No Turkey

I walked in the door tonight. The table still had slimy grains of rice on it from dinnertime. I'm thinking, "Why didn't Jonathan clean it off? He's been home for the last two hours." Then I remembered that it was Atticus' chore to clean the table and sweep the kitchen floor. My head is always in a whirlwind when I walk in the door. Especially tonight. Cinci dropped a jar of salsa after getting out of the Porsche. Crash! There's a pile of red chunky stuff on our garage floor and a whole bunch of broken glass. I just don't have the energy to go clean it up right now. I will. But not right now. Jonathan just told me that he didn't get the scholarship he was hoping to get. He's devastated. Jonathan usually doesn't get devastated. But tonight he is. He just stepped out for an hour to tutor some friends in their English, but he'll be back. I called a family meeting and announced:

• Dad is not in a good mood kids!
• Be on your best behavior when you are around him!
• We're probably not going to Turkey as we had planned.
• Our family will have to separate for a while again and you won't have a dad.
• You may have to attend school in Utah for a year.    

 I'm not sure how I feel about this breaking news. The fact that Jonathan didn't get the scholarship means that we won't have money to do what we had planned. Frankly, I didn't do anything to make our goals happen. I just sat on my butt and did the usual, cooking, rowing, studying, chatting with people, taking care of kids, and sitting here writing in my blog. (Actually, that's not true. I haven't written in it for a long time.) I just hope when Jonathan returns I can be a good listener and shut my mouth. Really all he wants to do is vent and have me comfort him by eating junk food with him. Normally what happens is that I think up a solution that he doesn't like and then we argue about what we should do next. So this time I'm not going to do that. It will take everything I've got to keep these lips shut tight. I just have to remember that this PhD thing is his thing. I'm just along for the ride. I'll do whatever he asks me to do even if it means going into serious debt (which is probably what he's going to want to do cuz he wants our family to stay together physically). But really, that's a good $12,000 for plane tickets to Turkey. And then living expenses on top of that. Not easy. We did it once with three kids when they didn't eat very much. Now with 5, and one of them weighs almost as much as me, and eats more than me. That's a lot! That will cost us sooooo much money.To be continued . . .