Liberty

Ch...ch...ch...changes

2010-07-06T08:30:00.002-05:00

Looks like I haven't posted here in about three weeks. Well, I did, but I deleted what I posted. However, I am driven to think out loud with my fingers. So I started a new, secret blog, on WordPress. I have been posting many insane stream of consciousness ramblings there, over the last three weeks. It has been a chronicle of my thoughts and sometimes prayers over a new season in our lives.

We are sending our boys to public school.

There, I said it. No taking it back. Rather than rehashing the decision, here's the last post I wrote.

I don't think I'm going to keep this blog up. I'm not going to delete it. Someday, blogger might due to neglect. But I'll leave it up. I might transfer some of my favorite posts to bury the insane ramblings.

So new season, new blog. It's a good thing :-)

Week Alone, part deux

2010-06-13T18:52:00.000-05:00

This is likely to be a rambly post. Today is the first day of another week alone for me. I know! another one! I'm thinking they are my reward for all the time I give to my family. My Abba knows how much I love alone time. Don't worry, though. I intend to invite some other Scout moms over for a salad dinner. And I think I may have gotten roped into helping someone move. I'm not even sure how that happened. My pastor's wife is far too compassionate and I am always looking for ways to lighten her load, so somehow we are helping someone move, I think.

This week, I intend to finish grading N's school work for 9th grade, and fill in his transcript. I intend to spend some time sitting before the Lord and listening for His instructions. I really want to do some school planning, but I think I am going to hold off on that. There are some undone decisions that dh and I have to make.

I will not be blogging about anymore deep dark secrets. That was too painful. I shall carry on blogging as if nothing ever happened and just paint a rosy picture for the readers.

Supposedly, I am to take a job application to the vet's for my oldest son. I'm sorry, but in my opinion, this is not a good idea. I would never hire a kid whose mommy brought his application in. Maybe they'll hire me, though? I'd like a summer job out of the house. Why the vet's? He just got certified as a lifeguard. How bout some swimming pools, where you can do something you are qualified for? Sorry. You're not my son. The only thing he's qualified to do with sick animals is hunt them down and put them out of their misery.

Two of my very favorite people came to visit me this weekend. They are friends from high school. I met him in 9th grade, we sat next to each other in P.E. because we had the same last name. We had similar music tastes and a friendship was born. I don't really remember when I met her, she was after my bff's boyfriend. So not my favorite back then. But I love her dearly, now. They are my brother and sister in Christ and that gives me more joy than I can express. They brought their completely adorable boys with them. And that was a special, special treat. Their story is a story of God's mercy, grace and faithfulness. They are miracles. G and C are amazing parents. My boys enjoyed having the little ones around. That was a fun thing to see, as well.

The best thing about being alone is eating what I want when I want. In the past, I would gorge myself on chips and dip, but this week, I have planned to eat salads. Greek salad, caesar salad, pasta salad, chicken salad, things my family roll their eyes at. Dh bought me two chocolate bars for my week alone. Don't tell, but they are really not very good. There is a reason they put chocolate on clearance at the grocery store and it's not because they are lowering the price so that everyone can experience the delightful sweetness and delectable, delicate flavorings.

He also came home with a honey-corn syrup "blend" (ick) and three plastic bowls that were 3/$1. All I'm saying is that the man can't pass up a sale.

Another one of my plans is to watch things on and from Netflix that my family rolls their eyes at. So far I have watched a documentary about cemeteries, The Legend of 1900 and I tried to watch some old black and white Italian film, but even I couldn't watch that. I've got Poirot, some Cary Grant movies, Mama Mia and Absolutely Fabulous in the queue.

Oh!! I also already have watched some stuff on Hulu, too. Have you seen this new show on NBC? It's JUST LIKE FRIENDS! I can't decide if I like it or not. I spend a lot of the time being offended that they ripped off Friends, but I have watched both of the episodes and am likely to continue watching new episodes. It's called 100 Questions.

Not sure how to end this rambly post. So, I'll just stop. Maybe I'll post more tomorrow.

Apple a Day, As Long As It's Under 200 Megabytes

2010-06-03T08:09:00.000-05:00

Not sure why I am so fixated on this. Maybe it's my psyche just trying to think about something else for a change.

I read a news article yesterday that ATT is no longer going to offer unlimited data plans. We'll still get ours, because we already have it and if we renew our contract, which we won't, we'll still have unlimited data.

Seems ATT can't support unlimited data for all the iPhone and iPad users. This bugs me sooo badly. Put up more towers! Is that so hard? Is that so difficult? ATT is one of the oldest and largest telecommunications companies in the world. Surely they are one of the richest. Surely, they could afford to put up more towers. I have less coverage with ATT than I did with Sprint, and Sprint stunk (stank?. who cares.)

This next part is going to sound totally juvenile, but here goes anyway...Why partner with Apple to get exclusives on these super cool devices where the world is in your pocket and then not be able to support it?

Apple, please cut the cord with ATT. Please join forces with Verizon by February 2012 would be good. Please!

If you are a homeschooler

2010-05-25T08:50:00.001-05:00

You MUST read this article. This is probably the best thing I have read in 10 years.

I know that one of my personal issues with our homeschooling journey is that I am tossed to and fro by every wind of homeschooling doctrine.

I started this journey reading Ruth Beechick. I agreed wholeheartedly. I moved on to Sally Clarkson, same vein. I still pull out my very worn out "Educating the Wholehearted Child" When I am feeling burned out. It's been on my nightstand for a month, now. The old Elijah Company catalog was a wealth of information that encouraged me to continue on a simple path.

Then, I read The Well Trained Mind. I bought more expensive curriculum. Confusion set in, because my flesh and soul began battling. I was lured by the promise of turning out, well...well trained minds. James 3:16 says that where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil thing. yep.

I bounced from curriculum to curriculum. Disliking this and declaring that that didn't work. I spent three years loving the concept of Tapestry of Grace and finding it harder and harder to "do." Don't even ask how this year went. That rhetoric level is a butt kicker.

If you have read my blog for any length of time you know that Isaiah 54:13 is my go to verse for our homeschool. "All your children will be taught of the Lord and great will be the peace of your children." My back up verse is, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you." Shoot! I just quoted it to someone the other day, when we were talking about order in the home.

It's no wonder my kids are way off base and out in left field (I can use that metaphor because it's baseball season - which btw, I am so done with, not that it's over, I am just done.)

For the last two years, I have been more focused on getting N through high school and into a "good college" than I have been concerned about his character, or worse, his soul. In turn, I have neglected his brothers. I have been shocked on more than one occasion this year to find that Q has been failing math lessons. He's a math genius, I tell you, this should NOT be happening.

I encourage and exhort you to read this article.

Steadfastness

2010-05-24T09:08:00.000-05:00

Marked two more things off my To Do list this morning. And I've started several of the other things. I have to wait on other people for some of them. Waiting on other people can be frustrating, but I am starting a campaign of not being so easily irritated by people.

Thursday morning, I felt so beat down, mentally. I had really wanted to HEAR FROM GOD on Wednesday. And it just did not happen the way I wanted it to. I knew that what was going on in my heart was "there is no peace and well being because you have left teaching your children of the Lord (Is. 54:13.)" I knew that. But there was no peace in my heart and no will to move forward.

You know those FB status updates, "If you have brothers you love blah blah blah...post this. X% won't."? Those irritate me. So I posted, "When is it going to be tired moms' week?" One of my IRL friends, said take your coffee and Bible outside. So I did. Sitting on FB one more minute was not going to energize me. Every cell in my body was saying, "Please, do what Mrs. Lucy says!" (They talk to me in a Bill Cosby voice.)

I have a little book called 101 Devotions for Homeschool Moms. I bought it as a door prize for our homeschool group. I had a copy of my own a long time ago, I gave it to my sister. Sitting around our house, the back cover got creased, so I don't feel like I can give it away, now.

The devotional didn't speak to me. Devotionals rarely do, anymore. Nothing wrong with them, at this point in my life I just need WORD. But I took it outside and opened it up anyway.

The verse that day was Psalm 51:10. Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a steadfast spirit in me.
I whipped out my iPhone (I took it for the iPod for some worship music!) and opened the dictionary app.

Steadfast - fixed in direction, firm in purpose, unwavering, firmly established.

Ugh! I am so wretched! Why do I waver so? Why do I entertain fantasies about sending N to a private university model school? That is not the direction God said to go! You are feeding a monster. Tear down those thoughts! At what point did I leave off teaching God's ways to the boys? Did I really think that by virtue of having them at home that their lives would be peaceful? (I think I did.)

And note that spirit in that verse is not capitalized. It's MY spirit that needs to be renewed. I also note that this verse is a petition, a request to the Lord to renew a steadfast spirit. I don't have to do it myself!

The verse in today's devotional (do what works, huh?) was 1 Cor. 3:5. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God. ...sigh... His grace, His power, is sufficient to renew a steadfast spirit in me. It really is. I need only to believe.

Botox Anyone?

2010-05-22T08:30:00.003-05:00

Yesterday we had park day with our homeschool group.
It was cloudy, but so wonderful. There was a breeze, it was so nice.

I was supposed to be meeting a couple of ladies who want to join our group.

I told the boys to take some kind of sports equipment so they wouldn't be buzzing around me and nagging me to leave.

There were a couple of families at the park with small children.

My boys tumble out of the car, bat and gloves in hand. Instantly, the bat became a weapon, meant for violence and destruction. I took it away. They began chasing each other, in and around the playscape where all the small children are playing happily and innocently. I ran them off.

The first visitor showed up. She admitted to me that she was nervous about meeting us. That she'd told her boys (7 and 3) they better behave and not have any gun play. I grinned, "They'll fit right in."

So my boys put on a little folkstyle wrestling show. I stopped them.

Some of our moms showed up, the other visitor showed up.
Two of the kids came with baseball equipment. Everyone go play ball. Whew! I think, a break!

"Uh, Christy..." I follow the pointing finger. My boys are on top of the backstop. I walk halfway across the park and gesture wildly for them to get down.

Minutes later. "Uh Christy..." Not again...sigh... Now they are on top of the dug out.

Why?Is?This?Happening?

I walked all the way across the park. "If this isn't acceptable at home..." You know the rest. Including , "I dunno..."

Is this a test for the whole goodness vs. Godliness lesson?

I'm going to need some botox for the ditch that's being created between my eyebrows.

2010-05-22T08:18:00.000-05:00

Some things make you stop and think about busyness and life.
Busyness is hard to stop. Not even sure it's necessary to stop.
But we sure need to make sure that in and amongst the busyness, we are telling and showing the people we cherish that we love them.

Raising Boys or Berserkers?

2010-05-21T16:01:00.002-05:00

At this point, I am convinced that I am just not very "with it," as a mother.

Case in point:

Wednesday, I decided we would take the day off and go to the lake, cause we can. We went to the dollar store and bought drinks and snacks and water toys. I bought my 12 and 10 year olds blow up pugil sticks. In case you don't know what those are, here is a definition from Dictionary.com, "a long pole or stick with padded ends used to carry out mock combat."

We took them to the lake, where the boys used them as buoys for the sinking rock.

The next day, I hear them talking about jousting on their bikes with them. "Well," I think, "that's what they're for. I think I'll go take some pictures."

Here they are:

It's cute and fun and educational. Never-mind that we are studying the middle ages next year.

I got done with picture taking and came inside. Minutes later, I hear screaming. I am not a mom who jumps every time I hear screaming. Q isn't having fun unless he's screaming. So, I waited for the offendee to come inside and report the offense.

And here comes Q. "Why is your brother screaming?"
"I told him I was done and he wouldn't stop and he made me fall down and almost smash my head on the concrete so I was calling him to me to tell him something..."
"Hang on, you and I both know you were not simply calling him to you to tell him something. Don't give me half the truth."
"Then (Q almost always insists on continuing with his version of the story, I don't even know why I try) then I..."
M bursts in now, "He threw a rock at me!"
A huge no-no at our house. Not because M is covered in scars from rocks (although he is), but because we have had to replace two windshields due to rock throwing.
"And he jerked the seat off my bike and the chain too!"
"No I didn't."
"Yes, you did."
Q, go put M's bike back together. M go get your brother's bike and bring it in.

Sigh...I am so sick of playing turning into fighting. I am weary of it. I have done everything. But I am powerless to stop them.

Later in the day, we went to the pool, where the pool attendant told them to calm down, after I already told them to once. So we left.

I called SB, "Why Why do they do it?" They can't just play calmly, it's always full-on violent and physical. Someone always gets hurt. It always turns into an argument.

SB's answer, "I grew up in a house of girls, maybe this is normal behavior for a house of boys."

Dear God, NO!

Maybe I need to go read Bringing Up Boys again?

Wait until we get around to studying Vikings. They'll be so happy to learn about berserkers.

I'm going to need more wine, I think.

Elementary Science This Week

2010-05-21T08:15:00.000-05:00

This week, I started clearing out this year's stuff to make room for next year's stuff. School stuff, that is. I found that there were several experimenty things that the boys haven't done, yet. Can't have that. This week, owl pellets.

Owl pellets are both gross and fascinating. If you don't think too hard about the fact that they are hairy, compacted, regurgitated owl dinner, and you kinda unfocus your eyes for the initial breaking up of the pellet, you can get through it.

It didn't bother M and Q at all.

Owl pellets are cheap. They don't require any specialized equipment, some tweezers and some tooth picks. You can print these charts for the price of ink and paper. And here's a funny video that we enjoyed a lot.

This kept M and Q busy for more than an hour. I even left to go get N part way through, expecting to return to scattered mouse parts and the two of them fighting over the computer. It did not happen, they were still at it!

Necessary Repairs

2010-05-21T07:52:00.001-05:00

My camera has been telling me, occasionally, that there is some kind of lens problem. When that happens. I usually take the batteries out and put fresh batteries in. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I don't have a full set of AA's charged up.

That's why there are only two pictures in what would have been a great set.

I LOVE it when the boys go out to work together. Mind you, it's a kind of indentured servitude. Q thinks up the plans and tells M that he will pay him a Monster, or not beat on him, if he works X number of hours. Q has finally learned that while M is initially excited about the project, he soon tires of the work and of Q's perfectionist demands. At that point it gets on my nerves, because Q comes stomping in, yelling at me to tell M to...fill in the blank. I don't do it, btw.

The tree house is about 8 years old. The boys have gotten a LOT of use out of it. It makes me so so happy because I had a treehouse (not nearly as nice as theirs) when I was a kid. I lived in it. Well, I played in it a lot. M and Q literally live in theirs on occasion. They have installed bunks and fold down tables. It's quit the little hut. They are currently planning something called Hobo Fest, where they will live outside as hobos, for a week.

As I was saying the tree house is about 8 years old. It has some rot. There are places that are coming apart. It needed some repair. I was beginning to think it needed to come down. So their last big project was to make some necessary repairs (before Hobo Fest.)

This is all I got before my camera pooped out on me.

We are letting him use the power tools now.

Make note of Q's "toolbelt." It is a holder for paintball speed loaders. :)

Oh Foolish Woman

2010-05-20T09:17:00.001-05:00

It used to be that I could go sit in my lake chair, Bible, notebook and pen in hand and hear from God. I would get all my little kidlets in their swimming suits, pack up towels and water and head to the park. I would tell the boys, "Up to your chest." That indicated how far they could go into the lake. There was a roped off area for swimmers. They would play happily, and non-violently. I had very few worries.

Now that the boys are older, they want to take "sinking rocks" with them. For those not familiar with the geography and geology of my area I will explain the absurdity of this. We have about half an inch of topsoil and then, solid limestone. Rocks are everywhere. Big rocks, little rocks, every.where. I feel sure they could find a sinking rock AT the lake.

But let's talk about what a sinking rock is for. It is to tie a rope onto. You toss it out into the lake, hanging onto the rope and let it pull you down. Crazy children, I tell you.

The presence of "sinking rocks" is not conducive to my being able to be still and quiet before the Lord. Neither is the fact that they are all great and competitive swimmers and want to try to swim across the lake.

After two hours, calling (screaming because the wind was carrying my voice away) them back to shore, fighting with the dog to stay out of the car, fighting the wind, and telling them to leave the rocks alone, we came home.

I didn't get anything new. I guess I don't need anything new. He already told me that I had left Isaiah 54:13. All that is required is that I be obedient. That is what I require from my children. I do not reason with them, or give them choices for obedience. Obey now, obey cheerfully (or at least silently ;-p.) What did I think I was going to get?

another plan?? fool.

The True Purpose of Summer

2010-05-19T08:34:00.000-05:00

I wrote the longest, ramblingest, most boring post on doing school vs. having summer. Lucky you, I deleted it. I lost track of what I was talking about, it was so long. And it started out with me saying that I didn't want to get to the end of homeschooling with regrets.

At what point did I become so locked into the world's way of doing school? Surely there are basics that one needs to know. But homeschooling was supposed to be about freedom and retaining curiosity and the natural love of learning that kids have.

Not only that, but specific to our family; I believe God led us to this lifestyle because we are supposed to be discipling our kids. The discoveries I made last week are the fruit of what we've been doing. And it ain't Godly discipling. I don't want to have regrets there, in particular.

I guess I need a come to Jesus moment.

Proverbs 16:9 (nasb) The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.

Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it.

This Sunday, I had a moment of clarity that I had left the verse that God gave me for our school.

Isaiah 54:13. All your sons will be taught of the Lord, and the well being of your sons of your sons will be great.

The next verse says this, "In righteousness you will be established; You will be far from oppression, for you will not fear; And from terror, for it will not come near you."

In righteousness you will be established. Not in doing school, not in not in requiring good behavior, not in expectations. But in righteousness. Then it says that oppression, fear and terror will not come near. That is where I am right now. Fear that the boys won't measure up, that I won't measure up.

I made school in our home. I left the words I have been speaking for years, "Home first, school second." I let school become my identity, instead of being identified only by Christ. And my children see that and imitate it. We have all been striving for outward goodness. For people to look on us and be impressed. We have left the inside to grow dark and dirty.

Maybe we do need a summer break, in order to air out these vessels. God help me to not waste summer break. But to build relationships with You and with the boys.

Dreaming of Peace and Quiet

2010-05-18T14:54:00.001-05:00

School has pretty much consisted of math, spelling, read some history, write an outline and a paragraph, for weeks. And I intend to keep it that way until the last Friday of May. I am determined that Rome will fall by then.

