A few days with not too much planned.

These are the kinds of days I love.  The weather's nice, the sun is out and we don't have a lot on the calendar.  Yesterday, I got to play 2 games of UpWords, my favorite.  The first was against my daughter, who has only played a couple of times before.  I gave her a 100 point head start and then she only beat me by about 20 points.  Then later, I played a game against my parents and my Dad beat me by about 3 points.  It was a very close game with all 3 participants within 9 points of each other.  I love a good close game.

We're trying to finish The Story of Science, book 1 as soon as possible, because it's now officially overdue at the library.  I am going to read a big section of it today so maybe we can take it back tomorrow.   I'm looking for clip art to help with the notebooking a little bit, make it a little bit faster, so we can study more in one day.  Sometimes these notebooking pages take a long, long time. 

Above, these are the crazy morning glories that have overtaken a big section of our yard, growing and wrapping themselves around my husband's old bike.  They're so pretty, yet so invasive!  I think I'll probably just concede this whole area of the yard to them and put my garden someplace else! 

Enjoying the weather and in an organizing kind of mood.

After what seemed like weeks of rain, we had a sunny, cool day yesterday and another one today. We took a walk outside last evening and enjoyed it so much. I made chili and cornbread because they seem like good foods to enjoy with the cool temperatures. School went reasonably well yesterday, with the exception of one student who didn't finish until 9:30 p.m. last night.

Now that I've cleaned out my pantry (somewhat) I want to organize it. I really don't like the wire shelves in there and I'd like to take them out and replace them with wood. I do have a wooden bookshelf in there, so we may just put it up on the wall to help me be able to see it better ( I have to bend way down and to the side to search for canned goods) and also make a space underneath it to store the dog food, cat food and the potatoes. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. If this were an anonymous blog and no one who read it knows me in real life, I'd publish the pantry photos here and see if anyone has any ideas.  :-)

Deep thoughts or not.

I should post something intelligent on my blog occasionally, something besides what we are doing any given day.  I will give the daily update today, we're back to school and I've been doing my hour of cleaning which, today, has involved cleaning out the pantry.  I had the dreaded dead potato in the pantry.  Does anything smell worse than a rotten potato?  Ew.  I've got 20 more minutes and I'm thinking I might try to organize it a little bit too, while I'm at it. 

Since I don't have a lot of deep thoughts of my own today, I thought I'd share some writings by other people that I thought were interesting. 

Do we think more school is the answer?  More School

A blog about education on Psychology Today.  I read this one frequently.

One hour of homeschooling a day?  One Hour Homeschooling.   Also this site  One Hour Homeschooling 

This is actually kind of what we do.   We do an hour or two together, then the kids have some things they do on their own and we do a lot of unschooling type activities around here too, watching educational DVDs and taking field trips, browsing through a ton of books that we get from the library, etc.  Around here, unschooling means is that the kids learn about what they are interested in learning, which means my oldest learns a lot about guitar and video game design, my middle child studies art, beading and everything about animals/pets and my youngest studies a bunch of things about video games, legos and trading card games.  (For a child, play is work, right?)

Anyway, that's what our homeschooling has evolved into.  An hour or two of science, grammar, math and notebooking, a couple of hours of chores and other schooly assignments they do on their own and then they follow their own interests and read, read, read - at least until screen time.  Then, after screen time we read together. 

It seems to be working for us.

More Photo Studio stuff.

I went to Walmart today to get a cookie cake for the birthday boy. As I walked in, who should come and start talking to me, but photo studio worker 2 from the other day. She said that she felt horrible about me leaving the studio unhappy and offered me a deal I couldn't refuse on photos of the kids. I might have to use the walk away plan more frequently, although really, I'm not a good actress, to be able to pull that off when I really wasn't angry. Anyway, we're getting our pictures!

Happy Birthday!

Right on schedule, my oldest son turned 17 today, about 15 minutes ago as a matter of fact.  We had a difficult day that day, 17 years ago, 14 1/2 hours of labor that was induced and therefore supposed to be over quickly.  The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice and he was not breathing when he was born.  He had to be resuscitated and then taken quickly to the special care nursery where he had to spend several days.  He had IVs in his arms, his legs and finally in his head.  Thankfully, he's okay now.  :-)  I am the stereotypical mom who cannot believe how long it's been! 

Happy Birthday!

