It really doesn’t matter what my to do list says today, it probably won’t get done. My baby is sick and all I can do is hold him. And feel completely helpless. I think it’s either an allergic reaction (which I posted about with pics here) or maybe something viral since he has been running a fever since yesterday.
But… if I do get to do anything else, here’s just some of what I need to do:
Help oldest daughter address graduation announcements (yeah, I know this has been on the list for the past month but we never seem to be home at the same time to do this!)
Order invitations for youngest daughter for a coronation ceremony thing my church does. (It’s an awesome conference just for girls and when the girls are 15, they go thru a coronation ceremony where they do the purity vows and there’s a big banquet. It’s a very big thing around here and a guarantee crying moment for me as my daughter ages up.)
Start making plans for youngest daughter’s 16th birthday, which btw, is the day after coronation mentioned above.
Continue calling to see any info on baby’s insurance saga….that’s another gripe post that I will write about next. The woes of government subsidized insurance.
And I still of course have tons of laundry and re-organizing the boys’ room.
oh yeah, as soon as the baby feels well enough, I still have to take youngest daughter to get a jacket or shirt to go with her formal attire and get her dress hemmed.
and I’d like to get started back on homeschooling soon…..or at least lay out some more plans.
Homeschool conferences have always been the main encouragement push that I would receive every year to keep on going. When we used to live in NC I lived very close to where the annual homeschool conference was held and never missed a year. But since moving to FL, I’ve not been to one in the past three years. Maybe that’s why it’s easier for me to get discouraged? Even though I just graduated my oldest kid, I have four more to go and still feel that there’s a lot I can learn. I hate the disconnected feeling that has settled in without a local support group or without homeschool conferences. And when I’ve had to take a toddler with me, I have always found it hard to concentrate and get as much out of the conference. But a virtual conference? Not only will a crying baby force me to leave a workshop but I don’t think anyone would notice that I might still be in my pajamas.
It’s midnight and I have a migraine coming on. Why? Nope the MSG (although the Chinese restaurant we ate at said there was none…) and the strawberries did not affect me. However they or something affected Jeremiah. Who by the way, just turned eighteen months old!!
This is what I’ve dealt with all day:
He’s had three doses of Benadryl and I’ve applied cortisone cream. This is the worse outbreak yet. I figured it would be getting better. How long does it take to get over? Until the food passes all the way through his system? This has happened only once before; he had an allergic reaction to a prescription.
In case of emergency, my kids are now prepared. Well, two of them. This morning my 15 yo daughter and 11 yo son attended a CPR/First Aid course.
The course was very informative (I sat in in the course). The kids even got to practice on the CPR dummies. And at the end they were both given certificates to show they passed the course.
One card was for Adult training and the other was for Satndard. I was so proud I didn’t even bother to correct the misspelling.
It’s summertime which means a time when I get to enjoy one of my favorite things to do…read. For enjoyment. Not just all the stuff I have to read during the school year. (We homeschool and I try to read whatever my kids also have to read so we can discuss it.) So here’s some great books I have read this summer:
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
The Host
A Bend in the Road
True Believer
At First Sight
Nights in Rodanthe
The Rescue
Preparing Your Son for the Other Woman
Checklist for Life for Women
Five People You Meet in Heaven
and then there’s this book on organizing that I misplaced….I think it was Confessions of a Happy Organized Family or something like that.
I talked to my sister yesterday. Remember when I went to NC last month to visit my sister and was able to watch my newest nephew’s birth? Well, she took him to the doc and in four weeks he has grown 3 inches!! He only gained one pound be could you imagine how much energy it took to grow that much? As a newborn? My babies were lucky to grow an inch!! My baby was 20 inches at birth, 20 inches at one month and 22 inches at two months. That two inch growth was the largest growth, all the other times were either half and inch or one inch at the most. Sometimes, he didn’t grow at all. And no one in our family is really tall. I guess it’ll level out.
Meanwhile my sister is having a wonderful time enjoying the baby and has an abundance of mommy’s milk. She has contacted a milk bank and is going to donate. The milk will go to preemies or adopted babies. I think that is awesome. I wish I had had that problem. Nope, I barely had enough. At least some little one will be blessed and I pray it will make the difference in the health of a newborn somewhere, someday.
Today I have to go thru my boy’s bedroom!!! They have almost no place to put clothes and every time I get started on this task, I get so discouraged that I just walk out. But while trying to find my youngest son a particular pair of jeans, I discovered quite a few clothes that he has outgrown. That gave me hope. If I can find enough outgrown clothes, then I can hopefully make more room for what actually fits them now. It’s unfortunate that they have to share a room with such a small closet. All of our previous houses they at least had two closets in their bedroom. (They’ve always shared a room.)
