Ordinary Time

We are supposed to start school this week, which is why I spent all morning and early afternoon finishing up the details of the school planning. I have never left it until so late, and this was cutting a bit close even for my taste. I need to make a mental note that next year I just need to do it in late July whether I feel like it or not and just get it over with. I have left much less wiggle room in the schedule this year just because there was so much I wanted to include. This also makes me a little nervous because I know how frequently life can undo a nicely planned schedule. I can always cut some things out if I find that they aren't going to fit. So what was I doing today? It was all those little odds and ends which get left for later. Some of the books I had placed on hold didn't come in until Thursday, so after looking at them, I had to figure out where they were going to go. This changed the original flow of the schedule, so the biggest thing was to reassign which

The number of additional titles this post could have is numerous. They would be along the lines of "The rotten day where I lost my patience" or "How very, very close we came to not actually having this dinner" are a couple which come to mind. Yes, it was that kind of day.  It started out well enough. G. and I did the barn in less than an hour, so that was very good. My plan was to spend part of the morning doing map work to (finally) finish our travel journals before we start school next week. Well, one child could not find the journals. This resulted in me going into this child's room to see if I could find them, and was instead appalled at the amount of garbage (actual, literal garbage) that was shoved into various places. Why? So I might have lost my mind a bit. This was followed by realizing that books were also strewn about, so I spent some time repairing them. Having to repair books is always the precursor to a great big lecture about good stewardsh

I'm currently reading Late Bloomers: the Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard. I'm not very far into it, but it is proving to be an interesting book. For some reason, as I was beginning it, I flipped around to look at the end pages. (I love bibliographies because I like to add to my reading list.) Anyway, I found myself glancing at the epilogue and came across this: "... America and many part of the world face a crisis of untapped and undiscovered human potential. I wonder whether today's angry populism, seen at both ends of the political spectrum, is a misdirected cry of pain from those who see themselves as untapped and undiscovered. Large swaths of people in this country feel unacknowledged, unappreciated, and disrespected. They want us to see their pain but also their potential. This shouldn't happen in an affluent society like ours. But out of ignorant good intent, we've designed a human sorting machine with a co

I feel a little bit as though I'm a day late and a dollar short here on the blog. This is the post I was going to put up last night. But, well, I spent half the night sitting with R. as she wept. That is an improvement from speechless anger. I think. It's different at least. So, no blog post, and I'm running on a little less than five hours of sleep. The masses have been warned that their mother has no patience reserves at the moment and a high irritability index. I feel like a weather report... thunderstorms looming in the south... Anyway, you weren't really going to get much content anyway, just a lot of pictures. Here are some new(er) ones of the three dogs who live here. Good old Kenzie. He is such a sweet boy, when he is not barking or scaring strangers. He is also just a mass of anxiousness whenever something unexpected happens, which would be everything. He is also starting to look more grey around the face which is new the past year of so. That doesn't m

J. and I were able to go out to dinner last night, so blogging didn't happen. There are many moments throughout my day that I am overcome with how blessed I am and overcome with how God has provided for us all these years. This was especially true as I was riding one of my horses on Friday. I am still wrapping my mind around the fact that I live in such a beautiful place and actually have horses. G. and L. are having a sleepover with B. at his apartment tonight. Do you think they are having a little fun? We have a new microwave. The microwave which came with the house was not terrific, and slowly, over the past two years, it has become more and more decrepit. We knew when the door handle came off that its days were numbered. Finally, it went out with a bang when the glass in the door fell down, shattering all over the kitchen. We lived without one for nearly two weeks, but yesterday, I couldn't take warming my coffee up in a pot on the stove any longer and went a

For various reasons yesterday, I ended up scrapping my dinner plans, taking whatever ingredients I had on hand, and making up a meal. It turned out quite well, if I do say so myself. So I'm going to share it with you. Really, I'm sharing it here so that when I want to make it again, I'll remember what I did, but you benefit, too. Chicken and bacon over pasta *Boneless chicken thighs (I used 6 thighs) *2 pkg of bacon (though this was kind of gilding the lily, and one would have been just fine), cut into pieces (I use scissors to do this; it's easier) *2 onions, sliced *Swiss chard, washed, sliced, and the center stem removed (I'm not sure how much. I had a bag of sauteed chard in the freezer that I had uncovered and decided to use) *Garlic, maybe 1 or 2 teaspoons or maybe tablespoons (I'm generous with garlic), minced (once again, this was in the kale, so I'm guessing how much was in it) *2 cups of chicken broth or bouillon *1 cup of red wine (okay,

Instead of telling you how the van's serpentine belt broke as I was driving it (the van, not the serpentine belt) home today causing all sorts of alarming things to happen including the power brakes and power steering to go out (and a 15-passenger van is mighty hard to stop and turn without those things), or about how the van is currently stuck on the top of the tow truck at the car dealership because the van was too heavy for the tow truck and broke the hydrolic system ( because AAA doesn't quite seem to understand exactly how large a 15-passenger van is ), I will show you a picture of K. and his best buddies. They just had a three day sleep over fest together. It sounds as though they had a ball. But K. is now pretty exhausted. How can I tell? Well, he fell asleep during tea time and was too tired to eat much dinner. I think he would say it was totally worth it.