September 26.

We've got an event with our large homeschool group today, what was going to be an Airsoft tournament, but has changed into a video game party since it has rained every single day this week.  It should be fun, for all of us, kids and adults alike.

In other news, my oldest son is going to turn 17 tomorrow.  17 years.  I cannot believe it.  It's like your life is going along at a relatively slow pace and then you have kids and it all accelerates to a crazy speed.  Seventeen.  

Still.  Can't.  Believe.  SEVENTEEN.

How we managed to squeeze in a school day anyway ...

We had the sleepover last night and I took our guest home at noon. Then we headed to the Walmart picture place to have school pictures made and then to the library and home to watch a DVD from the History Channel about the technology of the city of Alexandria in ancient times. It wasn't a heavy day of studying, but we did learn quite a bit from the DVD, the library is always educational and every school takes time out once a year for pictures.

We didn't get any pictures, however, we just wasted over an hour of our time. When we first arrived, I explained what I wanted, close ups of all 3 kids and I'd like to get them at the 7.99 promo offer please. Worker #1 at the store told me that we could not get the promo offer on more than 1 pose, and we could not come back and get a repeat promo offer until they'd changed it, in a couple of months. I said okay, we'll just get one of the kids done today, here and we will go someplace else to get the other 2 done. She argued, saying, oh, they could help me, they could make the pictures look just like school pictures and for only a little bit more than 24.00 (ish) it would cost me to get them all done if they could all get the promo, I could get individual pictures of all 3 of them.

After the pictures were done, we went to the pretzel company and got some yummy pretzels and came back for our pricing session. I tried to get the worker (by this time the shift had changed and we were on worker #2, although she was there, standing next to worker #1 when worker #1 tried to sell me this load of garbage) to cut to the chase and tell me how much, but she wouldn't. I listened to an endless spiel about how this was their best package (230 dollars) but it was worth 1000.00, etc. Finally, I interupted her and said, "Listen, the most I want to spend is about 40 dollars, your co-worker told me that was possible." and she said that that was not true, that the least expensive package that they had was 79.99. Is it just me or is that more than a little more than 24.00? I walked out without buying anything.

My husband has a good camera if I can just get him to fit it into his schedule, we will do school pictures at home, as a homeschool should.

A sleepover!

My kids hosted their first ever sleepover last night.  We've never had a child stay overnight before.  I know it's odd, but we were just shy about this for some reason, mostly because we didn't feel that the house was clean enough, but we've developed some better cleaning habits lately and the best way to keep it clean is to invite people over, right?  So we started out with a delightful young friend of my daughter's - luckily her parents were okay with the school-night thing since I only have Thursdays and Saturdays off and we've got something going on Saturday.  It went well.  I made them go to sleep at 1:00 and it seems they did.  Unfortuately for me, Freckles decided she needed to go outside at 6:30, so I'm already awake.  :-p

Socrates quote on education.

"Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men."

~ Socrates ~

No! No! No! Please!!!!

This is what I hear every night when I stop reading from the 4th Ranger's Apprentice book (from the youngest 2 kids, the oldest is too cool to beg).  They absolutely LOVE these books.  I'm glad I took a chance on reading them.  Usually I pre-read what we do as read-alouds, just to make sure that there's nothing scary in them.  My youngest has, in the past, been scared of a lot of things, but I think he's outgrowing a lot of that now and I took a chance.  It has worked out well so far.  The action is nonstop and there's a lot of humor in them.  You grow to love the characters, which is very important, because if you don't care about them, then what's the point of finishing, right? 

Parental note:  It does have some mild cuss words in it.  It also has incredible vocabulary words in it and you may need a dictionary. 

School.

We took a day off from school yesterday to visit with friends, which is important too and now we're back.  I asked the kids last night how they'd enjoyed their (1 day) fall break.  They think they should have 2 full weeks like the public/private school kids around here, but we started a week after they did, so guess what?  We're not taking 2 weeks.  We might take a couple of days sometime in October.  I'd like to go somewhere on a small vacation but I don't know if that's going to happen.  I was really hoping that this was our year for a beach trip, but then the bad economy happened and Cafepress cut my commissions.  Blah.  Anyway, maybe we can find someplace to go for a couple of days?  I hope so.

News.

