her stay, but what are the chances of that happening? At this point given how she either a) completely lied to my face for a few weeks about what was going on with Renee, or b) is so unbalanced that she pulled a complete 180 without any warning, I don't know that I want to keep Renee there anyways, and may not send her back even if Lynn suddenly says that she'll take her. This means that by now Julie has likely given the Nature Center her 2 weeks notice, and she will become a stay at home mom. Not that this will affect us financially too much, since if you subtracted daycare costs from her paycheck, she maybe had $30-50 left per week.

This obviously completely killed last night for us, and we spent a good chunk of it feeling blindsided and pretty bummed, while trying to figure out what we had to do. Unfortunately, towards the top of the list of things that had to be done was mow the lawn. 8-) Not that I normally care about doing it, but I just didn't really want to deal with it at that point. But that's not much of an option, so after a while of us repeating "this sucks" over and over again, off I went to do something productive and mow. About halfway through I'm interrupted by Julie waving for me to come inside, and see that Renee is eating rice cereal from a spoon like a champ. We had been trying to get her started on solid foods for a few days, but she just looked confused by the strange feeling stuff in her mouth. But last night, she was taking it so well that I just had to smile. Which made the rest of the mowing a bit better for me.

When I finished mowing, our neighbors JB and Rachel were out by their grill, and yelled over to me. They said that they were trying to clear out space in a chest freezer, and so they had been grilling up a turkey for the last few hours, had just finished it, and it was way more than they could eat, so would we like to come over for dinner? Now you have to understand that while we've lived in our house for several years, we hadn't really gotten to know any of our neighbors very well. In the last few months, we had been talking with JB and Rachel on a fairly regular basis, but usually not much more than "how you doing" or "I like what you did with your garden", so this was completely out of the blue...and also had about the best timing that I could have ever asked for. I guess I had a funny look on my face, because JB asked "Do I need to call 911? You look like you're going to have a heart attack or something" Which of course made me laugh. I ran back to the house and when I told Julie that we were having dinner next door she practically jumped through the roof it was such a great surprise. And it was absolutely delicious...JB is a really good cook! We told them some of what was going on, but I don't know if they realize just how needed a random act of kindness like that was at that exact time, and how much we appreciated it.

So the next two weeks should be interesting. We get to take Renee to a daycare that doesn't want her so Julie can finish things up at her job and get ready to be a full time mom. I will be interested to look in on the nature center in a few months and see how it copes. Despite being showed no appreciation and miniscule pay, Julie did so much for them and really held a lot of stuff together for them. They barely survived her maternity leave, and she spent the next month after she got back fixing all the things that they f'd up. I bet whoever gets stuck with Julie's job will be screaming for more pay and more hours (because they only paid her for 20 hours a week, even though it took 3 people that much time or more EACH when Julie was gone to do her job) within a month, and unless they are as kind and patient as Julie is, will have quit within 2 months. And while I like the place and what they do, I think I'll just smile and enjoy it, because their management will have brought that on themselves.

Holy cow...that rant just took me by surprise! Only meant to put tiny blurb...oops. Oh, well, it's all true, so may as well leave it. *insert big sigh here* ok, now that I got all that off my chest...back to work!