We may not have started school yet, but school has certainly begun for some around here. Yesterday, M. began classes in the Vet Tech program. I have no idea how things are going since I have not seen, much less spoken with, M. since Sunday night. While it's great that M. can still work at the shelter clinic while in school, going from work to night classes is tough. I'll probably hear on Thursday how things are going. Today, D. started classes at J.'s school. He leaves with J. in the morning, takes his classes and entertains himself for the rest of the day, and comes home with J. at the end of the work day. It sounds as though things went well today, and D. is feeling confident. The other new thing that happened today was that I took the younger half of my children and we did our first activity with the co-op we are joining this fall. If you know me in real life, this might be more than a little surprising to you; I'm really not much of an organized (rather than

You can find useful life lessons in a wide variety of places. Today's comes from my riding lesson. I am still working on getting the whole timing-thing when jumping down. I'll do it great and then the next few times will be less than spectacular. ( But at least I stay on the horse .) What has made a huge difference in figuring out how all the various pieces fit together is my upper body posture and where my eyes are looking, especially if the approach to a jump is particularly long. I don't necessarily like jumps with a long approach because it gives me far too much time to over think the whole process. The longer I have the more I worry about what is coming up in front of me. I focus on the jump instead of anything else. And when I'm focusing on the jump, I start to look at it instead of where I'm going. My shoulders begin to hunch over so I lose my center of balance. I tend to hold the horse back too much in anticipation of what is coming instead of meeting th

For Christmas, my mother gave us a sum of money to spend on the children, so we decided to use it for special outings throughout the year that we might not otherwise do. This weekend has been Elburn Days in out little town, with lots of different activities including a traveling carnival. Today, we took everyone to it, and they all had a good time riding rides and eating cotton candy. I was working at the Horse Power booth, so they would all do something, cycle back to where I was, then go off and do something else. There was just the littlest bit of rain, which was far better than blazing hot sun, in my opinion. K. and L. H. and R. Everyone back at the Horse Power booth M. and R. ... R. adores rides. She particularly like this roller coaster. I think at some point we need to let her ride a real roller coaster; I think she'll love it. G. and L. on the Ferris wheel. L. loved the Ferris wheel. G. did not love it.  Thanks Grammy!

You will probably be able to guess how life has been around here for the past couple of days by how many words I haven't written. It feels as though it's been nearly constant emotional therapy with R. I'm exhausted, but I think we are finally seeing real progress. I'll be glad if I can survive long enough to enjoy the fruits. In the meantime, enjoy these pictures that M. took of P. lunging Emmy the other evening.

On this day when our local schools all started back, I found some time to sit down and start to plan our school year. One doesn't like to rush into these things, you know. In my head, this year's planning is not going to be terribly time intensive. We are going back to Egypt, and I knew that I had it all planned out when we did it the last time. The last time wasn't all that long ago, so it should be easy. We are also doing a year on writing... the mechanics of writing, creative writing, fiction, non-fiction, poetry. This will take a little longer, but since I have a lot of resources, it is more figuring out order of activities and assigning date. This is what was all going through my head as I sat down today, pulled out my laptop, and started looking for my schedule for studying Egypt. I wasn't entirely sure of the year, so picked one that seemed reasonable, and opened the file. Nope, that wasn't it. I went back another year. Nope, not that either. I finally had

If you hadn't picked up on it, life with R. these days has been tough. Really tough. Like feeling as though we are in over our heads tough. And it doesn't help that she has been doing her let's-not-sleep-for-48-hours-thing far too often. That would be nearly weekly instead of every few months. Even with a decent night's sleep last night, J. and I still feel pretty much like zombies. This is one of the reasons why I was talking on the phone to the neurologist this morning, discussing medicine. (The short part of that story is that I really need to find a pediatric psychiatrist. Sigh. Oh, how I hate breaking in new doctors.) Anyway, as the doctor and I were talking, I asked if she wanted to hear my new theory I had come up with, saying I knew it entertained her. Being a great doctor whom I can get along with, she was all ears. R. has been on a new seizure medicine for a while now, and we just recently starting going up a bit on the dosage. The plus side is that we rea