Q has the understanding that the sooner he gets school work done, the sooner he has free time. M and N have yet to get that. They like to take their free time throughout the day. Not that I approve.

The problem with this is that Q has never been able to entertain himself. So he spends a few hours everyday distracting his brothers. Not that I approve.

Yesterday, in a monumental effort, M was able to get his school work done in about the same time as Q.

I ordered them outside. Where they proceeded to bicker and argue.

And now I remember that I said, last year, that I would never take the summer off again. Sadly, I have that big, long To Do list that I created with no school in mind. Besides, I think they will commit mutiny if I insist on doing more than math. I can work on being sneaky about learning. But that will take some planning. Sorry, I can't help myself.

I posted on FB yesterday that we had 10 days left of school. To which one of my friends replied. "I thought you LOVED your job?" I do love my job. Very, very much. But I also love free time. I also love peace and quiet.

I know! I'll go charge a laptop and figure out how to tether my iPhone to it and we'll spend all day every day at the pool.

I can dream.

And they will be gone for 1/3 of the summer. There is hope.

Summer To Do List

2010-05-17T09:22:00.005-05:00

My aunt posted on my Fb wall yesterday. She said, "When are you coming to Fort Worth?" What I told her was that the summer is shaping up to be as busy as the school year. And that is the truth. Of course the road does go both ways, but I suppose that is a post that will never be written.

I have a list in my head that I really need to get out, so that I don't forget anything.

First of all, N will be gone the first and third weeks of June.
Q and M will also be gone the third week of June.
N and Q will be gone the last week of July and the first week of August.
I may be going to KS with KC, HRL-B and 6 of our 8 kids. (I do like doing that, typing in initials, that is.)
So, in no particular order (even though I really should prioritize,) here is my summer To Do list:

sew patches on Scout shirts and blankets
9th grade transcript
talk to homeschool football coaches
~~read homeschool lab science book~~
lesson plans (to include printing and binding of various books)
plan homeschool group meetings
plan homeschool yearbook class
Key to Algebra series w/ N (when he's home) (Check out this online video series that I'm going to have him use)
start homegroup (I know, seems kinda insane)
update calendar
beg someone to be the Yahoo! group moderator
do more begging in terms of our homeschool group (this will take the form of carefully crafted emails so that I am concise and not wordy, because that apparently confuses people)
get the second computer online (buy a wireless card or a wired router)
Sort through pile of loose paper that I hid in the school room/lounge/in-house storage unit
encourage N to finish his Eagle project
Scrapblog OKC trip
~~get my 50 free prints of the Big Bend trip from that photo storage place online (can't remember the name...U-something???) (Shutterfly! I knew there was a U)~~
Register the boys for classes
Review IEW DVDs
Print out high school tips from IEW group
Mail friend's books

(this list keeps getting longer)

2010-05-17T08:26:00.000-05:00

Last week, several semi-serious things happened which have me examining the difference between goodness and Godliness.

Goodness comes from within the self and Godliness comes from God, Himself, within me, in the person of the Holy Spirit.

I can clearly see that what I have been doing for years is practicing and thereby teaching goodness.

And as SB and I sat all three boys down for a discussion the other night, I could hear the call to goodness coming from him as well.

Goodness is not so concerned about what is on the inside as what is viewed by others on the outside.

We know that God does not look on the outside, but at what's on the inside. In several instances, Jesus took a legitimate command from the Father, "Don't commit adultery," and stressed the heart component, "If you look at woman and sin in your heart, you have already committed adultery."

My initial reaction is to drag out a Bible study and drill the boys on Godliness. But the Spirit is fairly screaming in my heart, "Don't do it your way! Just practice Godliness." So, I will pray for SB to practice Godliness and I will pray for myself and I will pray for the boys.

I have messed up, but God is good. His Name is on the line and He will see His Word, in us, to completion.

