Friday bullets, Jan. 27, 17

It's Friday and I can't decide if the week went quickly or dragged heavily. A little bit of both. Everyone, myself included, has been a bit discombobulated about the changes that are ahead of us. It's so distracting to think about your life being so upturned that it can make it difficult to focus on much of anything. Difficult to focus probably pretty much sums up the entire week.

• K. now has a shiny new expander inside his mouth and I'm getting a chance to use my mad expander turning skills. (This is the fifth one in various children's mouths.) He was not happy about it (understandably) and was uncomfortable, but he's been a trooper and the discomfort is a lot less today.
• In other mouth news, G. FINALLY pulled out the front baby tooth that has been pointing forward from above her adult teeth. Hooray! Hooray! I can cross off 'call oral surgeon' from my to-do list, because I was becoming increasingly convinced that the tooth was never going to come out on its own.
• Zillow is addictive. And frustrating. Especially when you are in absolutely no place to even start looking at houses. I don't do living in limbo well. I'm more of a Veruca Salt-type inside my head. I want to do a thing right NOW! Sorry. I'll go back to being reasonable.
• There's nothing like an impending move to motivate one to take care of annoying little jobs that tend to get ignored. Like dealing with the basket of table linens that have been staring at me for far longer than I'm willing to admit in public. Let's just say we're not talking months here.
• Tet and Chinese New Year may be postponed in the Curry home this year. In all of the other mental chaos, it kind of got left behind. See introductory paragraph.
• Animal bonding continues. The other day Nefertiti walked up to Kenzie, sniffed him, and walked away, all without hissing. This is real progress.
• You never know what is going on inside your children's heads. I had mentioned the cats needing  check-ups at the vets and that I was going to make appointments for them. For the next couple of days after that, H. went completely off the rails. We eventually were able to figure out that she thought me taking the cats to the vet meant that they would never come home. It is so hard to teach permanence to a child who has had so little.
• On a lighter note, I'm pretty sure the receptionist at the vet had never heard of the Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, based on the number of times I had to spell the cat's name for her.
• Playing the card game, War, and the imaginary game, Family, have been the all-consuming pastimes of the 7 to 10 year old set around her this week. No, I don't think the two games are in any way related.
• I have a small reminder for everyone. Five of my children are immigrants. They are also naturalized US citizens, but that doesn't change the fact that they are indeed immigrants to this country. When people in charge start throwing around words without careful definitions, then it affects everyone. Immigrants are not evil; they are not to be feared. Fear is a (not so) funny thing. Fear short-circuits the brain and causes the rational thinking parts to go off-line. People in the grip of fear are not thinking rationally and are susceptible to anyone who says the things that make them feel better, whether or not the thing that is said is actually true. And for the Christians reading here, you of all people need to look at your fear and call it what it is, because our God is bigger than anything we can be afraid of. Parental lecture done.
• I forgot one I was going to add, so I'm editing it in. I read a newspaper article a bit ago about some librarians who were under investigation because they had created an imaginary patron who then checked out library books which were on the purge list if they didn't circulate in time. These were good, classic standards that libraries should stock. I shout hooray for the librarians. I used to do this when our library books still had date due stamps in them. I would browse the shelves and always look at the last time a book was checked out. If it was a long time ago, I would check it out to extend its life. I would even volunteer to check out books on death row at the library, if there was some way I could be fed a list of what books are endangered. Boy, I miss those date due stamps.