Interesting Day

Today was a GOOD day in our house, especially considering the way some of our days have been going lately. Yesterday was a nightmare but today was good. It was report card day. That has never been a bad day but this one was very good. He got four 4s: Listening and Speaking, Collaborative Worker, Responsible Citizen and Quality Producer. I'm especially proud of the Listening and Speaking. Part of the grade for the speaking portion is being able to be 100% understood when making a speech and not making any pronunciation errors. That is quite a feat for someone who almost always needed a translator when he started school unless the person he was talking to knew him and was familiar with his speech. He has a bit different accent than most people from Arizona but that doesn't matter. Mom was worried when he took the decision to discontinue speech this year as he figured that "this is as good as it's going to get." Guess my worries were unfounded since his teacher didn't even realize until I told her about a week into school that we needed to schedule an IEP meeting to close it out. She thought he just had an accent she wasn't familiar with.

On the other hand, it was a VERY bad day for our neighbor and an interesting evening of question answering for me. Long story short: Ms. Neighbor has been cheating on Mr. Neighbor and she decided to leave him and go with Mr. Other Man. Mr. Neighbor came home from work and found stuff lined up to head out the door and all h*** broke loose. Sean was hot and opened the door right when it was erupting. A little while later I started to step outside to indulge in my bad habit and Mr. Neighbor was talking to Mr. Policeman. So I turned and went right back inside. About an hour later I decided to venture out again and heard the whole issue of what was going on. We had heard some of it in the house but I heard more than I wanted to outside. I stayed on the far end of the balcony by our house with my back to it. One of the men helping her move said to me, "And people wonder why I'm single." I'm not 100% sure if that was an attempt at conversation or an attempt to pick me up. Either way it wasn't happening. I just glanced at him and said, "I just came out for a cigarette" and went and stood in the corner with a pointed look at him that said, "You're on my side of the balcony. You can return to the other side." So then, of course when I came in I had an 11-year old full of questions about what does it mean to cheat on somebody and why does Mr. Neighbor sound like he's crying? So we had a nice little discussion about fidelity and trust and what it means to commit to a person. I didn't think we'd be having this discussion quite yet but I guess that's one of the things about communal living.

Hope things are going well in everyone's corner of the world. Ours is calm and peaceful for this minute and I, for one, am glad of that.