Homeschool Mom Confessions

2010-05-14T09:14:00.001-05:00

One of my imaginary, URL friends posted her homeschool mom confessions. I had been thinking the last two days of making a similar post. Homeschooling at the end of 10 years is certainly not what I envisioned (or was lead to believe) 12+ years ago. I told K that my confessions would be pretty raw. We're going through some stuff that I was lead to believe I would not go through via the homeschooling route. So be prepared, pick your feet up so I don't ~~step on~~ crush your toes.

~~~In the spirit of another of my imaginary, URL friends, I am also going to tell you about another post I've been thinking about, but probably won't write. The idea is that I take all the popular, Christian homeschool mom "beliefs" and tell you what really happens. (Can you tell I am feeling a little ...uh... disappointed? Maybe not disappointed, just ready for this year to be done already.)~~~

On with the confessions:
1. I don't get up early.
2. My kids don't get up early.
3. I don't make my kids do chores every day before school commences.
4. (As a result) our house is not terribly clean.
5. I yell...a lot.
6. I let our kids play a lot of video games.
7. I do not cook breakfast or lunch. I make the kids cook their own.
8. 2 of my 3 kids hate to read. (Is this a result of 6? Who cares?)
9. I feel frustrated, exasperated and overwhelmed every.single.day.
10. I spend free time thinking about educational alternatives for my oldest son.
11. Our family is not very harmonious.
12. My oldest son does not feel close to me and does not want to "share" with me.
13. Boxed curriculum looks better and better every day.

Home School Highlights, 2009-2010

2010-05-11T15:19:00.001-05:00

Since we are looking at 2 weeks and 3 days left of school at the Liberty Academy for Boys, I thought I'd make a few highlight posts of our year.

This first post is about the movies we loved from Netflix to supplement out study of ancient world history.

David Macaulay: Roman City (available free online here)

Hands down favorite: Drive Through History

Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Greek Myths

Egypt: Engineering an Empire

David Macaulay: Pyramid (sadly, not available online)

Outdoor Home Decor

2010-05-11T09:32:00.000-05:00

I came home from my 4-day mini vacation to find out that SB had paid all the bills in the bill basket. Great. And not left enough money for groceries, gas, his birthday or mother's day. I am totally not complaining. This is simply an example of how men and women think differently. There are bills to be paid. Let's pay them all right now, including ones that aren't due until the end of the month.

And according to him it was ok that there wasn't enough money for me to get him a birthday present, because he bought himself one. A gigantic, plastic ashtray. For real.

He sits on the front porch to smoke. He tosses all the butts in a neat little pile in the flower bed next to the porch. It doesn't bother me. It's unsightly, but I don't really mind. There was a can. Cans are disposable and we have plenty of them. But he thought a giant, plastic ashtray would be better, as in more attractive than a can or a pile of butts.

So the box came via UPS yesterday, addressed to North Shore Repairs, because SB didn't think the company would sell it to an individual. Because normal people don't buy giant, plastic ashtrays for their homes. The box was enormous. I am thinking of shipping one of the children somewhere in it.

He took it out of the box and assembled it in our bedroom. I asked him where he was planning on putting it. In the flower bed, he tells me. I told him that I thought it would be better on the side of the house. Or on the back deck. But that would mean he'd have to get up off the porch and walk around the front of the house to dispose of his cigarette butt.

He left early for work this morning. He didn't have time to take his birthday present outside. So I did it for him. I'm a good wife, like that.

I won't ask what you think. Because I feel sure that you think the same thing I do. "REALLY?! For REAL!? A giant, plastic ashtray? I thought only businesses could have those."

This is one of the places I thought it could go. There are several things wrong with this location. Including the fact that it will tempt the boys to pick it up and carry it around, using it for some kind of target practice.

Here it sits on the pile of existing butts. Nice, huh? Klassy, I think.

Turned sideways for easy access from the top step of the porch.

At least the color is right.

Baseball and Big Bend

2010-05-08T19:13:00.005-05:00

We had a baseball game this afternoon. Our boys have played one kind of sport, or another, every season since N was in the first grade. Q is the only one playing baseball this season. Which is kinda nice, then we don't have to split up when games are in different towns. I have never been into sports. at.all. I have to admit watching your kid play sports is kinda fun, though. Don't ask me what's goin' on though, 'cause I don't have a clue. Today's game was different, I payed attention. Man! It was close! Then, our super-awesome, Cuban pitcher collided with the catcher, so they put in another pitcher. This kid takes everything seriously. He did a fan-tab-u-lous job! I wish I had a video. When he's nervous, he adjusts his hat, spits a lot, adjusts his cup, stands there, adjusts, spits. Love it! We did end the game losing, in an extra inning, by one point. But, man! it was a good game!

But that's not what this post is about.

I finally got SB's Big Bend pictures uploaded and fixed, for the most part. I'm no expert at editing photos. But I do know when something is washed out and awful looking.

He took two waterproof, disposable cameras and bought an extra disposable camera while there. Guess which one he dropped in the water? Yes, he did. Can't fix those.

Here are some of my favorites.

M, Q & N
The lady in the front of the canoe on the right is S

N & Q, posing for a hiking magazine...I don't know...

Q & N in a cliff cave

M cooling off, because kayaking is hard, hard work, I tell you

All my guys

N, You can see his knees! shh! don't tell him

Another shot of all my guys

M and Q, shooting one of his "make you sick to your stomach" videos

The Hot New Homeschool High School Curriculum

2010-05-07T08:54:00.001-05:00

This is my first-official-homeschool-post-on-my-non-homeschool-blog-since-I-am-going-to-shut-down-the-homeschool-blog-sometime-this-summer.

I came across this article two days ago. It was one of the many distractions that kept me from my "work." Gary North attributes the list of courses and texts to Ron Paul, whom I love. I am unable to find the actual Dr. Paul connection. Of course I haven't done any in-depth investigation. I looked at two of RP's websites, under "education" and did not find this list.

What I find a little crazy, is this: "That's the main problem. This curriculum does not exist yet. But it could. Two years from now, it could be on-line." Crazy is not the word I'm looking for, uninformed. I dunno...help me.

Here's the thing. By publishing the list of courses and recommended textbooks, the curriculum now exists. Any enterprising, creative homeschool mom, like myself, could take this and really run with it. And I intend to. This summer. While my people are galavanting around the country, disguised as Boy Scouts.

It's a good list with solid suggestions. I even have an idea, or two, floating around for a co-op class. God help me. That is happening more and more. I guess I am over the burn out I suffered from doing Apologia science for an entire year in my home with a dozen kids.

Irony

2010-05-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

I have been working feverishly for the last two days on our homeschool group's meeting tonight. It's my first official meeting as president. I want to do a good job. I have some ideas to do it like we've never done before. Not in a huge break out of the box sense. Just small changes.

I haven't gotten dressed for two days. Which means I haven't bathed in two days.

Here's the ironical part (is that a word? It is now.) The boys haven't got hardly any school work done because I have been too busy working on the meeting. (Yes, I intended that sentence to be all crazy grammatically. It's to show how very uneducated we are because I am too busy helping other mommies teach their little darlings at home.)

Wanna see what my kitchen looks like?

Here's a peek:

Yes! I did!

In case you are wondering, that pink bucket is an ice cream maker. It is Q's. He has been nagging me all day about getting a bag of ice so he can make ice cream.

I think I might just go take a shower and run out now, before the sink caves in.

All is not completely lost, though. Q and M have resurrected their lawn business from last summer. They took flyers to all our neighbors and already have one customer. That's educational. Everyone did get in their math, spelling and reading. I'm not sure about N. He went to his room with a book about Romans. Maybe he found a Roman Empire App.

Haha! I just had an idea. I'm going to have a support meeting called "Creative Ways to Teach." I think I'm going to give them a list of educational apps.

See what a good leader I am?

What One 4-Day Weekend Will Do

2010-05-05T15:26:00.001-05:00

I posted and posted about my week alone and my family's trip to Big Bend. It was awesome for everyone. They had a fabulous time and I got to clean without interruption. Of course then they came back and in about 4 seconds it looked like they'd never been gone. I love them. For real. I missed them while they were gone. I had been falling in love with my beloved all over again the week before they left. I don't want to sound like I was ecstatic over their being gone. But seriously, sometimes a break is in order.

What I didn't tell you was that I was also in the midst of planning a little 4 day, out of state, girls' weekend with some of my oldest (I'm the oldest, but people I've known for a long time...you know what I mean) and closest friends.

(insert gleeful sounds)

I don't even know how long I have known KC. We went to church together when we were little. I can remember going on an Acteens trip in the 8th grade, to Waco and crying to KC that I missed my boyfriend. We were not super close then, or in high school. But we ran in interlocking circles. It wasn't until we started having corresponding babies that we clicked. And every time I am with her, I think to myself, "And why don't we spend more time together?" It is so easy to be me with her. No masks. And I think that is because she refuses to wear a mask and refuses to put up with masked people. She loves people very deeply and that is serious balm to my soul.

KC and I rode 6 hours to Oklahoma City to meet HRL-B. Six hours sounds like a long time, but I tell you, the time flew and before we knew it, we were pulling into the hotel.

I met HRL-B in 7th grade. Maybe in 6th, at a slumber party. We did not go to the same elementary school (This was in the olden days, when 6th grade was still considered an elementary grade) but I knew who she was. HRL-B is friends with everyone. (I can hear you saying you're not, but you are.) In 8th grade we were in pretty much all the same classes, along with about 20, or so, other people. Our friendship grew into one where I was at her house every weekend, or at least I said I was. We have so many memories of walking home from school, handcuffing my sister to her bed, running through shrubbery, early rising to get to the beach before we had to work, calling in sick to work to go to the beach...so so many. She was in my wedding, I was in hers. Just always there. Oh! and she saw my middle child being birthed.

HRL-B currently lives in Kansas. The plan was to meet somewhere in the middle. I'm so glad we did. Not that visiting her house would have been boring. But you can't beat hotel life.

OOH! Hey! I just had an idea! I wonder what it would take for us to get an invite to Pioneer Woman's for the next girls' weekend?

The rough middle worked out to be Oklahoma City. Not really a destination city. But we had fun. Because you can't not have fun when you're with your bff's. The theme was doing stuff we wouldn't normally do. There were tattoo plans. But we are already all tatted up. So we got fake ones.

We went to Shawnee in search of lavender and wine.

We did finally find it. In a town called Prague (rhymes with Craig) where they were having a kolache festival. We come from a town that has a yearly festival, called Frontier Days. There's a parade, booths, dancing, I'm sure there's a queen, but I could totally be wrong. We joined the residents of Prague in celebrating their Czech heritage. It was serious fun.

We went to a casino. I've been through casinos, but never to a casino. I left with $15 more than I came with, thanks to KC. And I have decided that I do not have a gambling problem. I like puzzles and games, I do not like random chance.

We visited the site of one of our nation's most tragic events. The pictures speak for themselves

We ate until we had stomach aches at Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill.

Eating until we have stomach aches is something we would normally do, but not at Toby Keith's.

Then we entered the Twilight Zone and walked into Coyote Ugly Saloon. Here's the thing...hardly anything is open on the weekends in and around OKC. Shawnee was shut down and most of the establishments along the um..."riverwalk" in OKC were shut down. And besides, if visiting bars were something we'd normally do, Coyote Ugly would certainly not be one of them.

The next day we got up late and went to IHOP (IHOP = normal, getting up late = not normal,) where we waited 40 minutes for our food and drank cold coffee because the waitress could not remember to bring us a bowl of half and half while the coffee was still hot. I needed the caffeine to drive back to Texas.

Right now, I am supposed to be working on the agenda for my first meeting as president of our homeschool group. I can't concentrate until I get this post up. Funny thing is that I couldn't concentrate on this meeting last week because of my anticipation of our trip. The meeting is tomorrow. I'm not ready. I need to buy paper and door prizes. I need to email people and ask them to come. I need to email people and remind them to be ready to speak at the meeting. The list goes on and on.

A four day weekend will refresh, renew, and cause you to be totally distracted for a couple of weeks.

Now For Something Serious

2010-04-29T09:22:00.000-05:00

A month, or so, ago I started watching Who Do You Think You Are? on Hulu.com. The concept of the show is that celebrities trace their ancestry. I wish it was normal people finding out extraordinary things about where they came from. I guess that would be too much to ask from our culture, though, huh?

Anyway...One of the celebrities was Emmit Smith, the football player. One of the things that was done was a genetic test to find out the area of Africa that his ancestors came from. The country was Benin. He traveled to Benin to see what it is like and to see the old slave trading places. When he was there, he met a man who runs a school for children who have been rescued from slave traders. Emmit Smith seemed surprised to hear that slave trading is still going on in Benin.

Since then, I have seen article after article on the subject. I have a friend who started a ministry in China which helps women get out of prostitution. Many of them were sold, essentially as slaves, by their families. One of the men who ministers regularly in our church spoke briefly on Sunday about the sex industry in Houston and the people who work in it, who were sold into slavery, in their own countries, to be sold here, in America.

Slavery was not eradicated in the 1800's. It was made illegal, and the industry moved underground. The majority of people who are sold into slavery now, are women and children. They are made slaves in fields, houses, brothels and factories. They are kidnapped and sold by their own families.

Looking up statistics is difficult and overwhelming. It is hard to know which organizations to trust, given their track record in other areas (I'm referring to the UN.) And when you look at the numbers that are published, they vary widely. One report that I read said that 4 to 27 million people are slaves. Compare that to the 4 million legal slaves in the US before the Civil War. It is impossible to know exact numbers of modern slave trafficking, because the nature of crime is that it is secretive.

What I do know is that the Lord has not shown me all these things for nothing. Jesus came to this earth to set captives free. And He told His followers that they would do greater things than He did. National and International bureaucracy are not going to solve this issue. Only the love of Messiah in each of us will.

This Week's Menu

2010-04-27T17:51:00.000-05:00

Yes, I realize it's Tuesday. Better late, than never.

Sunday night: Baja Battered Fish Tacos (we had them 2 weeks ago, liked them so much, I have added them to the regular lineup.
Monday night: Baked Chicken with leeks and onions: blech. It calls for this dijon sauce which sounds great, but not paired with the leeks and onions. One or the other, not both.
Tuesday night: Multi Bean Chili. I just sampled it, and I think it's pretty tasty. Verdict is still out for the rest of the fam. I should have told them we were having beans, not chili. They may protest. I altered the recipe. For one thing, I one and a halved it. Then, I saw several commenters complain about wateryness. So, I did half water and half tomato sauce. I used diced tomatoes, instead of crushed, it's what I had and I used 4 kinds of beans, it's what I had, garbanzo, dark red kidney's, pintos, and black beans.
Wednesday night: Fragrant Shredded Beef Stew. We loved this a few weeks ago. It is definitely going into the regular line up. And I am making double this time.
Thursday night: HEB had seasoned leg quarters on sale. So I am baking those and having corn on the cob and potato salad.
Friday night, I will be in OKC w/ 2 of my bestest friends. The guys will have to eat the left-overs I have been stock piling for them, which includes the yummy chicken pantry meal that I got from Pioneer Woman

Speaking of Pioneer Woman...I made this cinnamon toast this morning. I promise you, we will never have it any other way. So delicious!

Tiniest Amount of Bragging

2010-04-27T09:08:00.000-05:00

You know that SB and all the boys went to Big Bend last week. They went with several of SBs co-workers.

There is one man in his unit who enjoys picking at SB over the fact that we homeschool our kids. I'll call him HS, he did not go to Big Bend. Yesterday, he tells SB, "I can't pick on you anymore, my brother is going to start homeschooling his kids."

To which another man, D, responds, "You shouldn't pick on him for his kids being homeschooled at all. I just spent a week with them, and they are intelligent, can talk about anything and are the most well-behaved kids I've ever been around." :-) I'm smiling the biggest about the well-behaved part.

More bragging, not about my own geniuses. My very good homeschooling friend has had to quit homeschooling. Her kids entered public school for the first time ever, three weeks ago. No one had any hope for her 12 year old son doing well on the math TAKS (stoopid [another KC phrase]Texas standardized test). Well, he passed. And her daughter who has severe speech apraxia made an "A" in reading on her very first report card, ever.

So, yes, I am doing a little bit of homeschool mom cheering today. And so so thankful that my kids don't have to take that stoopid TAKS test. I could go on and on about the idiocy of these tests which do not test knowledge and are designed to force schools to compete for funding, but I won't.

Saturday Stream

2010-04-24T08:46:00.000-05:00

SB and the boys came home from Big Bend a day early! I was so happy! And good thing Big Bend is so far away. I took out the package of chicken legs to thaw when he called. 'Cause, ya know, I was going to just have eggs. But my guys needed more than eggs to come home to. I made this pantry meal from Pioneer Woman. Only, I didn't have any tomatoes. So I did have to go to the store.

Hows my food experiment going? Well, considering that I only bought half the groceries this payday, good, I guess? SB went grocery shopping with me last night. We had a date, to far south west Austin, then to Serranos (I am still suffering from the delicious jalepeno rellenos), Academy, HEB and Stuff Mart. I can call it a date, if I want to. Kids didn't go. It's a date. I did not buy them any packaged cereal. I'm going to try these oatmeal recipes from Eating Well.com. Breakfast bars and granola. SB did insist that I buy them some ramen. We compromised on 2 packages each. He wanted to buy a case. I also did not buy Dr. Pepper. I don't think SB noticed. He got in the car, when we were leaving and said, "Grocery shopping sucks." Yes, it does.

My guys took three disposable cameras with them to Big Bend. We turned them in to Stuff Mart for processing. I can't wait to see the pictures. I saw some from one of the other men that went. He promised to make me a disc. So beautiful. And then, there was the video from Q's viceo camera that he got for Christmas. It's this cheap little Vivitar. I can't get the software to install, so we can't upload pictures or videos from the camera, we have to watch them on the TV. It seems his favorite filming technique was to hold the camera in his hand, not point it at anything and allow the water to drag him over rocks. Most of the footage is under water. The Rio Grande is a muddy river, so you can't see a thing. And he recorded about 20 of those shots. I'm going to see if they have a cinematography class at the resource center. I know there is a cinematography merit badge. We'll have to sign him up for the class at winter camp.

SB and two of the boys got up early this morning to leave for an overnight camping trip assocaiated with going to National Jamboree. Q will be getting a ride back this afternoon for a baseball game. I promised to work on an agenda for our next homeschool group meeting. Being the president is boring and hard. Good thing I got church music done for the week, already.

20 and Counting

2010-04-21T09:38:00.000-05:00

I just knew we'd be getting married any day. Any day did happen, about a year and a half later.

Poor SB. He was 18. He wanted to live the life of a free, teenage boy. I just wanted to get married.

We did shack up for about 6 disatrous months. During that time, we fought night and day. At one point, I moved out. And was so stressed over it, that I broke out in hives. That lasted for a few days, then I moved back in. At the end of our lease, we realized shacking up was not working out. I moved in with my my bff and he moved in with his bffs (heh heh).

And that was a pretty crazy time, too. We continued to date, if you want to call it that. Until one day in June of 1989, he told me that he wanted to break up with me to. see. some. one. else. I was crushed. More crushed than when my red-head boyfriend broke up with me in 10th grade. I mean, I was still under the impression that we were going to get married any day.

That was, and still is, the worst 28 days of my life. I couldn't eat. And for some stupid, stupid reason, I started seeing this psycho from work. He immediately started telling me that he loved me. I'm sure all I did was talk about SB. eww...just thinking about him gives me the willies.

It turned out the the person SB had his eye on, wasn't interested in him in the least and my plot to make him jealous (oh yeah...that's why I was dating Psycho) worked. It really ate him up to see that guy's car at our apartment.

I don't remember the moment we got back together, but I do remember that night. He told me that he never wanted to be one more minute without me and that we needed to get married as soon as possible. I was so happy. And we got married, 19 years old, 3 months later.

One of our friends is quoted as saying that it wouldn't last 6 months. I think of her every anniversary and smile a smile of pure satisfaction. 21 years this October. How's that for 6 months?

What's so funny in looking back over that time is how important I thought certain things were and how long time seemed to take. It flies now. 28 days is gone in a blink. A few days...phh! And things that are important are really important. Not self-serving.

I am so thankful to the Lord for the protection that He gave during my teenage years. I could have died, been diseased, you name it. I am so thankful to Him that He put us in positions to ensure that we'd be where we are now. I believe with all my heart that He orchestrated the first few years of our marriage to play out in England. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have the strong relationship that we have now. I am particularly thankful that He drew me to Himself and changed me. I can honestly say that I am not the same person I was. And I am still being changed. Thank You Jesus.