I actually finally picked out a wall quote. It's from the book of Thessalonians and says "In Everything Give Thanks." Simple. All about an attitude of gratitude. I still would like to get another one. I'm not sure if I'm going to put this one in the kitchen or living room and I'd like to have one in each room. The list of quotes is about 3 pages long at this point, so it may take a while to decide on another one. Hey, this one only took, what, a month?

Really working.

This extra screen time thingy really works to motivate my boys. I'm surprised at how well it works. I was ready to let them quit cleaning this afternoon and my youngest said, "Can we do one more hour of each." Which means one more hour of screen time and one more hour of CLEANING. Can you all believe that? You can almost walk through the boy's room now. ;-) This works better than the audio book trick I've been using for year. Hmm.

Organized? Not.

In some ways we are and some ways we aren't.  We need to go through all of our little stuff and find a home for it.  We've got 2 rooms with TVs and 3 computers that people can watch DVDs on and we've got DVDs all over the house.  We've got music CDs here and there and everywhere.  We've got over-the-counter medicines in both bathrooms, my desk, my husband's desk and one of the kitchen cabinets.  No actually 2 of the kitchen cabinets.  My husband puts things over the stove, but I can't reach that cabinet so I put things in the next cabinet over.  We've got to work out some kind of system so that everything has a place and then start putting everything in its place on a daily basis. It's hard to do if they don't have a regular place to be.

Random Thoughts.

Random Thoughts About The Cold. Everyone male in this house has now caught this darn cold/virus with me. That leaves our daughter as the only one standing this time. I think it's the same cold, just going around and around to various family members. She had it a week or so ago, so her turn is probably coming again. My youngest son has been giving me updates on his boogers frequently today, which is entertaining.

Random Thoughts About The Shows I've Been Watching Since I Haven't Felt Like Doing Anything Else Because I Have a Cold.
I finished watching all the episodes of 24 that we had yesterday. I like it, but there are a few things about TV dramas that bug me. For one thing, they rarely get any medical stuff right. I'm not a medical expert by any means, but I've been in enough ICUs to know that committing a murder in one would be pretty difficult. For one thing the walls are glass so that the nurses can see their patients. The beeping of the alarms showing the heart stopping would surely bring someone running? Seriously. Even on House MD a lot of the medical stuff is just goofy. I mean House is an internist not a brain surgeon. In one of the shows he did brain surgery on a patient.

On Burn Notice and 24, this is a funny thing I've noticed. The heroes, Jack Bauer and Michael Westen, always have their sunglasses. They will go through 3 or 4 cars, hotwiring and stealing them or borrowing them, have to get rid of several cell phones because they are now traceable, beat up several bad guys, get the snot beat out of themselves and then, start driving and pull their easily locate-able and unbroken (!) sunglasses out of their pocket to drive. I can't even make it to a trip to the library and the grocery without misplacing a pair of sunglasses! (Which is why I make all my sunglass purchases at the Dollar Tree.)

Random Thoughts About Homeschooling.
Yesterday we went to Lowes to have a support board cut for my oldest son's bed as the metal bed slats aren't that strong and he's worried he'll fall through it. This involved measuring the bed, going to the store and looking for a cheap yet strong type of plywood and then having it cut to our measurements. I told the kids to watch the guy with the saw carefully so we could count this as a field trip. LOL. What do you all think? :-)

Better?

Okay, I feel better today, no fever so far.  Although it's kind of weird, I'm going to just go with it.  I need to clean my house and I need to work and I'm very thankful that I don't have to feel horrible while doing it.   Very thankful.

Again?

I'm sick again. I woke up this morning with a fever of 102 degrees, chills and body aches. I went to the doctor and had my nose and throat swabbed (very unpleasant, especially the nose!) and it's not strep and it's not flu. It's just some kind of silly old virus that they can't do anything for. Joy. So again I'm sick and again I can't take any time off from work, so I'm working under the influence of cold medications. Hopefully, that will work out okay!

We did half a day of school. Both boys are getting it too, as well as my husband so we went light on the school-work. At least we got a little bit done and I'm going to count it as a half day. Some days are just like that.

Still going.

I'm still trying to stick as exactly to the schedule/work plan as I can.  Since we started school in August, I've had a really easy daily plan and this week, I've ramped it up quite a bit and I've been trying to stick to it exactly, trying to see if it works.  The only way to see if a plan works is to try it.  I've just got back from exercising outside and now I'm going to start on cleaning and my hour of medical transcription work I've added to the mornings.  (normally I work in the evenings).  It's the only way I can see if the goals/plans are even reasonable.  I guess I could add it all up.