Here are A. and D. They are busy with a project. Being concerned about the development and welfare of their younger siblings, they have decided we need a new household job system. I've had different systems for children doing work around the house for years, but just never got around to figuring out how to make it work in our new house. This concerned A., because she felt the younger people needed the character building having household jobs created. She's probably right. So, this evening, she came up with a new way to make the household jobs work. Each morning, each child will draw for which daily job they will do. Each Saturday, they will draw for which bigger Saturday cleaning job they will do. She assures me this will be FUN! We have decided that people may trade jobs if both parties are agreeable to the change. Trading privileges will be revoked if whining and complaining results. I said great, make it work, and that is what they did. A. is writing out a detailed li

I'll jump right in, though as I think about it, this may be horse heavy. We rode Bristol and Java today, and all went well. Bristol is going to make a great horse to teach the littles on, I think. The day after the horses arrived, Java started to act just a wee bit nutty. It turns out she has gone into heat, and has spent several days making googly eyes at Emmy. Emmy, surprisingly, doesn't seem to mind, but there is still a fence or stall between them. I was a little concerned that Bristol and Java had bonded a little too much on their trailer ride down here and were going to become a little buddy sour. Well, it seems that Java has switched her affections to Emmy. See above. L. took a writing class that was offered for late elementary students at a local bookstore. I signed her up because she can fill notebooks with her stories like nobody's business. She was excited about the class and even agreed to reply back to people when they spoke to her. Well, after the class,

My grocery budget combined with the number of people I feed is constant source of curiosity for people. I'm going to go through my weekly meal planning and grocery shopping process and maybe that will help explain what I do. It happens to be a week of pretty mundane meals, as when I was doing this week's planning I wasn't expecting to dissect it like this. But it does give a pretty good slice of eating life, so it will work. When I sit down to make my grocery list, I first plan what meals we will have each week. Step one is to look at the calendar and see if anything is going on. This week I saw that tomorrow night there are a couple of events that have dinner included in them, so I'm off the hook for cooking. (Yay!). I also see that J. is late a night or two. This changes what I plan because I tend not to do any real cooking when it's just me and the masses. (I really only cook for J., I feed everyone else.) I think I'm also taking a meal to a couple of new

Today, for the first time in... well... ever, R. fell asleep on my lap. Sound asleep. So sound asleep, she was twitching and it was difficult to wake her up. I realize that for the vast majority of you, this little event hardly seems worth mentioning. Let me explain why this is a great big huge deal around here. I think I've made it pretty plain over the past three years that R. has experienced more than her fair share of trauma and change of caregivers. Trauma rewires the brain and not in good ways. Lots of trauma rewires the brain in lots of not good ways. When you couple the effects of trauma with a brain that is already structurally compromised and then throw in a brain resection, you get a mess. There are so many things that are difficult for R.... language, both receptive and expressive (compounded by switching languages), memory (both long term and working), large and small muscle control, proprioception and vestibular awareness, to name a few. Plus, on top of all that, th

Dear Radio Produces of WBGL , As I was driving one of my children to work, I had your radio station on and happened to catch the most recent spot by Kendra Smiley. Normally, Ms. Smiley is just fine, and I wasn't expecting anything different this time. I listened as she introduced a letter from a frustrated father about how his son didn't seem to listen to him when he was being disciplined. This frustrated father then went on to ask if his two  [emphasis mine] year old was capable of understanding and what he [the father] should do. I admit, that once I heard the age of the child in question, I chuckled softly to myself (having raised quite of few children past this age), thinking that the response would be to take a deep breath, let the child mature a bit, practice redirection, and not to worry about it. I mean, the child is two... little more than a baby, and still very new to everything. Since that was my expectation, it is little wonder that I was gripping the steering

I believe there is a (not so) secret fantasy of every horse loving child who does not have a horse of their own, that one day, quite unexpectedly, a horse will be given to them. I'm quite sure I am not the only to have harbored such fantasies, otherwise what would fuel the children's fiction horse genre of just that scenario played out over and over and over? I am too old to have that particular fantasy come true, but it is what played into my decision to surprise my younger children with a horse. Oh, they knew that Bristol was coming and were very excited. What they didn't know was that a couple of days after we visited the Midwest Horse Welfare Foundation , that we decided that we really needed to bring home another horse that we had seen there. Meet Java who arrived along with Bristol this afternoon. Java is an appaloosa mare and is as sweet as they come. She is a terrific trail horse, but is also super calm and will be perfect for children such as R. to use to r