Another Running Commentary on My Week Alone

2010-04-21T09:00:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, I cleaned and organized the utility room and cleaned the kitchen, including the inside of the fridge. The kitchen really needs a deep clean, but I was not up to that task. I did take crockery down off shelves and washed the gross, sticky dust that collects in the kitchen off.

So, while I was cleaning in the kitchen. I realized there was only ONE glass on the counter. And I thought, "I have managed to use one glass all week!" Ususally, by midday, there are 9 glasses on the counter and by evening, 20. I have tried everything from color coding to removing glasses all together to force the boys to use one.glass.a.day. Maybe it's me, I'm just not mean enough to enforce a one glass rule. nah. I'm pretty mean.

Then, I realized I haven't dirtied up a bunch of laundry either. I was wearing the same shorts and t-shirt that I wore on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Yes, they smell a little. I'm going for the juvenile goal of seeing how smelly they can get.

Other things that I have been able to do without the family here:

Play Johnny Horton while I clean
Leave the windows open and not turn the AC on
Take a bubble bath without people banging on the door and asking where something is
Not washed the dishes every day and there is still room in the sink ;-)
Make the bed (SB gets up much later than I do and I am already busy with the day when he gets out)
Drink wine without being harrassed by the kids
Have raspberry Crystal Light without getting red stains on the counter

On the other hand, with out the guys here, I have had to:

Walk the dog.
Take the trash to the curb and haul the cans back (yes, cans, plural, I have been getting rid of some stuff!)
Check the mail
"discover" dog vomit in the boys' bathroom (at least it wasn't on the wood floor)
"discovering" more dog vomit in the boys' bedroom

My time alone was cut short. Hooray! I really missed those guys. I was going to have to add to the second list, Bowling With the Oldies alone. Bowling with the oldies is where we go to a nursing home and help the residents bowl. There is a rubber ball and plastic pins. Our job is pin setter. And beleive me, they WILL hit you with the ball if you're not fast enough.

Now, I have to go grocery shopping because the other thing that I could do while they were gone is eat what we have.

Last Roll of Treasures

2010-04-20T09:54:00.003-05:00

Stuff Mart called to tell me the last roll of 4 year old film was in. They really messed up the actual processing. But I got a picture CD and the pictures are so good! The roll was the end of our family trip to west Texas and the beginning of HRL-B's wedding shower. So, really, it was the second of the 8 rolls that I didn't develop, if we're talking chronologically.

On our way home from Big Bend, we stopped at Balmorhea State Park, that's bal (a as in cat)- more- a (long a).

A few facts about BSP:
It is a popular destination for divers. Yes, in the middle of the Texas desert. Because there is a huge spring fed pool. Due to all the divers, it is the most noisy state park that I have been in. And I have been camping with Cub Scouts.

The pool is 77,053 square feet. That's 1 3/4 acres. It's 25 feet deep with a year round temperature of 72-76 degrees. That's cold, buddy! And it's FULL of some kind of endangered fish, turtles and catfish. And they are big! ick!

Seeing how we were there in April, I did not partake in the swimming. But the rest of our crew did.
I took pictures.

M
This is my favorite!

Me and nephew, half frozen, bringing me rocks.

M. I wouldn't get in there, either, buddy.

Get it over with.

N, in an uncharacteristic nervous state. 25 feet of cold water, no thanks.

Q. Anything N can do, he can do. And don't you tell him he can't.

Happy Birthday, Gramma

2010-04-20T09:06:00.001-05:00

My Papa, mother's father, passed away last October. He was 89. He would have been 90 in February. His wife, my Gramma turned 90 yesterday. One of the reasons I stayed home from the camping/kayaking trip to Big Bend was to go spend her birthday with her.

Yellow Roses are her favorite, as are bluebirds. Yummy cream cheese icing.

Currently, she is living in her Airstream across the road from my parents in a sort of RV park. The Airstream she is living in is the 4th one they owned in the last 30 years. She has lived in an Airstream for 30 years. Not merely traveled, lived.
Recently, she and my parents decided they should rent a house and live together. Pray for my mom. She has no idea what she is entering.

Still surprised.

My Gramma is still doing pretty good. She does have macular degeneration and is slowly going blind. But she moves around well and mostly has her wits about her. She seems to forget short term things. Like if I just hugged her goodbye, or not. It's time. Her mother lived to be 97. I was born on that great grandmother's birthday and my Gramma and Q almost share a birthday. His is the day before hers. And if you're counting, he was in Big Bend for his 12th birthday.

crying.
That's my mom with her arm around her.

My Gramma has been going to my parents' church since my Papa died. The people there love her. People love her everywhere she goes. I bet she has 200+ "kids" across the United States who call her MOM. Everyone at that church does.

Showing the love.
They were telling her how, at various times, they almost blew the surprise.

They planned a surprise party. I was a little concerned about how she would receive it. She is 90. I mean, ever hear of scaring someone to death?
She just cried a while. Way to go. But then, she was honored that these people who have known her for such a short time wanted to give her a party.

Crying still.

I don't know if I have said before, my dad's parents also live in the same RV park, only they live in a house. They came to the party. My parents met when they were 13 and started dating at 16. They were members of the same church. My grandparents were good friends. It has been convenient to have them all in the same place. Not that I have visited often, but it has been convenient.

The couple on the end of the table came from East Texas.
The next couple (standing in blue and sitting in brown) are my dad's parents.
My dad is in the background.
This is almost a pictorial study of that family. oy.

I stayed the night at my dad's parents. My grandmother and I stayed up talking and drinking cranberry juice and vodka. I think my head still hurts. But we did have a nice visit.

Isn't she cute? You know you're old, when you enter "cute" again.

Genetics, a weird and wonderful thing.
I am just seeing the wrinkles around my own eyes.
Guess I'll be getting some eye cream today.

What To Do...

2010-04-18T07:57:00.004-05:00

Be Warned: Posts this week could get nutty.

With that said, I have decided to keep a running list of the movies I am watching without the guys here. To say we have different tastes in movies is a gross understatement. I usually retire to bed when the guys put a movie in. They like action. I need some kind of story line. Please. When I put a movie in, it is usually British or '80'/'90's and the collective sigh from my family produces so much hot air, our roof lifts a couple of inches. I rearranged the Netflix queue to put all my Poirots (ok, 6 of them) at the top. Much to my aggravation, I even had a dream about it the night before they left, SB let the boys take one of the two Netflix movies with them to Big Bend. There is so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to start. But it's done now.

So, in addition to The Biggest Loser, Here is a list of movies I watched this week:

Saturday night: Singles and Who's That Girl sigh...Chris Cornell with long hair...sigh
Sunday night: at my parent's house.
Monday night: started watching As Far As My Feet Will Carry (Take?) Me. It's a German movie about a WWII POW escaping from Siberia. I got bored and turned it off. 3 Episodes of Arrested Development.
Nearly forgot that I also watched Poirot: After The Funeral.
Tuesday night: I caught up on network shows on Hulu. Ugly Betty (the very last one), Dancing With the Stars (I was looking at FB on my phone while I was watching it and one of my FB friends said Kate had been voted off, it made watching her awful dancing much more fun to watch.), House and 2 more episodes of Arrested Development (really funny, not sure why I never watched it before.)
Wednesday night: Several episodes of Arrested Development, then I tried to watch Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, but fell asleep.
Thursday night: Poirot; Murder in Mesopotamia.

Then, they came home. The end.

Day 2, The Week By Myself

2010-04-17T11:24:00.000-05:00

Hey, 40 Winkzz, party at my house this time ;-)

So, all my guys left at 7 on the nose. Funny. SB has a very flexible work schedule. His general hours are 10 am-6pm. I know, grueling. Unless they are dumpster diving, he usually gets there around 11. He has not ever been an on-time person. A fact that used to drive me crazy. When he was in the Air Force, I would just about have an aneurism every day, in a panic over trying to get him up and out the door to work. But give the man a camping trip and he is like a general, making sure everything runs smoothly to get out the door at 7 am.

I started watching the last season of The Biggest Loser a couple of days ago, on Hulu.com. Man! what a lot of drama. Crying and cheering every other minute. As soon as the men-folk left, Iwatched a couple of episodes. My plan was to deep clean one room of the house every day while they're gone. But 7 is awfully early to start cleaning. My other plan was to do some decorating in our room. Since SB got paid yesterday and my grocery bill is going to be half what it normally is with the guys gone for a week, I decided to go shopping for our bedroom, first. Priorities.

And let me tell you, I got some stuff. New sheets, a wall sconce, framed art and silk greenery, a pretty decorative pillow and a toilet paper holder. Can you believe we've not had a toilet paper holder the enitre time we've lived here? 'Bout time, huh?

I had a Chick Fil A chicken salad sandwich and lemonade for lunch, came home and watched another episode of The Biggest Loser. Then, I started cleaning our room. I had taken some before pictures last week, but I accidentally erased them. Here is a picture of the stuff I took out of our room.

Some of it is going to a garage sale, some to the attic and some to the school room/lounge/storage room. I think I am going to calculate how much of our mortgage is being spent on storage in our own house.

Today, I was going to go to a curriculum thing that Mardel is doing for our homeschool group. But I woke up too late. I am on lunch break right now from my closet and bathroom clean. Later, I need to go buy my Gramma's birthday present, she's 90 on Monday. And I have a growing list of stuff we need as a result of cleaning. How does that happen?

I am hydrated and have some food in my stomach, so I guess it's back to the closet.

Field Trip

2010-04-15T18:44:00.000-05:00

We went on a field trip today to th mounted police horse stables. It was very interesting. The officers did a great job. This is the third time I've been on a field trip here, and the first time, they split the kids up by general age group (big kids and little kids.)

This is the only picture that I can post. All the others have opk's (other people's kids)

Guess where this is?
The median of a 6 lane road.
I was sitting at a light and really liked the way the grass made a backdrop for the flowers.

More Treasures

2010-04-14T14:23:00.000-05:00

I picked up 5 more rolls of film from Stuff Mart yesterday.

These are from a canoe/kayak trip that I took with SB, the boys and some of his co-workers. See, I told you I've been canoeing.

M
That's me paddling while SB takes pictures.
Hard, hard labor, I tell you.

Q
I know this picture is grainy, but I love the happiness in his face.

SB
LOVING life

Lunch Break
Me and N

And in case you are wondering, every roll of film that I picked up had this glowing bar across the bottom right corner of every picture. Very nice. Thank God for digital cameras, so you can see the picture and clean the lens off.

Is This Sick, Or What?

2010-04-13T09:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I had a chance to browse Half Price Books while waiting to pick up Q and his friend from a movie. I usually go with all three boys and with a list, or a pile to sell. This time I just browsed, and impulse bought.

I bought a tall book about skyscrapers. $1!

And one of those magnetic poetry boxes. You know, with all the words. This one was cowboy related.

Then, I proceeded to take the sheets of words apart and sort them.

Now, every time I go to the kitchen, I organize it by parts of speech.

pronouns

nouns

prepositions

disorganized verbs

I guess I could have had the boys do that, huh? (slap forehead) See, Christy? That would have been a PERFECT hands-on learning thing.

huh! Take a look at the whole things again. It's like the two sides of my brain, one side trying to be organized and the other side, not.

We could further say that I have all my things (nouns) together, in their places (prepostions). While the people (pronouns) are grouped a bit more loosely. While I have good intentions, my actions (verbs) are a mess. And the rest of it, I just don't know what to do with.

And there's my therapy for the day.

On another note, take a look at our lizard.

Deosn't that look miserable?

What Happens When I Don't Buy Ramen

2010-04-12T12:58:00.002-05:00

You may know that I don't cook breakfast or lunch. I believe it makes the boys better men to make their own breakfast and lunch. Up until last week, they ate cereal and ramen nearly every day for breakfast and lunch. Sure, every once in a while, one of the younger boys was cajoled into making pancakes or eggs or bacon. But mostly, they ate cereal and ramen.

The other day, N accused me of child abuse because I refused to go buy ramen. He put his shoes on at noon and was about to go to Super S and buy some himself. I didn't let him.

Today they broke down and fixed themselves some lunch.

N's.
Left over ground beef and potato from taco night.
He poured bbq sauce in it. Some people think you can eat ketchup on anything.
N eats bbq sauce on anything.
Also, I know it's blurry. I was trying to be covert about taking a picture of his lunch.

Q's
That's tuna in the skillet.
I think he's making a tuna melt.
Maybe he thought frying the tuna first would make it tastier

I didn't get M's. He was too fast. Peanut butter and honey sandwich.

2010-04-12T12:15:00.003-05:00

It is very difficult to bring them in for school.

Today's Math Lesson

2010-04-12T11:28:00.001-05:00

Menu 2nd Week of April

2010-04-12T10:35:00.003-05:00

Last week's menu went very well. I made the Indian Spiced Chicken Pitas for the boys on Friday, when SB and I went on our date. Everyone LOVED the Fragrant Shredded Beef Stew. The chicken and white bean soup was ok and so was the lemon dill chicken. (I changed the menu, in case you're keeping track.) I really hoped for more flavor from the lemon dill chicken, it was a tad disappointing.

So here is this week's menu:
Pasta Primavera (I plan on making homemade pasta, but I will probably break down and go buy some whole wheat pasta)
Japanese Chicken Scallion Rice Bowl
Eating Well Fish Sticks
Curried chicken and pasta salad

There are only four days, because starting Friday, I will be all alone for a whole week. Normally, I would be very very excited, but I am feeling a little sad. God has changed my heart drastically over the last week regarding my husband and kids and I am already feeling lonely.

Normally, when I am alone I eat junk. Instead, I am going to keep up the healthy eating. I'll have to look at it as a chance to make things that they won't eat.

Treasures

2010-04-11T21:23:00.003-05:00

I took 8 rolls of actual film to Stuff Mart last week. Two of them came in. The film had been sitting in the bill basket since 2006. I got my digital camera in November of that year. I knew some of the rolls were from HRL-B's showers and wedding. I had no idea what all the rolls contained. I was pleasantly surprised at the treasured memories, I now have pics of.

Here are a few of my favorites.

THE Pecos River. I don't know why, but I was super impressed at seeing THE Pecos River.

We went to Big Bend NP in April 2006.
Doesn't the color look more like 1976?
I guess that's what happens to film that you let go for 4 years before developing.

One of my favorite sites in Beg Bend.
On one side of the tunnel is desert and the other side is green river valley.
Amazing.

SB thought that was Q in the chair. It's N, 4 years ago. I love genetics.
This is at Seminole Canyon SP. The host didn't like kids. And we were the only people there.

The next section is not for the faint of heart, or animal right's activists. Be warned: Dead deer, and disembodied deer heads.

Noah's first harvest with his bow. 11 years old. That is one proud daddy.

Admittedly, the one eared skull is kinda gross, but look at my boys' smiles. Gorgeous!

I included this for two reasons.
One is to remind myself to always wear sunscreen to ball games.
(I actually sit here, now, with a sunburned face from the game yesterday.)
Two is that SB thought the antlers on the window treatment was high interior design fashion.
Dear God, Please help us.

Nice background SUVs.
M was 5.
Aww...

TWO, count 'em, deer on his first hunting trip! 8 years old.
There is a reason the one on the left has a hinky antler.
It's not something you probably want to know, though.
Again, would you look at that smile?

Now We're Goin' Somewhere

2010-04-11T16:16:00.001-05:00

I realize that I am now over-blogging, if there is such a thing, posting 3 and 4 times a day. This is much more cathartic and creative than Facebook, though, and I don't get irritated by people's statuses and hide them. One day, I'll only have 4 or 5 friends actually showing up on my feed.

My SB and I did go on our date. I did buy him a wedding ring. He grew about 2 sizes since the last wedding ring purchase. It is titanium and it is not as cheap as it said on the website. But that's ok, it really wasn't expensive and we have the money right now, praise the Lord!

I did get all gussied up in my skinny jeans and butterfly shirt, but I felt dumb asking my SB to take my picture, so I didn't get a new profile pic, yet.

I was reading the last post I wrote (not Worship this Week, the one I actually wrote, Would You Go With Me) and I realized it was kinda weird starting with Josh Turner and ending with Suicidal Tendencies. Such is my life. My SB's mom took his Suicidal Tendencies album away when he was a teenager because it worried her. We have it now, and he mostly listens to country music. I just go with the flow, for the most part. I grew up with country music, but I don't necessarily love it. You should have heard the iPods on our date last night. We had some Josh Turner, some other unidentified country crooners, The Smiths, jazz, Siouxsie and the Banshees ... it was pretty eclectic, to say the least.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I left you outside my bedroom window, to the tune of falling luggage. My parents gave me luggage for my 18th birthday. I was not happy about it. But I sure appreciated it when I decided to run away. It was a huge set and this teenage fashionista decided to pack all her clothes.

The sound of the luggage hitting the ground made my sister's mutt dog bark a lot, which woke up my mom who had been sitting up with my sick sister. The plan was that I would get up as usual the next morning and drive off to "school." I would meet my SB in the parking lot of the VFW Hall. But with the dog barking and my mom moving around, I just knew she was going to look out to find my SB climbing over our fence to retrieve my luggage.

So, I swallowed my heart and my guts, and walked down the stairs. My mom looked up and asked me to wait for my dad. It was like she knew what was happening. I told her, "no." and walked out the front door and down the road to the meeting place. My SB wasn't there. He wasn't expecting me for hours. Turns out he was hanging out at the convenience store near my house, just shooting the breeze with the clerk. In the meantime, I was freezing my behind off in the doorway of the VFW Hall.

When he finally got there, I told him that I wanted to grow old with him. He told me something vaguely similar in return. Teenage boys will say anything that teenage girls want to hear.

We went several places over the next week. We went to my friend Stacy's, because she was already out of high school and would be home. We went to a go-cart place to say good bye to our friends. We went to Galveston and Pasadena. But ultimately, we went to California.

Houston, I thought I'd never see it again

We went to California in a 1972 brown Chevy Nova with no grill, because my SB had rear-ended two different people. The wind roared through the car every night and froze our feet until they were numb nubs.

This is to show you my combat boots. What an attractive picture.

I remember stopping in Tuscon, AZ at a diner and I swear to you it was just like Mel's Diner, with Mel and Flo and everything. We went to Mexico, where we were stopped coming back into the US. They kept my SB's knives. Something he is still upset over.

In Mexico (please pardon the smudges)

We stayed in California for a week and a half, then decided that that life was too hard and we should come home.

Long Beach

We had a flat and ran out of money at the same time in Kerrville, TX. I called my dad to tell him we were coming home, but in order to do that, we needed more money. So he wired us $200. I hope I thanked him. I should do that next week, when I see him ... in Kerrville, where they now live, isn't that crazy?

It was March 1988. All the people I had gone to school with most of my life, were still in school. But I felt like I had grown way way beyond them. It was hard relating to them now. I had had a life altering experience and I just knew I'd be getting married any day.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I made a cool playlist to go with thist post, but the website is refusing to give me a code so that I can post it. We took 4 cassette tapes with us, U2's The Joshua Tree (perfect for driving through the desert), Tracy Chapman's self-titled album (perfect for teen angst), Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses (perfect for illicit love, yeah, you heard me), and Love and Rockets' Earth, Sun, Moon (more teen angst). Anyone of the songs off any four of these albums instantly puts me in the passenger seat of that Nova. Kinda prophetic, really, all those albums have driving/car/running away/looking for something songs.

Baseball

2010-04-11T14:47:00.000-05:00

Is this what you call baseball ready?

Itchy nose...the oak pollen is baad.

Hang on...lemme rest a minute.

Stumbling into home after a crazy run around the bases.

Worship This Week, April 11

2010-04-10T20:25:00.000-05:00

Hard Workin'

2010-04-10T09:19:00.000-05:00

This is M, he's 10

He is the new, official lawn, err grass/weed clump, mower

Our yard eats one mower per year

This is last year's mower

I don't hold out much hope for it

But I have a lot of hope for that hard workin' boy

Would You Go With Me?

2010-04-09T14:11:00.004-05:00

Thinking about buying dh a wedding ring has had me daydreaming all week and spending a lot of time on memory lane. I hope you don't mind.

I also keep hearing this song, I tried to find the original post where I posted it, but I couldn't. We had been up the tallest peak in Texas and had grown closer in the process of the struggle up the mountain.

My first boyfriend asked me to "go with him" during 8th grade math. Monique Upton made a sign to broadcast the news to the rest of our class. He and I "went together," mostly to his little brother's baseball games, his house and the beach, until 10th grade. Then, I told him I wanted to "see other people." I was kinda mean sometimes back then.

Really, what happened was there was this boy in our consumer math class, that I thought was super cute and funny. And I wanted to date him. He had a red, curly mullet. Oh dear. I wish I had a picture of him. He smelled good. And he drove a black car, with a t-top. He told me he loved me, gave me a gold chain for my birthday and broke up with me. I was crushed, so my mom took me to the mall.

