State of Obvious

This might be kind of random, but it's what is on my mind today. I went shopping at the grocery store...always a depressing trip. Food prices are really taking a bite out of our pocket, especially it seems like we spend 2x as much just having Poppa living with us. Probably because he wants all kinds of special stuff that we never bought before. I grit my teeth every time the total pops up. I even clipped some coupons today in a feeble attempt to save some money. I saved about $10 on our $200 bill. Ouch. When I was loading my groceries up onto the belt that leads to the cash register, it got a chuckle out of the person in front of me. Have you ever noticed that at the grocery store, if one of the dividers is not available to put between the orders people create a huge artificial barrier? It's like we're afraid our groceries might touch each other. The person ahead of me put a nice 6 inch barrier between our orders and even after we got one of the plastic doohickeys

Christmas was a little different this year. For Christmas Eve we started a new holiday tradition, dinner at Red Lobster! You'd be shocked by how packed the place actually was. The rest of the evening was spent at home waiting for the children to get to bed so that Santa could come and visit. I had the brilliant idea of hiding all the presents in the back of Eric's car. This worked very well even though a couple of times Eric's dad came close to spilling the beans (Poppa, kids in hearing range: Are you sure you want the kids to ride in the Escape, they might see things . Eric: They can't see any of the stuff back there . Me: SIGH ). Carly went to bed pretty early, for her anyhow, and we sent Josh up to his room for sleeping at about midnight. And waited. 1 am, Josh is still awake. 2 am, he comes downstairs for a "drink" and to tell us he can't sleep. I send him back to bed with videos and strict instructions not to come out of his room because I am going to

I picked up a book at the store about ADD. Joshua has been officially diagnosed as ADD for about a year and a half. I feel a large quantity of guilt because I took this whole thing rather casually. We tend to think of ADD / ADHD kids as being problem kids, and Joshua is definitely not a problem child. He has always been sweet and mostly obedient, easy to please and able to entertain himself. The more I learn about ADD, though, the more I realize how much of a big deal it actually is, how many signs we missed, how many mistakes we made. For example, something I learned recently is that ADD often has ticks as a side affect or symptom. When Joshua was a baby he used to pull on his hair, just on a little patch near his temple. When he stopped the pulling, he started popping his eyelids (that started a couple years ago or so), and when he stopped popping his eyelids all the time he started snapping his fingers. All these little things seemed weird and the snapping in particular was