reality setting in

he cried yesterday when i dropped him off at preschool. he gripped me tightly crying "mommy! mommy!" i HATE leaving him when he's like that. in fact, half the time if he doesn't look like he wants to be at school, i just take him home. there's usually a good reason. either he's getting sick, or someone is being mean. but, i knew that this wasn't one of those things. it was the long weekend coupled with his remembering at the door that everyone "talks like this, mommy: shi shi shi sha yo"

his teacher was immediately at our side and shooed me away. i left willingly, but it didn't feel good. i picked him up earlier than usual, hoping that the episode was short lived. i was relieved to find that it had been. the teacher wrote in the daily report book they send home with him everyday that he'd only cried for a minute and otherwise had a great day.

this morning, he didn't cry, but there was a conversation in the car on the way over that made me feel just as sad. he said "let's go back to hawaii. i miss hawaii. i miss my park and my friends and my elevator." i tried to be upbeat and reminded him that we'd definitely go back as soon as daddy got back. it's just that daddy is going to take a long time before he gets back from helping people.

there was no answer from him.

he did go into his class willingly. but on the drive home i wondered if i had done the right thing by moving us here. i beat myself up about it for a couple of hours as i stopped at the mall to get a gift for a dear friend's birthday today. but on the drive back home, i consoled myself with the memories from this weekend. noah excitedly telling his halbee stories about his visit to the duck park with halmee, natalie actually reaching for her halmee (the first for her to reach for someone other than me), noah feeling upset on saturday morning when i announced that there was no school and his getting excited when he thought he spotted his teacher at a store (it wasn't her.)

i've written about it too much here already. it keeps going around and around. there were so many good things about sticking it out in hawaii, and there were so many good things about making our way here. i've decided so i must stop with the "what ifs" already.

and that part is settling in for me too. that we really are here for a whole year and not on some sort of vacation. we've now officially taken over two of the three bedrooms of my parent's home and the living room for the most part. i'm slowly taking over parts of the kitchen and when our car gets here, we'll take over a portion of the garage too, i guess.

we are still going strong with the skype. sometimes if i'm home alone and i just need an extra set of eyes, i'll turn that sucker on and demand that captain j call for me if noah starts to do something funny when he's in that room alone. i assume that captain j does his own thing on his end, glancing at the screen once in awhile. i even hear him trying to discipline noah. "noah, put that down." or "noah, get down from there before i count to five. one....two....three. thanks noah." it makes me smile. we joke that we should make it into a business. virtual dad for hire. he could monitor several homes at one time and interact with the kids like max headroom (do you remember him?) in any case, it works for now. i hope he lands in a place with great internet, because it would help so much to keep him in our lives visually this way.

finally, i guess i should talk about the haze i'm living in. i don't know what it is. when we first got here, i thought it was from exhaustion after the move. i keep expecting it to magically lift when i wake up in the morning. but so far, not so. my mind feels muddled and i feel tired all the time and i don't really have an appetite. i did occur to me yesterday that i might be pregnant. positive that this was the case, i got a home pregnancy test and breathed a huge sigh of relief (but i have to admit, i was a tiny bit disappointed) when the second line didn't show up.

i don't think it's any kind of depression. i'm not sad. i'm not teary or emotional. it's not just being able to think and move at the pace that i'm used to. and all i want to do is lie down and sleep and sleep. i want to sleep right now. it's irritating. i'm hoping that this week and next week will give me a chance to establish some kind of routine, and that will help me come out of it.

if you have found my posts really blah lately, blame the haze.

Day 11