Two weeks later, I got a call from a guy I don't recall talking to before. He asked me about math homework. We didn't have any classes together. Then, he confessed that he got my number from my friend Beth (he did have math class with her,) lost my number and called every Green in the phone book. Good thing we lived in a small town and my dad's name starts with P. I think I was the 6th call he'd made. Can you imagine?

The boy was SB, my now, dh.

He rode his bike over to my house on Christmas day (the trip was a 20 minute trip in a car) to ask me to "go with him." Our first date was to his cousin's for a birthday party. Our second date was with his sister and her boyfriend, to a park. They parked, while we sat on some monkey bars, drinking wine coolers. Klassy, with a K, I tell you.

We "went together" until the end of summer. Then, I broke up with him because I wanted to date my first boyfriend again. I was mean, I told you. It crushed him. His friends took him to get a tattoo. It says HATE. Nice, huh? I get to look at it every night and know that I crushed him.

Sometime before my senior year, BF#1 decided that he was going to find punk rock fame in South Dakota, maybe it was North Dakota, either way...far, far from me. I cried and cried, until I went to Jack-in-the-Box a few evenings later, and there was SB. Cuter than ever and now driving his own car, that he bought. A big deal, since every other guy I was friends with, not only didn't have cars, or drivers' licenses, they didn't even work.

He asked me where I got my combat boots, I told him I'd take him there, if he wanted. He did :-) And he crashed his car. He says because he was looking at me, not the road.

In the combat boots I took him to buy.

The next time BF#1 called me from N/SD, I told him I was seeing someone, but it wasn't serious. It wasn't when I told him.

Very soon, like probably the next day, SB and I were officially "going together" again. Only now, we had wheels. And boy! did we ever go some places! This is a family blog and sometimes my oldest son reads it, so I won't get into details.

One of the many places we went.

He was so sweet and so romantic. He'd go steal little old ladies' flowers from their flower beds and leave them on my car before school. He'd write me notes and leave them with bags of M&M's on my windshield.

Then...BF#1 decided he was starving to death in N/SD. One of our friends went to visit him and convinced him to come home. My hormone infested brain was torn. So, I began seeing BF#1 in secret. Guess what? teenage guys don't have secrets. And we were all friends. SB, BF#1, the friend who saved him from N/SD, my bff, all friends, in a small town. I have this horrible memory of sitting in BF#1's living room next to SB, with BF#1 in my peripheral vision, watching me and SB. All our friends were there, watching a movie. Probably Repo Man.

SB was waiting for me by my car when I got off work one night in February. The look on his face is tattooed in my memory, like that HATE tattoo. He knew. He was angry, hurt and embarrassed. He'd come to tell me that he was leaving. As in leaving town. He was 17. I was absolutely desperate. And until that moment, I had never, ever thought about marrying anyone. Not even BF#1. But I knew I wanted to be with SB until I got old. And he could not leave.

We talked for hours in that parking lot. Until I finally told him that I'd go anywhere with him...now...tonight. I took admittance to a fashion design school in California and tossed it out the window. I took my senior year and tossed it out the window. I tossed my family and friends out the window. Then, I literally tossed a bunch of brown, vinyl luggage out the window at about 4 am, in order for SB to come pick it up.

SB and me, on THAT day.

And now, I have a really huge mess to clean up in my room. I opened up every box of pictures in there and tossed them on my bed. And I can hear the sound of an electric drill in the backyard. I should go check on that.

Come to think of it, I wonder if that friend who went to rescue BF#1 from N/SD wasn't really going to get him and bring him back to see me with SB. He was good friends with both of them and really didn't care for me one bit. I bet he did. Maybe I should get on FB and thank him ;-p

Ugh! I Really Need a New Picture

2010-04-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

That is a new picture of me on this blog. Dh and I are goin' on a date tonight and I'm gonna get all gussied up. I'll have him take a picture of me. It won't be weird at all.

And I'll be sure and tell you if I got weird looks for being a 40 year old woman in skinny jeans. I bought some. I really wanted some. I like the way they look. It's the teenage fashionista in me. She didn't go away and she rears her dyed, punk head every once in a while. She bought a fashion magazine last week.

Ooh! I know! I'll have him take a full body shot (that didn't sound right) and that will be my new profile pic. Me in skinny jeans, unless, I look ridiculous. Then, you'll just get a head shot, maybe a torso, because I also bought this cute butterfly shirt that I'm going to wear with the skinny jeans. What's happening to me?

We are going on a date, so I can buy him a wedding ring! I'm so excited! We were 19 when we got married. Our 20th anniversary was last October. He weighed about 150 lbs. N weighs more than that at 15. He was skinny. I was too, come to think of it. Suffice it to say, he grew out of his ring. At 19, he was working at Wal-Mart, pushing carts and I was working at a convenience store. We were PO (as in too poor to add the OR.) But we did buy rings. I had to quit wearing mine for a while last year. I took it off to make meatloaf one night, bruised my knuckle up good and could not get it back on. I have drastically cut down the amount of Dr. Pepper that I drink and it fits again. Dh hasn't worn his since Q was born. At least. Maybe longer.

Anyway we were so poor, he got a very thin gold band. I wish I could find it, he's got it squirreled away somewhere. It is yellow gold, with brushed white gold and the tiniest diamond chip. I don't know how much we paid for it. I'm pretty sure we charged it at the mall. That was the first time we started avoiding the phone when it rang, good times...

His ring is so thin, I'd have to pay out the nose to have gold added to it, to size it up a couple of sizes. Besides that, it always made him itchy. He's the reason my poor Q has a perpetual rash on his tummy. He's allergic to the snap on his jeans. Dh is allergic to the alloy in his ring. It was probably 10k. If I could find it, I could verify that.

So I was at stuff mart the other day (the teenage fashionista, that had just purchased the skinny jeans and butterfly top needed pink lip gloss) and I walked past the jewelry counter. The wedding ring sign caught my eye. So I stopped. The first thing I saw was a tag sticking out from one of the men's bands, $59. Fifty-nine dollars? Is that all? Has dh been going without a ring for fiftyninedollars??

In true homeschool mom fashion, I came home and researched mens' wedding bands. Turns out I could get a nice titanium one for $49 and it would be hypoallergenic. Of course he also might lose his finger if he ever needs to be defibb-ed by the city of Austin. Titanium is the strongest metal they make rings out of and a standard ring cutter won't cut it.

So that's why we are going on a date to buy a ring. If I didn't guess his size right, they couldn't resize it. I'd have to exchange it. Which I'm sure they'd do, but gettin' gussied up and goin' on a date is a lot more fun :-)

Oh and our date is NOT to stuff mart, it's to the mall, because that's where teenage fashionistas love to go.

How Many More Bluebonnet Pics Can You Stand?

2010-04-09T08:45:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking that God must have told Pastor D that I blogged about his yard, because he emailed me this yesterday.

Bluebonnets just make me happy :-)

A Texas Tradition

2010-04-08T16:54:00.001-05:00

At this time of year, up and down the highways and byways of Texas, you will see families stopped by the side of the road, taking bluebonnet pictures.

The last one that I took, the boys were 2, 4 and 7. They are just not cooperative anymore.

M and Q took it upon themselves to fulfill the obligatory Spring Bluebonnet Pictures for me :-) They took these with the phone.

One Week

2010-04-08T09:51:00.001-05:00

Next week all my guys are going on a week-long camping trip to Big Bend National Park, to ride the river. I've been canoeing with dh and the boys exactly once. It was hard. Sitting in the sun, paddling, portaging around certain areas. Hard, hard manual labor. And then there are the rapids. They are going with kayaks, which means they'll get to experience a few rapids, instead of portaging around them. No thanks. I've watched movies. I don't need to experience that.

So...I am going to be home alone for a week. (insert whoopin' and hollerin' and ecstatic happy dance) I considered going to the mother-in-love's house. But the stress of thinking about asking someone to come take care of the dog, lizard and two birds is enough to make me just say "no." Something always happens to one of the animals. I feel so bad for the spoiled dog being home alone. I can't take him, m-i-l lives on her sister's property and big dogs are not allowed. She might make an exception for me, but the thought of driving to East Texas with a panting dog does not sound fun.

I am wishing we didn't take spring break back in March. I should have been a bit more forward thinking. Oh well. We'll be doing school the first week of June. I've already trimmed out a lot of material in order to finish by the end of May. Can't trim any more.

What am I going to do all week? Alone? Eat chocolate, chips and dip until I throw up? No. I am going to deep clean one room a day. And spruce up the bedroom. Did I just say "spruce up?" What is happening to me? (Go take a look at the origin of "spruce up." Guess I'll be shopping for leather too ;-p)

I tried to poke at dh a little and told him I was going to paint our room silver and hot pink with black accents. I guess he knows me too well. He didn't even blink an eye lash. I've got a whole week to think about it. I took a quiz on HGTV.com(?could have been BHG) that sought to tell me what my bedroom style was. It asked questions about designers and design magazines. I'm thinking if I knew who the designers were and if I read interior design magazines, I wouldn't need this quiz. Hello? Can we get a quiz for plain old housewives?
Such a quiz would say, "You are a slovenly, unkept woman. Your style is hillbilly, put up deer skulls and hang plaid drapes."

Here's a completely unrelated photo. Or not. Uploader is giving me fits. and rather than delete the text that reads, "Here's a completely unrelated photo", I want you to know that I tried.

MMM Good Stew

2010-04-07T10:07:00.001-05:00

Last night I made the Fragrant Shredded Beef Stew from Eating Well.com.

OH.EM.GEE. was it good! In fact, dh told me this morning that he wished he had some to take to work.

And for the first time in ~~a hundre~~ a long time, I did not cook enough for an army and there was only enough for each of us to have one serving. One of my our problems is that certain people in this house eat a lot of food. So I cook a lot of food. But it's hard to gauge when they're going to eat a lot, or not. We end up with a lot of left-overs that go bad in the fridge. I am the only one who will eat them for lunch. Well, now the boys will, because I'm not buying them ramen any more.

The recipe calls for flank steak, I bought cheap chuck roast. No one here knew any different.
I also omitted the canned jalepenos. I had fresh, but not everyone here loves spicy. I subsituted the sherry vinegar for regular vinegar. I know, practically a crime. Remember that this experiment is to eat healthy for the same $$ as unhealthy.

The recipe also calls for the entire thing to be cooked in the slow cooker. I cooked the roast by itself in the slow cooker, on high for about 2 hours. I trimmed all the fat off and transferred it to a dutch oven on the stove, where I simmered it for about 2 hours.

After about an hour and a half in the dutch oven, I looked in the pot and didn't think it looked substantial enough for my guys, so I added 10, quartered new potatos. Adding the potatos was perfect. Besides, who ever heard of stew with no potatoes?

Now, if I were a really good blogger, I would have remembered to take a picture. But with running people back and forth to baseball practice, I was starving and taking a picture was the last thing on my mind.

You'll have to be satisfied with the Eating Well picture, imagine it with potatoes and in cheap Correl bowls that dh bought because he didn't think our bowls were large enough. That's another post.

Here's an unrelated picture, anyway...

Isn't it idyllic? It's at my pastor's house. He has a lot of umm...stuff in his yard. This was last week. I'm sure the bluebonnets are super thick now. I'm taking a drive to Johnson City on Saturday and can't wait to see the fields of bluebonnets! I heart Texas :-)

Menu, Week 1

2010-04-05T08:51:00.001-05:00

I have always made menus. I really don't know how people go grocery shopping withhout them. A menu is just a plan and plans are good.

Breakfast choices are yogurt with fruit and, or granola. We have mangos (M didn't believe me when I told him that I bought mangos,) berries, and pineapple. There are also eggs, toast and turkey bacon (also processed I realize, baby steps.)

Lunch choices are finishing the remaining lunch meat that we have, PB&J, or left overs. They LOVE ramen, but I didn't buy any.

Dinner:
Indian Spiced Chicken Pitas
Fragrant Shredded Beef Stew
Fish Tacos
Pasta Primavera (I'm going to make the pasta, I have a machine that hasn't seen the light of day for 5 years.)
Chicken and White Bean Soup

All these recipes are on EatingWell.com I realize that some of the reicpes call for special ingredients like pastry flour. The point of the experiment is to prove that you can eat healthy food for the same as fat, processed food. In those cases, I will use regular flour. I know from watching Alton Brown that different flours have different qualities, blah blah blah, we're not setting out to be gourmets, just healthy.

First Trip to the Grocery Store

2010-04-05T08:39:00.002-05:00

Friday was such a hard day. N had a drive time at the driving school and we had a park day time scheduled for our homeschool group. We have to go, I am El Presidente, now. I was expecting some potential new member families. They didn't come. And it rained. So we went to McDonald's with one of the two families that did show up. Her boys are little, mine are not. We went into the playscape area. Where my boys proceeded to knock cute, little girls over and get yelled at by their mamas. I lost phone reception for half the day, which had me on edge for some reason. I needed to get to the grocery store and was not feeling it, at all.
I ended up bringing the boys home and I returned "to town" to brave the early holiday weekend grocery shoppers.
Dh came home from a shopping trip, himself. To Cabelas. I was also feeling hormonal and we got in an argument about one of his purchases. One. Out of a LOT. Hormones make you insane. I briefly considered checking myself into a hospital.

So my grocery trip...I spent $5 more than my budget. I got suckered by the multiple varieties of bulk trail mixes. Since I am not buying processed food, therefore no chips and packaged cookies, we needed some snack food. So, I bought about $15 worth of bulk nuts, dried fruit and carob chips. Otherwise I would have come in under budget.

Each boy has asked me at least once if I went to Whole Foods. I did not, I went to H.E.B., a regular grocery store.

Oh, and when I say I am not buying processed food, I did buy plain yogurt, which was processed somewhere. I bought the store brand, not a fancy organic one. I bought three boxes of cheap granola. That was also processed and probably has a lot of sugar. But hopefully less than the Capt'n Crunch and Fruity O's that dh broguh home last week.

I did buy a lot of produce, fish and chicken parts on sale, flour to make bread, and the already mentioned bulk trail mixes. I decided it would be bad reading for me to post the whole list. Aren't you glad?

My Last Trip to the Grocery Store

2010-03-30T10:23:00.000-05:00

For years, I did all of my grocery shopping at Super Wal Mart. Everything we needed was at Wal Mart and I didn't have to take the boys from store to store, which is a pain.

A couple of months ago, I started looking at the grocery store sale papers and I decided to make my menu according to sale meat at H.E.B. H.E.B. is a Texas grocery store chain. H.E.B. stands for Howard E. Butts, a fact my boys point out constantly. Nothing is as funny as hinies and their smells and sounds. H.E.B. also has lots of coupons.

I had been spending about $230 at Wal Mart every two weeks. That's when dh gets paid. I buy everything then. Which means I don't buy a lot of fresh produce.

That first week, shopping at H.E.B., I saved about $50. So, I've been shopping there ever since and making my grocery list according to the sale meat and their meal deals. A meal ldeal is buy this item and get all these items free. The deal two weeks ago was a 2lb. bag of shrimp and you got all the fixings for shrimp pasta and sides, for free.

Just to be sure, two pay days ago, I went to Wal Mart and spent $240. So H.E.B. it is. They have cheaper meat, fresher produce and more variety.

I have just been through my cabinets and fridge/freezer. I have a lot of food. I also have a lot of left overs, which means I am cooking too much food and wasting a lot of money.

This first menu is going to be a mix of exisiting, processed food and fresh, non-processed food as I go about emptying the cabinets.

Another thought: even though I have a black thumb, I am thinking about planting some herbs. I already have some rosemary. It's super hardy and no one can kill it. I had some basil for the longest time. One of Q's friends grew it for a science project last year. I just threw it out. I was finally dead.

Alright! It's time to leave for Tuesday classes.

Factoring in Dh's Health Concerns

2010-03-30T10:09:00.001-05:00

A couple of thoughts: Dh is on Coumadin through the end of June. He developed a blood clot during recovery from shoulder and elbow surgery last summer. He quit taking the blood thinner and developed another one. He is also taking Lipitor for high cholesterol.
Two things: One he needs to avoid foods that are high in vitamin K until July. These foods are listed here. Basically, green, leafy veggies.
Two, it would be great to know how the diet at home affects his cholesterol. He has a terrible diet. Think policeman. Enough said. Maybe I can convince him to reduce Dr. Pepper and take his lunch 4 days out of 5.

My Own Experiment

2010-03-30T08:45:00.000-05:00

While my Scouts were away this weekend, I watched about 30 hours of Netflix and Hulu. It was nice because dh wasn't here sighing over my choices and the boys weren't thinking they have a "right" to the computer. I just watched what I wanted to watch.

One of the programs I watched was the documentary, No Impact Man. I'd read Colin Beavan's blog while he was doing the project. While I completely disagree with most people who do things for the sake of the environment, I found the project completely fascinating. They lived in NYC for a year without using motorized transportation (except for the trains they took to upstate New York to meet some farmers), they created as little waste as they could, and went 6 months without electricity. The documentary was just as fascinating as reading his thoughts had been.

The thing that I was most impressed by, was how their eating habits were changed. They only bought food that had been grown within 250 miles. So they bought fresh, seasonal produce. They did not eat meat, because (they said) cattle emit too much gas into the atmosphere. At the beginning of the documentary, his wife admits to being addicted to fructose corn syrup and other processed foods. She did not know how to cook. They usually ate take away food from restaurants. She had had some blood work done and found that she was pre-diabetic. By the end of the project that was reversed.

I have been thinking a lot about food. We eat a huge amount of processed food. While we are generally healthy people, I do have a thyroid condition. My numbers show me as being hypo-thyroid, but my body looks hyper-thyroid. I have never been to an endocrinologist to find out all the deatils, but I imagine that it has to do with eating habits. They're bad.

Every morning, I have one large cup of coffee or two small ones with cream and white sugar. No food. Around 10:30 am, I am usually very hungry and I will eat some left-overs. Then, I might eat snacks until supper. Snacks would be chips, pretzels, microwave popcorn. Oh, and soda, dh and I drink a lot of soda. Supper is the only meal that I actually cook. Most of the food we eat is processed. Last night we had what we call burger pockets. I made stuffed hamburgers (with colby and jalepeno) and put them in refrigerator bisuits. We had waffle fries as a side.

The other side of the food thing is money. We hear over and over that the poor can't buy helathy food, it's too expensive. I just don't think this is true. I think that healthy food can be purchased at a regular grocery store for as little as processed food.

The reason we buy processed food is convenience. It's fast. Stuffed burgers could be done with homemade, whole wheat biscuits (ok I don't think whole wheat biscuits exist, but you know what I mean,) but it would require more time on my part to prepare dough.

So, I'm going to do my own experiment. One month at a time.

I'm going to try to buy local, in season produce as much as possible. There is a farmer's market up the road. I will not limit us to that, though, I will also buy produce from H.E.B. (a Texas grocery store chain.) I will educate myself on what is in season and try to stick to that. We will not be going vegetarian. But I am not going to buy any more processed meat. I have been wanting to learn to make sausage, so this is my chance. We are going to eat kosher (no pork, shellfish or non-scaled fish). Not because I think we have to, but because if it was God's idea, there must be a reason.

I'm going to make our bread products. and when I say I, I mean to have the boys learning to use the bread machine and I think they will enjoy using the grinder to make sausage.

I am going to find a more healthy way to consume coffee.

And I intend to show that it doesn't cost more. The hard part is going to be getting dh off Dr. Pepper. Or at least not have it in the house.

I'm going to try to replicate my last grocery bill. And compare it to the next grocery bill. I will post websites and recipes that I use. I think the first step is going to be to use up all the existing food in the cabinets and fridge. I buy every two weeks and so it is usually low by Wednesday before payday. Today is Tuesday and it's not so low.

Next post last grocery bill. That should be fascinating reading.

Heh!

2010-03-25T09:09:00.000-05:00

Blogger installed this jazzy (got that from my friend KC) designer. It allows you to make all kinds of changes in your template. Go check out my homeschool blog (in the sidebar under "My Homeschool Blog). Pretty cool, huh? I love this background that I put here yesterday, but I will be needing to fiddle and play with this.

That's Not Kosher

2010-03-25T08:45:00.001-05:00

This lady from church called me at 9:45 last night. You answer the phone when church people call you that late at night, something might be wrong with someone.

Something was wrong! She was in a panic because her 20 year old son was butchering a hawg (not to be confused with hog) in their driveway, would dh come help him? Sorry, dh is still at work and not feeling well.

aren't those babies cute? (I think adding baby pics to every post is going to be my new thing)

She was scared the police were going to drive by. It's not illegal to butcher a hawg in your driveway, I tell her. Heck! Out here, they might help him out. If they stop he should offer some meat for help. But the blood and the guts! This woman is going to nursing school, lol. Her husband wouldn't help him, said the kid brought it home, he has to clean it. That is true. Think of it as a right of passage, I tell her. She said it stinks. I said I know, that's why I asked dh not to kill any more hawgs and bring them home.

To try and make her fell better I told her this story.