I also have to go deposit my daughters’ portion of the insurance payment, pick up some milk and vanilla ice cream, make a blackberry cobbler, take pics of it and post on my other blog, pick up my daughter’s graduation pictures and we have our church’s midweek service tonight.
And sometime I still have to drive all the way to the Y to cancel our membership! I am just trying to wait until I have more errands that side of town to justify the drive.
First, I must apologize to all of my online fellow bloggers. I have been very, very bad about visiting others blogs. It all started about a month ago when we went on vacation and I fell into a slump. I got out of my schedule and rather, started a new schedule. I have replaced my computer time with reading. Which was a pastime that I used to enjoy but kids’ needs replaced that spare time. Spending a lot less time on the computer gave me that time back. But I miss my online fellowships and it has also showed in the amount of comments I’ve received lately. So, now I am trying to find a balance.
Which brings me to my new goal of visiting at least five blogs a day. I picked a few of my favorites from my blogroll to start off with. Between the Worlds was the first one I chose. I can relate to the struggle of homeschooling my children while everyone else was trying to win the lottery to get their children in the coveted charter schools. I even fell prey to it and put my own kids in lottery. Twice. Thank God they weren’t chosen.
Karen is running a contest that I think is beneficial to everyone…everyone wins. Well, not everyone will win the Starbucks gift card but I believe that everyone can benefit from learning from each other. All you have to do is share your 3 favorite things that you used this past year. I am assuming it’s all homeschool stuff. That’s what she did anyway, that’s what I am going to do and that’s where I am hoping to learn about new stuff!! Here’s my contribution:
My favorite thing that I couldn’t do without is my umbrella school. HomeLife Academy. We live in Florida and we choose the option to homeschool under an umbrella school. HomeLife is very supportive without being intrusive. We had already homeschooled for a long time before moving here so I didn’t want some third party coming in and changing everything we did. We had our first homeschool graduate this past month and she received a “real” diploma through HomeLife. It’s easy to do the record keeping online and I like that I can look back over everything even years later.
Teaching Textbooks - I put off buying this curriculum because it was out of my budget for the longest time. But after growing very frustrated because nothing else was working, I gave in and bought it. I love that the textbooks are written simply in conversation tone to the student. In fact, my kids rarely even use the cd’s. Math is finally making sense.
Paperback Swap - When we moved I finally admitted that maybe I did have too many enough books. Especially after carrying box after box and each one labeled “books”!! But I get attached to them and it’s so hard to pass them on. But with a brand new library that just opened I don’t feel totally desolate. I joined PaperBack Swap because it satisfies my need for new books when my budget doesn’t allow me to buy new books every week. It is so exciting getting packages in the mail and I can do free!! I exchange books that my kids have finished reading and in return, get books for their next reading level. I even get books that I want to keep forever on my library shelf. And it makes my husband happy to see me packing up books to mail out and get rid of….at least he’s usually not home when the mail arrives with more books. I just found Sparknotes on the site. They are fictional books that have the words you need to study for the SAT in them. The SAT words are highlighted someway with the definition in the margin. I ordered two and since I haven’t actually seen them yet, I can’t mark them as a favorite but without PBS I wouldn’t know about them. If you want to join, I get a free book if you do it from the icon on my sidebar. In fact today, I ordered a homeschool textbook.
We are in the midst of family camp this week and it is AWESOME. There’s no way I can share with you all that is going on but here’s a song that has been such blessing to me.
After graduating from our Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University course, I am keenly aware of our financial situation and have goals in place. But I still need to stay reminded of it and stay focused. As soon as we receive our tax refund, we will pay off our credit card debt and finally be debt free.
So I headed over to see what my Bills IQ is. I scored a 87% which is a B. Not too bad. I also know the areas where I needed improvement even though I answered all questions honestly. And if I take the test in even a few more months, I expect to score better. And within a year, get an A!!
The places where I need help is, of course, paying off our two debts. Which aren’t that much really but in ratio to the line of credit and how much we owe, it’s more than half which brings down your score. And on the quiz the options of getting out of debt were out of debt and then the next level was out of debt in 1 year+, so I couldn’t mark a few months or so. Also, I need to save more money for our kids’ educations and investments. But we are following our plan and that means getting debt free first.
I would also like to go back to school and get my degree and go back to work. Of course, that means that I would eventually have to put my kids in school instead of homeschooling them. But by the time I would get my degree, and I would have to do it online or slowly, my older boys would probably want to go to school (for sports) and my baby would be old enough for kindergarten. At least our church has a great private school so I wouldn’t worry about any of them.
The key is to take one day at a time and try to keep our financial goals in focus.
Where kindred spirits can meet and talk about whatever is on their minds. I will usually have random thoughts on Christian living, homeschooling, having 5 kids, trying to live more frugally, cooking, living in Central Florida (USA) and whatever else comes to mind.