Total hours in a week - 168
Hours of work 30
Hours of school 7.5 (I've worked for 5 years to train the kids to work without me sitting right there and it has paid off, mostly.)
Hours of sleep 56 (if the dogs didn't wake me up)
Napping 7  (if the phone doesn't wake me up.  This chronic fatigue thingy is killer!)
Housework 5
Exercise 2.5
Blogging 2
Family obligations 6
Church 2
Driving people places. 6
Email 7
Drinking coffee/staring into space 3.5
Showering, grooming, getting dressed 7

This leaves me 23 hours to just do nothing?   Well actually not.  I left off shopping for groceries, taking people and dogs to the doctor/vet, watching 24, a lot of cleaning that I don't really think about and don't really count, reading and shopping for wall quotes.  One of these days I'm actually going to decide on a wall quote and buy it and then what will I do with my time?  LoL. 

(Wall quote above by Ecrater http://www.ecrater.com/product.php?pid=3533043)

Working the plan.

We're in day two of the new housekeeping/work list.  So far, I've done one thing, but hey, it's a start.  Yesterday went pretty well.  We took Max to the vet and it turns out that he has ear infections in both ears.  I tell you what, with these dogs, I might as well have babies.  Max kept me up pretty much all night the night before last and last night, Freckles felt the need to get up and go outside at 2:30 a.m.  Last night, at about 2:35 a.m., Freckles I had a discussion about her going to live with strangers ... but I didn't mean it.  She's had enough homes in her young life.  I would like to sleep though. 

Anyway, back to my quest to figure out what is the minimum amount of housework I can do and still keep my house presentable ...

Okay, my excuse has expired.

I have to clean today, exercise and do school. I also have to take Max to the vet. He's miserable, rubbing and scratching his ear and shaking his head almost constantly. I tried cleaning out his ear last night (3:00 am) but it didn't help. We need to get school done and get there by 2:15, so we'd better move quickly!

(This post edited to remove the word "today" from every sentence. My excuse is I typed it before I was done with my coffee. I left it in the first sentence but took it out of all of the rest of them.)

Reasons I'm not cleaning and what I am doing instead.

Okay, after 2 days of basically just goofing off here at my house, I finally thought of an excuse a good reason I'm not cleaning the house this weekend. I'm testing my school/work list system slash schedule to see if it will be enough (I only want to do the bare minimum that it takes) to keep my house clean. All the better to start with a thoroughly dirty house tomorrow when we get back to school, right? If I started today, I'd just ruin it.

Pretty good, huh? I'm proud of it. This is a science experiment folks. (In more ways than one, unfortunately, if you get my drift).

Anywho, what I am doing this weekend, besides a lot of blogging, is reading a book called "By Darkness Hid" which so far is pretty good. We've gone to the library and church and Lowes (pricing a potato cannon and rope for a rope swing). I also started watching "24" season one which we got from Netflix and that's pretty addictive. I turned on the closed captioning because the kids were kind of loud and I really enjoyed the descriptions of the music on the captions which started with soft instrumental music and went through solemn, loud, louder, suspenseful, dramatic, mysterious, ominous and even terrifying. Good show though, so far, despite the music being ominous and terrifying. :-)

House Rules # 3- Miscellaneous.

School Lists - Everyone does everything on their school list every day with the exception of 3 "freebies" a week. Freebies can be used to opt out of some of the assignments. They can't be used for the same thing twice in one week. They can NEVER be used for math. Everyone needs to get their lists done before 3:00 p.m. (this one is not enforced adequately).

Swimming - No swimming alone.

Kid of the Day - The kid of the day gets preference if there is a squabble over something, like who 'called' the TV. Each kid has 2 days a week and mom has 1 also (just because there was one left over). For squabbles on mom's day, they usually just flip a coin or something.

Home Alone Rules - If the kids are home alone, they can't go outside, they can't cook and they get SCREENTIME. They hate to see me come home.