When dh was first a patrolman, we lived in a townhouse style apartment in south Austin. He worked nights. He came home one night around 3 am. It's always kind of a scary thing when policemen come home when they're not supposed to. I had been asleep, but the huge amount of racket he was making woke me. He walked through the downstairs to the back, sliding glass door, threw N's plastic wading pool around, then walked back out. For a long time I could hear him on the back patio talking and making some unidentified noise. So, I got up. And what did I see? Dh on the back patio with a deer strung up in the tree, hanging over my sweet baby's plastic wading pool, now coated with blood. "What the foul filth and foul are you doing?!" I wasn't a Christian then, and cussed a lot more than I do now.

Turns out some fancy lady in west Austin had hit it with her car and called the police. Because that's what fancy west Austin ladies do. Dh was in the area and responded to the call. In an instant he called his sergeant to take a few hours off, tossed it in the trunk of the cruiser and brought it home. He'd called his dad in California (it was only 1 am there) to get help. This was also before we knew anything about butchering game. He gutted it, quartered it and because our next door neighbor was a night owl with a huge deep freezer in her living room, bagged it and put it in her freezer.

He took a shower and went back to work. Those were personal hours that he took off, in case you were wondering.

The next day, he spent a while on the phone trying to find a processor who would process the meat out of season. He did and they charged us an arm and a leg, which is why we do all our own processing now. The only thing I can't do is make sausage. I'm learning. Last season I found a real good recipe. Unfortunately, it called for too much salt and it was inedible.

Back to my late night caller. Yes, 9:45 is late for me. Besides, I was still waiting for dh to get home so we could watch Lost on Hulu. It was awesome, by the way. It was all about the mysterious Richard Alpert. LOTS of questions were answered.

She asked if that was supposed to make me feel better? No, but it makes me laugh. I told her to put on some white noise and go to bed.

*In previewing this I realized that I have made myself out to be both a liar and a poacher. Please forgive me. It's a good story and it's completely true. I have another story involving dh and some venison steaks. It makes me out to be a shack up honey and dh a thief. It's a scream! Hey! we all have B.C. lives.

Regular Blogging Vs. Facebooking

2010-03-24T20:24:00.000-05:00

I was looking through a friend's blog today. And just being amazed at how she posts almost every day. Even though she says she doesn't.

I could post every day. Something happens every day that I could post about. There is always some word study floating around in my head that I have a desire to share. Right now it's "salt."

I even have my camera out of the bag and sitting, right here in front of me.

Instead, I resort to a one line, FB status update, "M and Q went to catch turtles." There was a great story. And the picture...Oh! you should have seen the picture I didn't take. They were wheeling their bicycles out the front door (we keep them in the school room, not outside - there's a good blog post too) with fishing nets in hand. M was holding the big one, the one dh bought for deep sea fishing. It was priceless.

There's also the story about the patio table frame sitting on my deck right now. actually, that will eventually make a blog post to make my sweet mother-in-love proud.

Facebooking is like writing junk food and blogging is like a meal...or something. You know where I'm going. That's as deep as I can get with visions of Kate Gosselin on DWTS, stumbling around in my head and antsy-ness over waiting for dh to hurry up and get home so we can watch Lost. I think they're going to tell us how old Richard is!

More blogging fodder, my TV viewing habits.

Maybe I can enter blogging topics on my iPhone calendar and sit down and do that every morning instead of seeing what people on FB aren't doing at 7:00 am.

And because no good blog post is worth anything without a picture, here's one from the files:

Moe at 4 months old. HRL-B had it on a disc or her computer and sent it to me. I'm finally doing something with it. Is that not the most awesome bunch of chins you ever saw??

Where Have I Been?

2010-03-23T10:19:00.000-05:00

Not blogging, obviously. Also not playing Farmville. I got a little obsessed. So obsessed, in fact, that I created a second FB account and acquired 240+ "friends" from all over the world, teen girls in France, middle aged Italian men, teen, Muslim boys. Okay, it was weird. But I was desperate. On my "real" FB account, only 5 of my real friends were regular FV players and you can't exactly get your barn built, or acquire enough gold for Blarney castle with only 5 farmies. I had 194 FV neighbors on my fake account. I logged on several times a day, because it ate me up to think of all the eggs and collectibles that I wasn't getting off the feed. Then, I'd get on my "real" account and just be depressed at how cute it was and how it wasn't progressing. I made level 30 in a matter of weeks on my fake account. It took me a year to get to 40 on my real account.

One day, dh said something that embarrassed me, so I decided to quit. Both FV accounts. I deleted the "fake" FB account. And then deleted the FV app off my real account. An hour later, I was clicking "block this application" from a gift request. I have been FV free ever since. And I don't miss it.

Little League baseball started three weeks ago. I went through my "start of the season blues." We have a lot of Scout friends on this team. We all sit together during practice. It has a potential to be fun. Only thing is...the talk of the first three practices was centered around middle and high school sports. I have nothing to contribute and it makes me super introspective and somewhat depressed, wondering if I'm doing something to harm my child by homeschooling him. Y'all I've been homeschooling for 10 years and the boys have been doing stuff with the same small-town public school kids for 10 years. When am I going to get over it?

I took N to the doctor because he has been complaining of severe knee pain since the middle of wrestling season. Not sure why it took us so long. Me just being chicken mom, I think. We went to our primary, she sent him for an MRI. The MRI showed an "unusual bone contusion." My dad, who still thinks N is going to get into the Naval Academy, was worried that N would have to have knee surgery and that would destroy his military career. Turns out it is still the Osgood-Schlatter's disease. And the ortho sees no reason to bar him from any activity, just take anti-inflammatory meds and rest when it hurts.

We got a large escrow refund check in the mail. I love it when that happens. Of course I'd love it more if our actual monthly payment was less. But thank you for returning my money, anyway.

That very day, I came home from running errands (I hate that phrase, BTW) to find Q playing a game on the computer and complaining about a pop-up. So I opened it up and lo and behold! there were 33! viruses on our computer. THIRTY THREE?!?! How does that happen? Of course our anti-virus software was expired. So it told me they were there, but couldn't do a darn thing about them. I called dh to tell him that I would need some of that escrow refund to go buy new anti-virus software.

The boys are currently working on a reality game show of their own. They each contributed $1.50 (low-budget) to the prize money (sorry, there's not a lot I would do for $4.50). The game is to see who can live outside the longest. We told them they couldn't start until summer. Where do they come up with these things? They typed up rules. An example is that you have to be more than 25 yards from the house. Q is planning on trapping food. Ick! M is saying he's willing to eat grubs. Double ick! N says he's taking all the Mountain House (backpacking freeze dried food) stuff with him. This boy won't miss a meal, I guarantee it.

Spring break was last week, it started and ended with cold, wet weather. I know that as homeschoolers we could take spring break, or any break, whenever we feel like it. But in order to see their ps friends, we take it when they take it. I didn't get any good pictures because the boys all went off to their friends' houses. I love quiet. I can't wait for summer camp :-) We did try to go to our, now full, lake. The water was about 58 degrees. We didn't stay long.

That pretty much sums up the last three weeks. I have been recycling worship music, so I haven't even had that to post. I can't promise anything. Until next time.

Worship This Week 2-28

2010-02-27T16:12:00.001-06:00

Ha! I'm pretty excited! I found a worship leader's website where they ask worship leaders to post that week's set list! On the one hand, it is such a comfort to know that other churches are using the same music we are using. On the other hand, it is a wonderful treasure resource. Maybe I'll even post my list this week. Won't they be surprised. They're all young, hip dudes and I'm an older stay-at-home-homeschool-mom. heh.

I chose the songs before I heard the news about the earthquake in Chile. It's so weird when that happens.
Anyway...this first song, I really wanted to use, but I think it's too fast for our congregation. Yes, I know we used the Jesus Culture songs a few weeks ago. that didn't go well. I don't have to be told something twice. Trust me.
If you don't listen to any of these other songs, listen to this one.

THIS is what we went with.

What's That Word?

2010-02-25T10:30:00.000-06:00

There's a techy computer word for the info I'm about to pass on, but I'm not sure what it is. I don't want to appear to be a moron, so I won't even type the word I think it is. That's when commenters come out of the woodwork to prove that you are, indeed, an uneducated idiot.

A couple of weeks ago, everyone was complaining about the new Facebook layout. I wanted to tell them to get a grip, but they are my friends and you don't talk to friends that way. At least I don't. Most of the time.

Then I noticed that I was seeing advertisements in the sidebar. I hadn't seen ads on Facebook in a year. I use the Firefox web browser and they have this cool, little add-on called AdBlock Plus. One person told me to upgrade both Firefox and AdBlock. Done. Not working. AND horror, of horrors! My super-cool, feed reader add-on was GONE! Around 50 feeds -poof! gone!

I have a iGoogle page, so I slowly, started adding feeds, that I could remember, to that. But it's a pain. I have to log on to iGoogle and it's clunky. The feeds are in these large boxes. The Sage Feed Reader was sleek. You clicked a button on the browser and the feed reader opened in a side bar. Click again and it ran through all the feeds in a minute. Then, I could go through and read to my heart's content.

Then, Firefox began crashing repeatedly throughout the day. We still use IE for Netflix and Hulu. I updated it yesterday to IE8. And glory, glory hallelujah! They have a built in RSS reader, AND they imported all my bookmarks from Firefox AND behold! All my feeds from the Sage reader were there!

I can rest now, I am back in blog heaven.

Three Boy Scouts

2010-02-23T11:17:00.000-06:00

So this post may diminish the respect you have for me. But it's a great story and I've got to tell it.

We attended our last Blue and Gold Banquet for Cub Scouts last night, can a get an amen!? No no, we love our Pack, we have made some great friends and learned some wonderful things. We also did our second and last cross-over ceremony as we moved M from Webelos into Boy Scouts. Can I get another witness?!

Yesterday was a gorgeous day. I really think God sent it, because it has been cold and wet, because it's winter, ya know. But it was like a perfect spring day yesterday. And a good thing, because we have our ceremony outside. The Scout Master dresses as Sitting Bull and the boys walk down this hike and bike trail through the woods where they have Native American music playing along the way. It sounds like that sample cd machine they have at Wal-Mart by the candles. Then, they get to this bridge over a dry creek where the Troop has a tee pee set up and each patrol is lined up to receive their new member. It's a pretty neat.

All the parents and the rest of the pack line up at the end of the trail, cameras waiting.

The boys get there and Sitting Bull starts talking, using indian signs. Our SM was an anthropologist and that was his specialty. He really gets into it. But it's a little long. So, I'm standing there taking pictures, trying not to get the backs of people's heads and I see dh move quickly to his left out of the corner of my eye. I lowered the camera to see where he went, I looked down and saw the bottom's of M's shoes pointing to the sky.

They did not need me. There were about 20 people around him. The man behind him is a commander with Austin - Travis County EMS, plus they're all Scouts. They should know what to do when a person falls out.

Plus, I have this internal switch that switches me over into super control mode in situations like this. When all the moms around me realized it was M, they start saying, "It's M! are you going over there? Oh no! aren't you worried? Aren't you going over there?" One mom got kinda irritated with me and said, "You are too calm!" Then, I said -and here's where you may lose respect for me- "Oh! I should be taking pictures, huh?" Yes, I did.

He came to immediately, and our wonderful EMS pal was looking at his eyes and dabbing his lips with ice and askiing him if he knoew who the indian was. LOL! Yes, he did! He figured if M knew that, he was good to go.

He got up and they went ahead and crossed him over. Bless his heart, look at him, he still looks wobbly.

For the rest of the banquet, M acted silly to prove he was okay. Poor kid, everyone was worried about him and kept asking him if he was okay.

But it's all over and he'll be able to tell his kids when they cross over how not to lock their knees while Scout Master T does the long ceremony. (I do believe he will still be around.)

2010-02-16T13:08:00.000-06:00

"Mo-om! Q is using the iPhone on the toilet."
"Is there a rule against that?"
"No! He's going to drop it in the toilet or get feces on it, or something."
"I don't think he will."
"Well, he won't give it to me."
"Do You need to go to the bathroom?"
"No, I just want it."
"Well, you're not done with your writing."

Church Music

2010-02-13T13:27:00.002-06:00

I have been feeling a need for a while to 'splain myself. Particularly regarding the sets of worship music that I post here. Plus, I love telling a story.

We joined this church in 2002. As soon as we walked through the doors, we knew it was home. Does that mean it was, or is, perfect? No. There are people there. Heck! We're there.

The music was average.

Then, a couple came who had some professional music experience. It was better.

Then, our pastor resigned. After that, we sensed God was going to start stripping man-made things away. The music was the last to go.
The music, quite frankly, sucked. Sorry, if that offends, it's the truth.

One Sunday, our acting pastor asked me if I wanted to lead worship. Uh, no. I have no experience, I'm not musical. What are you thinking? There was no worship band. Nothing. CDs. That's what we had.

I can't explain what happened during that week, but I found myself calling him the following Saturday and telling him that I would do it. That was three years ago.

I approached leading worship the same way I do everything. I studied it. I am like a caricature of the Bill Cosby "natural childbirth" routine.

Then, I got a bit carried away. I was choosing inappropriate music and just generally making a mockery of being led by the Spirit. No one said, or did, anything. Until...

One day, they told me they were bringing another lady on to help me. I was excited to be part of a team. The thing was, there was no teamwork, and I felt as if something had been taken away from me. I distinctly remember one Sunday morning -yes, Sunday morning- they handed me a CD with a song on it that was in a very high key. I told Pastor D, "I am NOT singing this song." He looked me in my eyes, and said, "You'll sing it. You'll sing it up there, or in your seat, but you'll sing it." I chose up there. Where I proceeded to cry the entire worship service. I had one of those times where you hear the Voice of God. He told me that He was going to work everything out of me in front of the entire congregation.

This is the song.

For the next year, I walked around in a funk. I continued to go through the motions of "being on the worship team." But I wasn't worshiping. I was filling a position. After a while, the pain of having something ripped away subsided and I resigned myself to the job at hand. I even allowed myself to enjoy it.

Then, my team left. Suddenly, I had the job of arranging music back. Now, I didn't want it. I spent the next few months, dreading, even hating the task of picking music. And every time it came up, I let people know about it.

One Tuesday night, I was telling a roomful (in our church that equals about 7 people) of people how irritated I was over the whole situation. I was sat down (in a figurative sense) and told that I had now earned the position, that I was chosen for the position. Through it, I realized worshiping God is a privilege! Leading His people in worship is a privilege!

I embrace it, now. But not too tight. It's not mine, it's His. I enjoy listening for His voice and paying attention to His leading. Most of all, I submit. Submitting is a good thing, it puts the responsibility on someone else's shoulders. And I enjoy sharing what we're doing.

Oh! There is still no band. Just Cd's. And I don't stand in front of the congregation anymore. I worship in my seat with my family. I just arrange the music.

Church Music

2010-02-13T12:53:00.000-06:00

Ok, we are not doing this song tomorrow, I'd love to...but we won't. I'll be doin' it in my heart.

THIS is what we're doing. It's Valentine's Day, what do you expect? Even I can do themes.

Boy Story

2010-02-05T13:48:00.000-06:00

I am a homebody. I like being at home. I like my home. I particularly like when I can be home alone. It does happen occasionally.

We have had to be out of the house every day, for two weeks. Dh has been working long long hours. Getting home between midnight and 4. I am just weary.

I'm not going to spend this whole post whining, I promise. In fact, you'll probably find it all very funny. Sick.
Today is payday, which means bill paying and grocery buying. Normally, the boys love to come. They didn't want to today. Which is fine, because I would rather drive around to and fro by myself anyway. They texted me the whole time I was gone.

"The dog needs to go out." (They have strict instructions to never open a door when we are not home. And the dog can't be trusted with a boy, he will run as fast as he can through the fence if he thinks one of the runts of the pack is in charge.)
"We need milk zap" (I don't know what milk zap is.)
"When are you getting home" (About a thousand times. Ok maybe three times.)

When I finally got home, I was greeted by, "Q tried to break my iPhone."

Sigh...I just love it when they bicker. It makes me so happy.

I had everyone sit at the table and started with Q. "What is he telling me?"

"Blah, blah, blah, He grabbed me, blah, blah, blah, sniffle, sniffle (he always does that for effect, I never fall for it) so I threw water on him."

I turn to N, "You are not supposed to put your hands on your brother, why did you?"

"I thought he blah blah blah, so I took the mouse from him." (It's a $70 wireless mouse that my m-i-l bought for my dh.)

sigh...if they ever break that mouse, dh will burst something.

To Q, "Why did you choose to throw water on N?" (As opposed to whack him, or a throw a shoe, or something. Water? What is he? The Wicked Witch of the East?)

"Because if I tried to hit him, he'd kill me."

And he won't kill you if you destroy his iPhone with water? (N purchased his own.)
Sigh...what to do???

"Everyone bring me all the phones and iPods and PSPs and the mouse." I put them in my room.

"I know why you are acting this way. You're bored. So I will fill your time."

And I put everyone to work.

Minutes later...I hear the bathroom door shut. It's the bathroom that Q is supposed to be cleaning. He comes to tell me there is nothing to clean the sink with. I tell him where the comet and the sponges are. He goes back to the bathroom to discover that he locked the bathroom door, from the inside. Because ...sigh... N's room is across the hall and he doesn't want N watching him clean the bathroom. To open the door, you have to get a tiny, flat-head screwdriver. I keep one around for just such an occasion. but we can't find it, because they've carried it off somewhere. Probably to stab one another in the night.

Guess what? The dog was in the bathroom. The dog that thinks he has to be by my side every waking moment. He's whining, because he can hear me, but he can't see me.

When I go down the hall, I can smell fire. Yes, fire. I, very stupidly, allowed N to buy fire crackers around New Year's. About 1200 of them. He's been setting them off, one or two a day since then. He also has been lighting things on fire in his room. I have taken matches and lighters away from him every single day.

"I just really don't have time for this," I say to the 15 year old boy. "Every day, blah blah blah..." Put it ALL in my room.

Dog's still whining.

We finally got the dog out with a Leatherman tool.

I'm tired and all I would really like is to just be home alone for a while, eating chocolate and looking at the new curriculum. Because I just love having my boys at home.

Nothing Changes Much

2010-01-27T17:22:00.000-06:00

Not sure where this post is going to go quit yet.

I saw a person's picture on FB that I knew when I was growing up. This person had band pictures on their page. I wasn't in band. I was in 6th grade, but I was so bad, I was in the second to last chair all year long. The 7th and 8th grade pictures were in front of the junior high that I went to.

I remembered that I had wanted to look on Google Maps at the junior high because I had a dream that included the field that was next to the junior high. I wondered if it was still there. The field is still there. But then, I had to go look at the house we moved into when I was 12. I followed South Street all the way to Moller. Google Maps didn't have street view of my street. But I could "stand" on the corner of Moller and College and see the end of my driveway. My parents sold the house several years ago. I don't know if I'll ever see it again. I can see the additions that my dad made to the house by the roof line.

So then, I had to go look at the house I lived in from age four until 12. It's labeled as County Road somethingC/Stadium. I remembered there being a county road number, but not the C. And there is street view of that street. We loved this house. There was a church next door. The church wanted to buy our property (2 acres+ the house) for a parsonage. My parents felt like they "should" because it was a church. Now, we all agree it was dumb. I learned to ride my bike in that church parking lot. On street view I could see that the ditches were full of water, how typical of Alvin. They didn't seem as deep as I remembered. The tree I loved to climb was still there. And so was the extra driveway that my dad put in for my Gramma and Papa. When I was 8 they moved into an Airstream. They traveled all over for 30 years. And when they were in town, they'd park in the driveway that my dad built for them. For a while my Uncle Mike lived in a trailer on the driveway. All of the trees were so big. Sadly, all the rose bushes were gone, including this giant one that took up nearly all our front yard. When I was little the house had blue gray slate siding. It now has what looks like yellow vinyl. When I was little, my dad closed in the garage and put in another front door (I don't know why, he did stuff like that.) We had two front doors. They are both still there, which made me smile. You'd have thought when they put new siding on, they might have closed one of the doors up.

I could see the house where the vicious dog lived that would chase me halfway down to my friends' house on my bike. Those people had a kid that would just walk right into our house without knocking. It freaked my mom out every time. I could see my friends' Melanie and Tracy's house. It looked exactly the same. But the house across the street where we used to go jump on their trampoline was completely obscured by bushes.

I looked at my friend, Christi's house. I couldn't remember the street, but I remembered how to get there on my bike, so I just traveled that route on the map. It looked the same. I remember sleeping in their camper and spying on her "fine" neighbors.

Sorry, HRL-B. I could not see your house at all. No street view and the trees obscure the view of the house. Tell your brother to get them cut, so the next time Google wants to take a picture we can see the house.

My mom thinks Google Maps is part of a conspiracy to spy on people. (Looks like the view of my current home is at least 2 and a half years old. So that can't be it.) I sure am glad for it, though. It's fun to go look at places you used to live.

Other places I looked at:
Quail Hollow Apartments on Rosharon Road
92 B Bridge St., Brandon, Suffolk

Now, I wish I could figure out how to capture the images on my computer so I could show you.

May As Well Try

2010-01-27T11:37:00.000-06:00

I managed to get my homeschool blog updated, so I think I will attempt that here, as well.

Life has gotten quite full suddenly. It happens like that, doesn't it? I took on being president of our homeschool group. And I accepted an invitation to preach on education at our church. Thank goodness we have a short trip to East Texas immediately following. My brain is going to be mushy after the next business meeting and the message.

I have not exercised this week. I haven't been able to get up early. I have kept up the Bible reading and prayer. That counts more, anyway, right? The last time I did exercise, I lay down on the mat in the middle of the routine and napped. I am sticking to one cup of coffee in the morning and I am drinking diet DP, instead of Coke. And that's been cut down to once or twice a week. I am not eating a whole bag of peanut butter M&M's in a sitting. I spread it out over a week ;-) Gives me something to look forward to. The boys and I have gotten a bit off our chore routine. Could have something to do with not exercising. So I am back to avoiding their bathroom and washing a humongous pile of dishes every morning. That's definitely not good.

That's it in a thin-skinned pecan nutshell. I have lots and lots to do, studying, cleaning, planning, choosing, teaching and instead I'm blogging and waiting for my FarmVille crops to be ready to harvest.

Means of Salvation

2010-01-21T14:07:00.000-06:00

N has this tiny cyst in his earlobe. Dh and I have been telling him that it's a zit. All three boys + dh had physicals for BSA today. N said he was going to have our Dr. look at his ear, since we didn't believe there was anything wrong with his ear.

She squeezes his earlobe and says it's a cyst and rolls away on her rolly chair. No big deal.

In the car, on the way home, N was feeling his ear and saying he thought he was going to need surgery on his earlobe.

Q says, "Maybe they'll leave you with one ear, like John the Baptist."

N, says that it wasn't John the Baptist that lost his ear, it was a guy that arrested Jesus. John the Baptist lost his head.

To which M says, "I bet he went to heaven since he's a Baptist."

(we are not Baptists, BTW)

Also, N passed out at the Dr.'s. He needed boosters for three different vaccines. Not sure why he passed out, but it was scary to look at. All 5 of us, plus three nurses were in their largest exam room. I think they keep it just for us. They had one nurse on each boy. N is nearly 6'2". His knees started to buckle. One of the nurses says, "Is he going to pass out?" And I joke, "No, he just has rubbery joints." The nurse giving him the shots then says, "He's about to pass out, he's all sweaty." I think the first nurse was afraid that when N went down it was going to be like a redwood being felled. They start saying, "Dad! help! He's going out!" I'm glad he was there, because I can't hold N up. He lay there for a couple of minutes, eyes half open, all grey. It was pretty freaky.

So dh bought us Schlotzky's for lunch :-)

Praise

2010-01-16T17:02:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted in over a week. Gracious. Been Busy. The Lord added something to my plate this week and it's good.

I have this crazy story that I like to tell about submission. When we moved into our house in 2000, we'd spent several years getting out of debt, first. We moved in in October, my birthday is in November. A week before my birthday, dh walks in with a receipt that was a mile long from Circuit City. It was for a 52" TV, 6 disc DVD and a receiver. He says, "Happy Birthday" I saw that he'd opened a charge account with them and I was not happy. I opened my mouth to yell at him and the Lord shut it and told me to go into my room. Once in there, I told God how bad this was. When I got done, He quietly told me to tell dh that he could keep the TV, if he wanted to. I objected more, and ultimately walked out of my door and told him exactly what the Lord told me to tell him.
I returned to my room and cried.
The next day, dh took the receipt back and returned everything.
That December, dh busted his knee up terribly at work. Six months later he had a claim check, for a 3% permanent disability in his knee, from workman's comp. He bought his TV and got the DVD player for free.

All that is to tell you that I have been doing the worship music at our church for nearly 3 years. Without going into explaining what that means, I will tell you what it means spiritually. It has meant learning to walk in submission to church authority. I had a heart for us to play "younger" music. Well, I spent several hours with my pastor and his wife today and he gave me this long song list from Jesus Culture. Without further ado, here is our worship music for this week :-)

Week One, 2010

2010-01-08T18:10:00.000-06:00

Never thought I'd hear myself saying this but, What an awesome week I've had! Praise the Lord!

If you had a crappy week, you might just want to stop here, because I'm about to do some serious bragging.

On the 31st, I did a whole lot of thinking about order. God is a God of order and I think He expects us to order our lives. I bought a new bra a few days after Christmas and was completely horrified by the rolls of back fat that I saw in the mirror. I gained about 15 pounds in 2009. That's a lot for me. I am wearing a size 10 pant. I would be much more comfortable in an 8.

One area of order is my physical person. Instead of the old morning routine of thyroid meds, email/Facebook and 4 cups of coffee, I am having ONE single cup of coffee with non-dairy creamer and sweetener AFTER I get my DAILY BREAD. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I am following an exercise video that is on Netflix instant downloads. It's called Pick Your Fit: Fat to Firm. I am a level one. There are 4 circuits. Monday I got through one and a half. Wednesday I got through 2 and a half and today I got through all four! Thank you Lord! Today, when I got done, I FORGOT all about my one cup of coffee.

Daily Bread- Scripture and prayer. I printed out some prayer guides from Revive Our Hearts. One for the dh, one for the boys and one for their future spouses. I also printed out some things for me to think about for the day. I also printed a one year Bible reading plan. Yes, I have a checklist going. No, I do not think it's not spiritual, because let me tell you, it's better than nothing. And I don't expect to use the lists forever, just to get me in a habit. I started an afternoon Bible study that is about walking in love. I will be posting what I get as I go. Right now, I have Love is Patient. And it's helped me be very calm all week. Glory to God!

School- Last week, I spent several days writing out lessons for the rest of the year. And it helped so much this week. I was able to show the boys, "Look, this is how far we have to go, it's not that far, I've done my part, now you do yours." N and I did some pretty neat biology labs this week. Unfortunately I only got pictures of the sheep heart and lungs. But let me tell you, the brain was fascinating. God is an amazing Creator.

The other thing I did was put out a schedule with no times on it. It just listed the things WE needed to accomplish before lunch and after lunch. I got the boys doing chore cards again. They are not fancy. There are three colors of cards, orange for daily, yellow for weekly and red for monthly. Each card has AM or PM and a day and or week that it should be completed. The boys do the cards in their pocket for one month. The first of February, they'll rotate. We concentrated on working daily AM chores into their morning routines this week and next week we'll add weeklies. I worked each day with a different boy to help him learn how I want the chore completed. It went fairly well. N, who had kitchen duty, did complain at the end of each day about the number of drinking vessels he had to get into the dishwasher. Good :-) M did a fantastic job in the bathroom and it is already smelling better. Q had the living room/dining room. I was especially gratified when he asked his brothers to leave their shoes in the utility room so he didn't have so much dirt to sweep ;-)

The best thing all week was that I felt so much calmer (and since it's just us, I was hormonal too!) because I had fortified my spirit. I was on top of all the squabbling and was able to clearly think of appropriate punishments without freaking out and screaming. Thank you Lord for Your Holy Spirit!

Good Morning!

2010-01-04T09:51:00.000-06:00

So there I am, trying to be good. First Monday of a new year. I have gotten up, had a devotional, EXERCISED, eaten breakfast, had ONE cup of coffee with sweetener and not refined sugar. I got the boys up, rallied them to dress and have breakfast all at the same time, DO morning chores. I'm doing my Monday morning chore, sorting laundry and out crawls the devils' bug! A scorpion!!! sent by the enemy to stop me from advancing to victory in my house.

A New Year

2009-12-31T13:42:00.000-06:00

This will be the third time that I have tried to write this post. The first incarnation was a wish list of changes I wanted to make in my life. As I typed, I realized that wishing would not make one single one of them happen. I started looking for some online help for each of the areas. Then I realized that online help is part of my problem. I find all these things to watch or print out (I printed a bunch of stuff from reviveourhearts.com and organizedhome.com if you're wondering) and ...pfft...the air is let out of the good intentions balloon.

Mostly, what I need is to have better habits in the areas of time, eating and spending. Who doesn't, right?
I need to be healthy. I need to read the Bible and pray regularly. I need to save money. I need my house to be clean and organized. I need my children to behave. I need to be a better wife and mother...

My head is spinning!

I've taken the first step. I installed a Firefox Add On called Leech Block. I set it to block Facebook from 9 am to 3 pm, with no password. There are no Facebook emergencies.

I found an exercise video on Netflix instant download that has three levels of instruction. That way I don't injure myself like I usually do when I decide to work on my body.

I moved my thyroid medicine to the bathroom, with a water glass. That way, I am not tempted to turn the computer on on my way to the kitchen to take it.

I looked up how long new habits take. This post says a lot longer than the 21 to 28 days normally quoted. Try 66.

Here are my goals: (because I refuse to call them resolutions)
1. To fit comfortably in size 8 jeans.
2. To cut caffeine and sugar consumption by half.
3. To follow a daily schedule which includes devotional time.
4. To help the boys develop better use of their time.
5. To work on Steps to Financial Peace and talk dh into attending a local FPU class

I pray that 2010 will be a year where you do things on purpose as you go about fulfilling your purpose.

What Am I Supposed To Do With This?

2009-12-28T08:47:00.000-06:00

My sister is one of those people that gets her Christmas shopping done by the end of October. She shows up every Thanksgiving with presents for everyone, even extended family.

She usually gives us a family present. We've gotten a forensic science detective chemistry set. We've gotten board games. This year she gave us a web cam.

Dh and the boys thought it was really cool. Dh even told his mom she should download Skype so we can use the computer to talk, instead of the phone. #1 She is not very computer literate and she would end up calling us, to figure out how to use it, anyway. #2 It's only a camera, it does not do audio.

One of the boys kept asking if we could go online and talk to other people with webcams. Again, I say, it's only a camera, it does not do audio. Well, can we go online and see other people's webcams? Sure, but I don't recommend it.

I thought it might be fun to set it up and let the world watch us do school. Just kidding.

We could also use it to take Facebook profile pictures.
Here's the latest picture I took of myself

Did I mention that it takes bad, grainy pictures? And the cord is badly kinked from being in the box, so it won't stand up.

Saturday Stream

2009-12-26T09:47:00.000-06:00

Where does time go? I keep scrolling over the time on the computer to make sure that it's really Saturday. I did not get one school-related thing done last week. I think next week will be the same.

Today I need to arrange church music. That's number one on the list. I do not enjoy arranging church music. And I feel guilty for not enjoying it, because worshiping the Lord is a privilege.

I have a PJ top that needs exchanging. Dh and N thought buying jammies for teenagers would be fun for me. Let's just say that jammies for teenagers are not cut for grown women who have nursed three babies.

Something has gone afoul with my new coffee maker. For Christmas, I planned this great brunch that included spiced cider. A lady on the website where I got the recipe said that she made it in her coffee maker. So I did and now...well, it took 30 minutes to get 6 cups of coffee and it's concentrated. blech! I'm going to run some plain water through it and some vinegar. I pray I don't have to get another one. That would make three coffee makers this year, and I really don't want to spend my Christmas money on a coffee maker I need new under clothes and larger jeans.

Q is leaving for BSA winter camp today. Dh and M are leaving tomorrow.
N is not going. He was going to work, but they lost his application and then were quit rude to him when he tried to reapply. He's not happy. Most of his friends are gone. He'll have to find somewhere to go on Tuesday, though. I'm having a girl's day and night then, which I planned when I thought all the boys were going to be gone.

I told this lady at church that I'd help her go through her closet and get rid of some stuff. I don't know why. She caught me at a weak moment. She told me that she purposefully did not ask her daughters because they would get rid of her favorite clothes. I told her I'm a ruthless tosser of stuff, so be prepared. I have a feeling it's going to take a long, long time. Hopefully, she'll be ready tomorrow.

This has been the most random Saturday stream in a long time. I am satisfied.

Saturday Stream

2009-12-19T08:50:00.001-06:00

Guess what? there is nothing on my calendar all week next week? (Except Christmas, and it came printed that way.) No driver's ed (it's over, and dh let N drive the big old truck for an hour and a half on their way to East Texas, yesterday), no classes, no wrestling, no Scouts, no running around.

I have plans. I am going to do lesson plans through Spring Break. And I am going to browse curriculum and begin to finalize my shopping list. In one month I will be filing our income tax return and a few weeks after that, I will be ordering curriculum. That's my kind of fun.

I mentioned that dh let N drive yesterday. Yesterday morning was also an historical occasion here. We had an extra driver to do the driveway dance!! We have a single wide drive way, filled all the way to the street with vehicles. Five of them.

In order from front to back: A 1982 VW Vanagon, a.k.a. "The hunting van." It belongs to my mother-in-love. Legally it is ours. The title is in our name, we pay the registration and the insurance. I just like to keep saying it is hers, because it makes me feel less car hoggy. We have used it twice this year to camp in. It has a fridge, a sink, a queen size bed and a potty.

Next, is the Big Old Truck. A 1980-something Ford F-350 dually diesel. It is a crew cab and has seatbelts for 6. Dh loves this truck, even though it is ugly as sin. His uncle gave it to him. It had been sitting for 5 years. Dh got in and it started right up. He believes it was a gift from God because he was pining for a truck so badly. It is only driven for hauling, helping people move and camping. It is a huge pain in my butt to drive.

Next is the Jeep Cherokee or the Mercury Grand Marquis, depending on which has gas and which has a current registration and or inspection sticker. We bought the Jeep new (1998) the day before Q was born. It has nearly 200K miles. The heat doesn't work, anymore and I'm scared another plug is going to go out while I'm driving. We bought the Mercury (1992) from Dh's aunt for $1000 about 5(?) years ago. It drives very smoothly, the heater works, but the rear windows do not. It also has nearly 200K miles. The headlights recently went out so I can't drive it at night. I have to drive the Jeep with no heat.

Lastly, is the best and most well-maintained vehicle. Dh's work Jeep Grand Cherokee. It belongs to the city and he drives it to and from and during work.

Gah! I nearly forgot why I told you about all our vehicles! The driveway dance. Dh needed the truck out because they were going to E. TX to help move my Gramma out of her little property. Behind the truck were the two Jeeps and the Mercury. Dh moved his work Jeep, I moved our Jeep (it's standard) and (trumpet fanfare!!) N moved the Mercury! It is what I have been waiting for ever since we bought the Mercury.

I was also going to talk about how I feel like my parents because we have to wait until Christmas Eve to go Christmas shopping. Soo not looking forward to that. I hate crowds. I hate tardiness. I should not have judged my parents. It's all coming back to me now. But I won't. Instead I will tell you that I am going to devise an elaborate plan where we all 5 go shopping and get groceries and Christmas gifts and they will still be surprises. I can do it. It will be the plan of plans.

Here's a cool thing, not related at all to driving or Christmas.

It is a 24 hour observation of all of the large aircraft flights in the world, condensed down to about 2 minutes. You can tell it was summer time in the north by the sun's footprint over the planet. You could see that it didn't quite set in the extreme north and it didn't quite rise in the extreme south. Notice that as evening approaches, the traffic is predominantly from the US to Europe and when daylight comes, the traffic switches and it is predominantly from Europe to the US.

HT Why Homeschool

Tis The Season

2009-12-17T12:23:00.000-06:00

American Vision has a great article today titled Exmas and Christmas. I don't really care for the name calling in the beginning of the article, though. The Word says that They will know we are followers of Christ by our love and I don't think calling fellow heirs names accomplishes that. All that said, I still think it's a good article.

I have struggled a lot over the last 12 years with Christmas. I have judged other in my heart for insisting they have a right to erect pagan symbols of false gods in their houses. Yet, I still experienced the joy and excitement that Christmas morning brings. No, the Bible does not direct us to observe the birth of the Messiah. Then, there is the argument that "it is one of two times a year that Jesus is in their faces." Really? Well shame on us.

This year the Lord has highlighted two portions of Scripture that give me hope and remind me that Jesus came for a purpose.

John 18:37 Therefore Pilate said to Him, "So You are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say correctly that I am a king for this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."

Isaiah 9:6,7 For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, On the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness From then on and forevermore The zeal of the LORD of hosts will accomplish this.

Scripture tells us that He NOW sits at the right hand of God. A place of authority. That He does rule and reign. So take heart. Have hope. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. He reigns now and forever.

If the angels celebrated His arrival, then I see no reason why we should not remember it. How many times in the Bible were the people of God instructed to remember the mighty acts of God. How it is remembered is up for debate, I suppose. But no name calling, please.

Christmas Music Post

2009-12-14T14:36:00.001-06:00

I have a serious love/hate relationship with Christmas. I hate that they play it until you want to stick pencils in your ears. But one note of Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole and I am instantly 8 years old.
Some (not all) of my favorite Christmas songs make no Christmas sense whatsoever. But I love them, nonetheless...

Do They Know It's Christmas tops the list. A) No, they don't know, or care it's Christmas, most of them are Muslim. B) "Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you. ??? Ironically sung by demi-god Bono. What kind of charitable thought is this?? C) It's SOOO catchy :) D) I think the general attitude found in this song is why the English banned Christmas hundreds of years ago.

My second favorite Christmas song is Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing The Little Drummer Boy.
David Bowie doesn't have his own piano? The dialogue just cracks me up. Two of the great voices paired. Beauty.

All the songs from The Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon

Sorry, I can't find a decent sounding video of this song by TransSiberian Orchestra. So enjoy the overplayed lightshow.

You just can't have enough U2 at Christmas ;)

And Nat...

We had this album when I was a kid. I guess there were several, really, but this I remember this one the best. I didn't even know Any Williams sang anything but Christmas music for the longest time.

I'm Going to Throw Up, and Then I'm Going to Die!

2009-12-10T09:42:00.001-06:00

(That's a quote from The Grinch movie, with Jim Carrey)

N started driver's ed on November 30. It is every night, 6 nights a week, for 3 weeks. Then, you schedule the driving time. Which is only 7 hours. Isn't that scary? Some of those kids will get driver's licenses on 7 hours of driving time. Not N. Our plan is that he got his permit as close to his 15th b-day as possible and will drive as much as possible for a year, then get his license.

In Texas, they have parent taught driver's ed. Dh decided that we would not be doing that. I was a little offended at first, but I'm relieved to not have another thing I need to do. (Except drive him back and forth every single night.)

(He made an 88)

He got his permit on Monday. It was pretty exciting. And my calm, cool kid was just about jumping up and down in the DPS office. The first lady we saw mumbled a lot and did not find him amusing at all. The second person we saw, a man, (a very caffeinated man) joked a lot with him.

I caught his excitement and let him drive down a normally busy road in Austin. He's driven in the POA parks, here in our town, why not on a busy road in Austin? I want to throw up just thinking about it. Our Jeep is standard, and every time he changed to 3rd gear, he jerked the wheel and we swerved all over.

(Did I mention it had been raining? Somehow, I'm not making myself look any smarter.)

I called dh to tell him I let him drive. He said, "Not a good idea. He needs to drive the Mercury and on the abandoned roads behind the golf course." Makes sense. OK. When we picked him up from his class, M told him he was not going to drive us home on the highway. LOL!

So, yesterday, I needed gas before I drove him "into town" for driver's ed. He asked if he could drive there. sure, why not? It's only across the road. It's only 4 o'clock. What could the problem be in that? Well, the end of our road is a steep (ish) hill, pointed up, when you're sitting at the stop sign. The high school down the road we needed to cross had just let out. And there were two cars sitting behind us. When he had a clearing that I liked, he started to go, rolling backwards a lot. The man behind us got impatient and pulled out and around us. The lady behind him, could see that he must be learning to drive and was laughing a lot, when I got out of the car and went to get in the driver's seat. Before I could get in, he'd turned it off and let the parking brake off. So I was hopping in a rolling car.

I think I will stick to Dh's plan. and tomorrow when I get the Mercury registered and groceries purchased, we will cruise on over to the area suggested.

And here are some gratuitous N pictures. Just because.

He's really tall.

Opening his b-day gift

Too cool to blow out the candle, he had to pinch it out. Q made the cupcakes for him. Aww...

2009-12-09T17:58:00.000-06:00