Dish rules - We made up an elaborate system last year to label everyone's dishes and have them use only those, and wash them when they were done, but this did NOT work. There was gross disobedience, mostly by me, and we've dropped this idea, although Dad is still trying to hang onto it, using only his own dishes, all the rest of them are just pretty much a free-for-all. It's a good idea, but the kids were so unbelieveably resistant to washing out their dishes and I didn't have whatever it took to fight my half of the battle (Dad fought his half well). So anyway, we've kind of dropped this one. I'm the one who pays for it, because I'm the one who washes dishes. Sigh.

Anyway, those are some of our crazy rules. We are peaceable most of the time around here, so I guess they mostly work.

Now I need to stop blogging and start doing something useful.

House Rules #2 - Snacks.

I had to ask my daughter the snack rules because they're not clear in my mind for some reason. :-p Here they are, according to what she told me. If I buy sweets at the grocery they can only have 2 sweet snacks per day. If I buy salty snacks, there are rules for those too. Chips have to be eaten with a sandwich (so you will get full and not eat too many). You can only have 1 handful of goldfish crackers per day because my youngest would eat the whole bag on grocery day if left to his own devices. Snacks that come in boxes of 6, each person gets 1 and we have a drawing to see who gets the extra. They usually have a lottery for mine too, because I don't eat things like pop tarts and toaster streudel. right now, we've got caramel apples and I haven't decided if I want to eat mine yet, so the drawing has not yet been done. There are no limits on fruit, applesauce, yogurt and things like that, although sometimes if the yogurt is a very popular kind, the kids will make rules and divide them up. They are into some kind of squeezy things right now.

Unfortunately, due to my recent laziness about cooking, I only cook 1 time per day, if that, and a lot of the times we follow the YOYO plan of eating which means 'you're on your own" or in other words, mom's not going to cook, so I try to keep whole wheat bread, sandwich makings, fruit, yogurt, applesauce, salad and various other things that the kids can make for themselves. I've gotten awfully, awfully lazy in the cooking department. Honestly though, since I had lap band surgery a few years ago, I can't eat a lot of things and it's hard to get enthusiastic about cooking things you know you can't eat. I'm trying to do better though. If I'd make a meal plan and cook, I could save a lot of money at the grocery store.

House Rules, #1, Screen Time.

We have tons of rules at our house.  I tend not to remember a lot of them because I ignore a lot of them.  :-)  If I want to remember a rule, I ask a kid.  One of the younger 2 kids because the oldest tends to ignore and/or claim ignorance of a lot of them too. 

One of the main rules is for screentime.  The various screens in our house, which include TV (2), computers (4), gameboys (3) can only come on from 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. so basically, when Mom is working.  This has worked well for us for a year or so, much better than any of the previous schemes and plans that I came up with.  This way, they leave me alone when I'm working and their screentime is limited in a way I can easily keep track of.  If they miss a couple hours because we're at the skating rink, there are no makeups.  They also get screentime on Saturday morning before noon because my youngest loves Saturday morning cartoons.  Right now due to the TV issues we are having (no channels at all!), I've been taking him to Grandma and Grandaddy's house for the last 3 weeks every Saturday. 
I realise that this amount of screentime is more than the 'experts" recommend, but I also realise that my kids don't actually get the maximum every week.  We skate, we go to parties, youth groups, etc. and also sometimes they all want the same screen so they have to wait.  At other times, they get interested in something else, forget about the screens and go do the other thing.  This week, since we've been reading Ranger's Apprentice, they've been interested in shooting bows and arrows, so they've been doing a lot of that, quite a bit of it during screen time.  Of course, there are bow and arrow rules too, no one can shoot unless the other 2 kids are in the house.  They watch each other and cheer for each other, through the living room windows.

No idea.

I've really got not idea what I'm going to do with today.  Yes, I realize that it is already here and I should already have gotten started on whatever it is I'm going to do, but I haven't.  I'm drinking coffee and re-reading one of my favorite books, "My Brother Michael" by Mary Stewart.  I'm almost at the end, about 15 more minutes and then I'll get moving.  I'm going to go to the library, the grocery and go over and see my parents, all of the things I wanted to do yesterday, but I was just tired and I don't think I'm going to wait until after we get done with school because then I'll be tired again, and rushing to get back in time for work.  I think we're just going to take the day off from school.  I may regret it later when we're trying to get all our days in, but that's one of the things I love about homeschooling, the flexibility.  I'm going to be flexible today. 

Tired?