I let the boys walk to the store behind our house to buy soda. They enjoy it and it gets them out of my hair. (That's a joke. It's true, but it is a joke.) Usually, they buy generic 25 cent cans of whatever and said soda is consumed before they get home. Then, I make them stay outside and bounce on the trampoline until they vomit. (That is a joke and it's not true, but I do make them stay outside after chugging 12 oz. of soda.) Today they went with a dollar and change and came home with a 3 liter bottle of generic RED SODA. Do you think it would be wrong to make them stay outside for a couple of days?

The Myth of the Freedom of Religion

2009-12-05T11:08:00.001-06:00

The other night I was listening to a new, local drive time talk show. The personal jury is still out on the guy. Sometimes I really like him, other times, I think he's far too wishy washy. I'm not a huge fan of most big-name radio guys. In fact, I am an anti fan of most of them, I think they are narcissists. So back to the local guy.

I don't even remember what the original topic was, Christmas songs at a school, or something. You know, as in, this school decided not to have Christmas songs in their "winter pageant." So, the guy starts invoking "freedom of religion." His callers were invoking "freedom of religion" and talking about how Hanukkah doesn't offend them, blah blah blah.

The thing is this, the First Amendment does not say "freedom of religion," nor does it say anything about "separation of church and state." It says,

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It says that the government won't make laws which respect one religion over another. And more importantly, as it pertains to most people who want to fuss about Christmas songs, it says that it will not make laws which prohibit the free exercise of religion.

Has the government already violated this amendment by making Christmas a "legal public holiday"? Is this one of the arguments that The United States is a Christian nation? Christmas was not made a "legal public holiday" (the legal term "national holiday" does not exist) until 1870. U.S. Grant was President. Maybe it was a concession to the American public for the government corruption under him?

The government cannot promote nor prohibit religion. Can ordinary citizens pitch a fit over expression of religion? Sure. And that is where the concept of community comes in. And that is where the concept of loving your neighbor comes in. This is pure democracy. PTAs and elected school board officials, not the federal government or ACLU lawyers, come together and decide what values and beliefs are reflected in their community. This is how government is supposed to work.

That's what I think, anyway.

Snow Schmo

2009-12-05T09:11:00.000-06:00

Thursday night I was thinking that we would not be able to go to our homeschool group's Christmas party due to snow. (go ahead B, Mrs. B roll your eyes, mumble...) We live off of a hilly, windy road. We do have a 4WD vehicle, but the heat doesn't work. And other people do not have 4WD vehicles. So, I was thinking we would not risk careening off a cliff into a creek, and not go.

All Thursday night, M kept flinging the door open (prompting the heater to come on each and every time) to see if the snow had started, yet. We don't even have TV with weather warnings, he just KNEW. I got up Friday morning, no snow. I began thinking, "It'll probably start while we're on the road." No snow.

As the party was winding down, kids started racing outside to see the snow. We were powerless to stop them. I got my coat and my notebook and headed out, no snow. N says, "Look real close." No snow.

It happened on the way home, on the treacherous, hilly road. Finally, the snow.

When I was a baby, my dad was in the Navy, based in Oakland, CA. As soon as I could walk, they took me to Yosemite to see my first snow. There is a picture of me somewhere, standing in a snowsuit in the snow, howling!

When I was 21, Sam was going into the Air Force. His parents lived in CA. It was December. What did they think would be a great way to mark the occasion of Sam entering service? Going to Yosemite to see snow. I stayed in the car.

(We also have pictures of the boys in the snow in Yosemite in MAY.)

I'm not a fan (of snow, Yosemite is lovely.)

As we neared the house, I could see breaks in the clouds. And 20 minutes later, it was beautiful, sunshiny blue :) This is why I love Texas.

I did take a picture (it is obligatory). The picture I missed though, was of the big boy standing outside in "the flurries." (That's what everyone kept saying, lol!) (Don't look at the grass...we had a drought...at least that's my story.)

Fifteen Years Ago

2009-11-30T11:54:00.000-06:00

At 10 pm, tonight we will recognize the start of a 30 hour labor to deliver N into the world, 15 years ago.
To mark the occasion, we will begin 3 weeks of intense busyness.

Mondays: 3pm, art
                4:30 pm driver's ed
6:15 pm wrestling
co-op Mom's Christmas party 7pm (next week)
                6:30 Teen Court (twice, instead of wrestling)
Tuesdays 11 am classes
4:10 pm go back to pick N up from classes
4:30 pm Drivers ed
7 pm Webelos
Wednesdays 4:30 pm drivers ed
                     7 pm youth group
Thursdays 4:30 pm drivers ed
                 6:15 wrestling
Fridays Co-op Christmas party 10 am (that's just this week)
             4:30 pm driver's ed
Saturdays 4:30 driver's ed
wrestling tournaments (which he may not get to do, due to the driver's ed)

I'm now looking at this and thinking, "What were we thinking?" It's just three weeks, right?

I had no idea 15 years ago life could/would be this great and crazy. I was just thinking, "Oh in a few hours, I'll have a nice baby boy." Ha! on many different levels. (I sure miss Stacy, she would have been loving the fact that N would be driving!)

I just remembered that Starbucks gift certificate I got for my b-day. Relief is in sight!

Er...I Mean Syrup

2009-11-25T09:25:00.000-06:00

Bounty of the Texas Hill Country

Prepping

Mashing

Marketing

Vintage Fabric

Product

It did not jell, so we have syrupy gifts (BTW, syrup is a weird word, I ended up looking it up to make sure it was spelled correctly.)

Ever present dog

He Wasn't Kidding

2009-11-09T08:16:00.000-06:00

about taking orders. Q came home from his friend's house with more prickly pears.

I'm thinking whimsical Christmas gifts.

Boy Stories

2009-11-06T09:54:00.002-06:00

The dig escaped yesterday. He has a special house he likes to go to. I sent the younger boys after him (I am too embarrassed to go after him anymore.) They returned with the dog and immediately disappeared again, with a bowl, into the woods.

Unfortunately, I was not ready with the camera when they came back. This is an image I got off Google of what they returned with.

For my non-Texan friends, they are prickly pears, the fruit of prickly pear cactus. They are edible.

The big boy informed the youngers that they make jelly out of those. You know they love to make stuff.

After an internet search and a trip for pectin. This is the result. They say it's good. Smells like outside to me.

In the event of apocalypse, I feel sure that our family will survive on prickly pears and raccoons ;-p

Oh and Q says he's taking orders. For jelly, not raccoons.

better than the alternative

2009-11-05T14:58:00.000-06:00

Team Captains

2009-11-03T17:50:00.000-06:00

Q's last year to play Pop Warner football. He's #31. He was starting quarter back. He scored one of our two goals this year. These are all the 6th grade boys on our team. He's played football with them for 5 years. They will be playing middle school ball next year. One of these boy's moms asked me if I wanted a homeschool break next year, so that Q could continue to play football with his team. Q will either play for a homeschool team or a private school team. Flag is also an option. I'm glad he loves it so much. I was not a joiner, nor was I encouraged to be. But...football is not as important as his character or his education.

Oh! BTW, that's Sam and I top center. He has on a cowboy hat and I am next to him. Great turnout for the last game, huh?

Forgot about Saturday Stream

2009-11-01T15:26:00.000-06:00

Oops! Yesterday was the last Pop Warner football game we will ever play. We have had fun playing football for the last 5 years, but I am glad to be done with Pop Warner. On many levels, which you know and understand, if you have read my blog at all.

Moe was sick all week last week, he got better Friday and Saturday, and woke up with fever again this morning. I'll have to take him to the doctor tomorrow.

I am very excited about the new writing program we are using. I am excited at all the possibilities and excited that it has helped to simplify my life.

I am fighting the urge to spend this time griping about the 20/80 effect. You know, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. So I won't. I am also fighting the urge to go nuts over people's H'ween costumes, or lack thereof.

Come to think of it, I'm suddenly not feeling so great myself.

Another thing I am fighting is telling you all about how I'm about to turn 40 and all that is involved, or not, in that.

What else is going through the old brain that doesn't sound like griping?

This song from Steven Curtis Chapman:

It's the only thing that makes sense right now.

Conclusion to Pop Warner Issue

2009-10-27T07:21:00.001-05:00

I was told this morning, that the reason Pop Warner is requiring mid-season progress reports from homeschoolers is that they had some otherwise ineligible players say they were homeschoolers when they really weren't.

A. how many documented cases of this do they have? enough to warrant punishing legitimate homeschoolers? Punish the cheaters!

B. If a parent is going to go to the trouble of creating a fake homeschool report card in the first place, what's to keep them from creating a fake mid-season progress report?

C. Aren't there team moms, coaches, other players who would actually be IN school with these people? Sounds like a conspiracy on the part of the entire team to keep an ineligible player on the team. Punish the team and if necessary punish the league

Saturday Stream, It's Been a While

2009-10-24T09:11:00.000-05:00

I don't even remember the last time I did Saturday Stream. I've been gone several Saturdays in a row, possibly a month.

Sam and the boys had a Scout camping thing to do last night. I was home alone :-) I love being home alone. It's so quiet. I can watch what I want and eat what. They are at the campground down the road, literally. I could have gone down there and had fun, family time around the campfire. But why ruin a good night at home, alone?

Yesterday, I went and picked up a big ol' box of curriculum from my friend. I asked to borrow her copy of Tapestry of Grace, Year 2, so I could see what the Rhetoric book list is supposed to be for next year. The younger boys and I are just not keeping up with this year's TOG reading. So, I also borrowed Volumes One and Two of The Mystery of History. Most importantly, I borrowed her set of Teaching Writing; Style and Structure from Institute for Excellence in Writing. It's 8 DVDs of Andrew Pudewa teaching you how to teach writing. I watched the first two yesterday. I am so happy and even excited. We can do this! When I've been working with the boys a while using these methods, I will blog about it. One of the things that I love about TOG, is that all the subjects are integrated. I like their writing program, Writing Aids. Something was lacking, though, and I still can't quite put my finger on it. We could not get over the hump of getting thoughts out on paper, even with writing assignments in the TOG week lesson. Andrew Pudewa gives some great insight into a child's mind, especially boys.

I already have two months worth of writing lessons for the younger boys and after the football game this afternoon, I will watch the next video and write out lessons for Noah.

This week, it seemed that everything was breaking. The toilet had been leaking all over behind it. We have wood floor in our bathroom, now the boards behind the toilet are slightly warped. Sam fixed it without spending any money. One of our half dozen cars wouldn't start. I said sell it for junk. But no, we must have a half dozen cars. He fixed it, without spending any money. The freezer stated making this bone rattling noise. I kept walking by and kicking it. (It stopped the first time that I kicked it.) He finally was driven insane by the noise and pulled all the food out, and the panel that covers the fan and some other mechanical stuff. There was a sheet of ice about an inch thick. The ice maker had been dripping water down the back of the freezer for, who knows how long, and was encroaching on the fan. He fixed that with no money. Which is good, because we screwed up our checking account very badly and the only money we have until payday is Noah's.

(This is just a picture to break up this long post)

One more football game after today. Today would have been the last, but a team that we forfeited to wants to give us another chance. So...joy...we have one. more. game. It has been a mixed season. The coach is very very nice. Too nice for football. Seems there is nothing in between. The coaches we had the last two seasons cursed all the time. Quinton has been the starting quarterback. It was his dream job. He now realizes that receivers and running backs are where it's at. Noah told him yesterday, "Your ego is two inches taller than you are." They've only scored twice all season. There's no tackling and no blocking. The mixed part is that Q, personally is having a great season, the team not so much.

Of course, you've read my letter to Pop Warner regarding progress reports. Our league president has taken up my cause and even spoke with a person at the national level regarding the double standard for homeschooled students. I haven't been able to talk with him, yet. So I don't know exactly what they said. In his message he said that the national level person wanted me to call them. That makes me nervous. I know my stuff, but I am no good on the phone. And as I keep saying, "how far do I want too take this?" This is our last year with this organization. Do I want to make it fair for all homeschoolers, or just mine? I am fine just warning homeschoolers away from PW forever. If I thought it would be a simple discussion and I caused the entire national PW Little Scholars board to see the light and wave a wand and they change their policy, I'd do it. But I don't think that will happen. They are operating out of a state that has some of the most stringent homeschool regulations. And I'm sure they want to do their part in making sure that homeschoolers do the job "right" by keeping us accountable. (eyeroll)

Alright! I have coffee to drink, showers to take and football uniforms to prep. Have a blessed weekend.

Bittersweet

2009-10-19T08:47:00.000-05:00

We had a memorial service for my Papa on Friday. I am still a bit confused. The obituary said he was going to be buried in Pennsylvania. But there was an urn on a stand and people kept talking to it. Later this week, I'll give my mom a call and ask.

My parents' new (as in they've only been attending this church for 3 weeks) pastor "did" the service. He did a fair job, considering he never met my Papa. He'd asked my mom for my Papa's Bible. He said sometimes you can tell a lot about people by the notes in their Bible. The only thing he found was a handwritten testimony by my Papa. In it he talked about riding a wagon or walking three miles to church. He was thankful that his parents took and did not send him to church. He stated that it was his own parents' example that led his choice to do the same with his own children.

I have for years, given my Gramma and Papa credit for the Christian heritage that has been passed to me. I know that God does not have grandchildren. I know that every person must make their own choice, but without a heritage, that choice is made more difficult.

Then my dad got up to speak. I hadn't cried since Monday night. I have been so thankful in my Papa's passing. The Lord did not allow him to suffer for a prolonged period of time. The people who loved him did not hang on and hang on, begging him (and God) to stay. It was time. My Uncle, his only son, was with him the whole week. That was a pure miracle of God, because when I spoke with him on the phone he was reconsidering flying in from California.

So, my Dad got up to speak and I started crying immediately. He talked about his father-in-law as a father. He was my dad's Sunday school teacher as a teen and it was then, that my dad accepted Christ. He had my dad come over often to do odd jobs. My dad believed it was to nurture a relationship between he and my mom. So my Papa saw something in my dad. My dad talked about all the help and guidance my Papa had given him over the last 41 years. And my dad, who is normally a very quiet man was so eloquent. I was very proud of him by the time he was done. And nothing more needed to be said about my Papa.

The rest of the weekend was filled with sweet family time. I saw my beautiful cousin for the first time in 21 years. The last time I saw her, I was borrowing $50 so we could drive back to Texas from California. Gosh...I wonder if I ever paid her back?

I had a couple of glasses of wine with my Grandmother (my dad's mom). That is always interesting.
My brother and his beautiful family were able to fly in from Georgia. I have a year and a half old niece that I saw for the first time. They did have to take her to the emergency room, she was having trouble breathing./ They discovered she had the beginning of pneumonia. I spoke with him last night and she is doing wonderfully. they caught it very early.

The boys got to play with their cousins. We don't get together often enough with my sister's family. They are not far away.

I came home realizing how I have distanced myself from my family. Family is weird. But when everything else falls away, it's all that is left (except for a couple of dear dear friends who have been around almost as long, if not longer than some family.)

I went through Facebook (it is sometimes a wonderful tool) and wrote birthdays on calendars. I am going to pencil in visits to the sister and to the parents/grandparents. Bonus! that is a one stop shop now. They all live in the same park, now :) In fact, I was scheming on how to get Sam's mom there, should anything happen with her sister's park before Sam retires.

Response from Central Texas Pop Warner

2009-10-18T08:26:00.001-05:00

Thanks for the contact.

Yes, I am the Administrator for Central Texas and I am the one that reminded Ed in our meeting about the need for the forms.

For clarification the request I gave was for any Association that had a player with a 70 or below average and those in home schools to provide a progress report, dated between Sept 16 and Oct 16. There are two separate forms and they both can be obtained on the Pop Warner webiste under ADMIN and then Scholastic forms.

If I have missed something or interpreted something wrong, I apologize in advance. If you have been in Pop Warner for 5 years, you are well aware that we are concerned about the whole child and not just the football player or cheer leader. I will forward your email up the chain of command and ask for better clarification if I read the forms wrong.

Please do not feel that your child is being picked on unfairly, it surely is not the intent and again, if I am wrong in my interpretation I will be the first to apologize.

Thanks

Well, I do feel that the request that is being made is unfair. It is unfair to paint homeschooled kids with the same brush that kids who are not making acceptable grades. I told the man so, in my reply. I still do not expect to hear from National Pop Warner. We are only one family. What do they care? They pride themselves on being around for more than 75 years. They claim to be concerned about the whole child and that is why they created Little Scholars, their sub-organization which gives away scholarships to kids who make good grades.

For many years homeschoolers have been looked on with suspicion. Colleges don't trust our transcripts.. The United States military forces used to enlist homeschooled students on the same tier as high school drop outs. This kind of ignorance must be rectified.

Mr. Brown doesn't seem to think it is a big deal for us to just fill out the form and turn in a progress report. the actual action is not a big deal. The big deal is that my kids, and other homeschooled kids, and their parents, are being viewed with suspicion that they are not making grades that qualify them to play youth league football. How ridiculous.

Letter to Pop Warner

2009-10-16T00:08:00.003-05:00

(I have deleted certain information to protect our privacy)

I'm not even sure that I am contacting the correct person regarding this issue. But I am contacting as many people as I can about it. It must be rectified.

This is our family's 5th year to play Pop Warner football in ---- (my oldest son did play one season for ---.) It is our family's 10th year to homeschool. I am a leader in the local homeschool community as well as a member of The Texas Homeschool Association.

Two years ago, Pop Warner created a new homeschool scholarship eligibility form. I thought this was commendable because previously, homeschoolers had been "lumped in" with otherwise ineligible players. The problem was that Pop Warner was asking for a form that simply does not exist in Texas, or many other states. I can only assume that they created a homeschooled student policy based on the homeschool laws of the state that Pop Warner is based in.

A little education on states and homeschooling. Every state has different laws. In Texas, homeschools are considered private and therefore not subject to outside requirements or verification to a "governing body." So, when Pop Warner asked for a "report card from an accredited governing body," I had to go out of my way to explain the above to the national organization as well as our league president. Such an agency does not exist in Texas.

This evening, Mr. T., our league president, sent me an email with an attachment, saying I needed to fill out the form by tomorrow. It is a short, simple form. Not a big deal to fill out and get to him asap. In reading the fine print of this form, I see that Pop Warner has changed their homeschool policy, yet again. The form is now asking me to submit a "progressing progress report or a report card from an accredited governing body." I will submit a progress report, because as I have already stated there is no such agency from which to obtain an accredited report card from in Texas. We have a very small team and without our two boys, our team would have to forfeit our last two games. It would break my 11 year old's heart to be ineligible to play.

I am writing because I want to you know that I am protesting the principle of this. I have not seen any emails to the rest of the team regarding other players submitting progressing progress reports for the current school year. Mr. B., I feel that this extra requirement is discriminatory. I have contacted the National Pop Warner Association, I just received the same automated email that they received my email. I do not expect to hear back from them. Please feel free to send this email, in it's entirety to anyone who may be interested.

Thank You for your time,

Bye Papa

2009-10-13T08:41:00.000-05:00

I can hear his humming and his unique laugh.
For the last 9 years, I kept saying, "The healthiest 80 something year-old that I know."
Now, he's gone.

I remember when I was about 8. They sold their house. A house I spent many nights in. I was afraid of the front bedroom at night. The bushes in front made a shadow that looked like a wolf. They moved into an Airstream and had plans to travel all over North America. They did too, until he was 85-ish.

Every year, since I turned 28, I would thank them for the heritage of faith and service that they passed on.

Friday, we stopped by Kerrville to visit him again. I wanted to know if he had gone to work for the CCC. I knew he would have been young. During the Depression, boys became men much sooner than they do now. He didn't, his brother did. Gramma shared about his working life. He made a knife to take to Case Cutlery, as a kind of application, when he was 17. In 1943, he came home from work and announced that he was joining the Navy. He was a SeaBee. He ran the machine shop, as an enlisted man.

In 2001, he decided that they boys needed a zip line. So, he made one for them. It is an amazing piece of craftsmanship. He was 81. He went out in the cold and wet on Christmas morning, with my dad to assemble the swing set that my parents gave to the boys.

I am so thankful that the Lord did not allow him to suffer for a long time. I am so thankful that his son spent his last week with him. I am so thankful for his life and his legacy.