I'm not sure why I came home from the funeral today so tired. It's not like I really did anything. However, I certainly felt the need to take a nap when I got home. I haven't been sleeping all that well at night and I guess it's caught up with me. Anyway, I had all these plans for this evening, going to see Mom and Dad, going to the grocery and the library, but I haven't done anything. I took a nap, I've read a little bit of a book and now I'm blogging and thinking about going to find something to have for supper. Maybe a BLT?

Brilliant.

We're reading the Rangers Apprentice series in the evenings as read-alouds.  We're on the second one.  So far, they're good.  Last night, we were reading about how the enemy had built a bridge and wondering what the main character was going to do next. We decided that he should burn down the enemy's bridge.  At the end of the chapter, when the character decided that for himself, we cheered.  We were so proud of ourselves for figuring that one out before he did!  So brilliant of us.  Then, this morning, I picked up the book to move it and noticed the complete title for the first time:  Ranger's Apprentice, Book 2, The Burning Bridge. 

We're so clever. 

Tuesday, the 8th.

Can ya'll believe it's September 8 already? Where did this year go? The good news is I'm finally feeling better and the kids who got "it" (whatever it was) just seemed to have a case of the sniffles.  It didn't seem to hit them as hard as it hit me, thankfully.  I'd hate to have 3 kids around here who felt like they'd been run over by a truck.  Yesterday, my youngest did feel tired and said he felt like he had "300 pound eyelids" but today he says he feels better. 

The bad news around here is that my husband's grandfather passed away yesterday.  The funeral home visitation starts tomorrow so today is kind of a limbo day and I guess we'll just go about our usual activities?  We've got school and a planning meeting for the homeschool group so I guess we'll go on as usual. 

Still not up to par.

I'm very tired of not feeling good and very whiny. If I still feel bad on Tuesday, I'll probably go to the doctor. I think maybe I've got more going on than just a cold. My main symptom now is the lightheadness and fatigue/weakness, not cold-type symptoms. Anyway, I managed to do school and work this week, not much else, but at least those got done. The house is a mess. The van is a mess. Maybe I'll feel like cleaning them in a few days.

Maybe not.

Still barking.

Yes, I'm aware that can mean barking mad and I'm not denying that side of it, as that could very well be true, but I'm really talking about a barking cough.  I also still feel weak, tired and kind of light-headed.  I did manage to go to the grocery today but that's about all I got done.  I'm tired of feeling sick.   It's been a week today.

My head and other things.

My head seems to be at least semi-attached today. That does not mean that I will have great thoughts today, it just means that I don't feel like I'm leaving it behind every time and move around, just sometimes.  Its a very good thing.   It's progress anyway.   I do still have a fever today, but it's slight, 99.1.  I thought I was fever-free yesterday and ventured out.  I hope I didn't spread the germs around any!  I did keep using hand sanitizer and coughed into my elbow! 

I think we're going to venture out again today.  We need to pick up my daughter's fair entry from the 4H office.  I also need to go to the library and pick up a book I've got on hold. 

I've come to the realization that I'm probably going to have to tweak my list (again!).   I thought I'd just do my chores while the kids were doing theirs but I'm not doing all that well and the house has gotten awful because it's been neglected through the fair and through the illness.  I'm going to have to add more total cleaning time and probably going to have to make the kids doing school contingent on my getting my chores done.  I hate to have to do that, but there is my lack of motivation staring me in the face again ...

I want a clean house.

I just don't want to clean house.

I think I should make that into a T-shirt.

Kind of in a daze.

I'm kind of in a daze today. My fever broke last night but I could not sleep and finally took a benadryl about 3:00 a.m. Big mistake. Huge. So, I was sleeping away soundly at 11:00 o'clock this morning when my husband came in the house and started the house dogs yapping and woke me up. I was very, very groggy. I made my way to the kitchen and made coffee and then found my way to my computer to get my email while drinking it. Then, after a little while, my daughter asked when we needed to leave for the field trip. Eeek! Half an hour!!!!! Not one of us had been in the shower yet. I jumped up and grabbed some DayQuil and then got in the shower, ASAP. Somehow we made it, on time and had a great planetarium visit. We really enjoyed it. However, I haven't felt like I've had my head on quite right all day. It kind of feels like it's floating ... which is not as pleasant as it sounds. I think maybe I should have checked the expiration date on that DayQuil.