The Eagle Has Landed.

He's home!  Woohoo!  He's lost another 20 pounds since we saw him last, mostly eating fish and steamed veggies in the school cafeteria, because he's afraid he'll get exposed to gluten with most of the other foods.  But hey, fish and steamed veggies is pretty good for you.  We're going to have to buy him some new pants though.  He's lost a total of 100 pounds since maybe this time last year and he's doing some kind of crazy intense workout with a friend at college.  He said "I won't be able to do my workout here"  I told him he could "work" here.  We need some post holes dug for his brothers treehouse/clubhouse.  That will get those biceps warmed up.  :-)  Anyway, he's home and we are going to spend as much time as possible enjoying his company.  The siblings have no enforced bedtime while he's home and no school while he's home.  We have 9 days and then he has to go back.  He said that the flying wasn't too bad although the first plane, which was a small prop plane was a tad scary, the big plane from Atlanta was nice.  When he was 7 or so and didn't want to  cross bridges because of his fear of heights, I could not have imagined this day.  I went to sleep last night to the sound of all three of them laughing. 

Joy. 

Some fun printables.

These look like fun for a lot of different ages.  It looks like the kids will have to use their imagination to fill these in.   :-)  Here's a sample of one of the history pages.

Isn't that kind of cool?  Here's the link. 
 

Today!

My son will be home tonight.  We have to go to the airport to pick up up.  (field trip?!) .  Hopefully he has really, truly overcome his fear of flying and will be fine.  Besides my underlying stress about him finding his way to the airport on time, and my generalized fear of my son flying  and then my fear of him getting lost in the Atlanta airport, my biggest worry is that he'll just balk and not get on the plane and decide not to come home at all.  :-P

Good stuff.

My son is going to get to come home for Thanksgiving.  That's exciting.  I can't wait to see him.  August 24 has been a long time, although we've kept in touch on Facebook and stuff, it's not the same and it really hasn't been enough.  We need to get the video chats regularly scheduled and possibly we might need to go someplace with faster internet.  This is definitely something we need to make sure and do.  The kids have always been extraordinarily close and I don't want that to end or have their relationships strained by distance.  If oldest gets a car which he is thinking about doing, then he should be able to come home more often.  I really hope so.  

He also got his grade reports and he got a 3.3 grade point average.  I'm very happy with that.  He needed to keep at least 2.0 to keep his scholarship and 3.0 to keep his good student discount on the car insurance.  So yay. 

This is very good because really we have been some pretty relaxed homeschoolers and he was kind of a difficult student for a while, but he's grown up now and doing well.  :-)

Latest crochet projects by the girl plus a bonus.

This is a Keva block marble run that my youngest son made.

Snake scarf.

Penguin.

Walrus.

Cat hat.

Alligator.

Yesterday was a good,

long, a little bit tiring day.  I did my transcription work and then went off to my volunteer job, holding babies at the neonatal intensive care unit at the children's hospital.  It was a little crazy last night.  Usually, I keep pretty busy with periods of nothing to do interspersed, but this time, I got there and there was a little guy fussing and then the little girl next to him would cry.  I'd get him to sleep, then her, then him, then her for 4 hours straight with neither of them sleeping more than about 15 minutes.  It turns out that both of them are fighting drug addictions.  It's so sad, but the babies are so sweet and I am glad to help them.  I would like to go more often.  I'm actually a little tempted to go back to school and get some kind of nursing assistant training so that I could work there.  I have been doing the same job for 18 years now.  It might be time for a change.  This empty nest thing has kind of got me running scared and thinking about reinventing/restructuring my life.  I've got 3 1/2 years until my youngest child is an adult!  I've been a homeschooling mom/medical transcriptionist for a long time.  It's hard to imagine that we're almost done homeschooling.  (!).  I, of course, am in favor of adopting a couple more kids and starting all over, but my husband does not seem to want to.  :-(

Meanwhile, my mind is on how to get my son home from Mississippi and how to get all the Thanksgiving festivities scheduled in and can you believe that it is really time to start Christmas shopping ... and lots of other things.  Right now though, I really should get to work on my medical transcription lines for today.  Blah. 

For fun Thanksgiving freebies

Can you all believe it's almost Thanksgiving?  I can't.  But, Technology Rocks, Seriously, has gathered some seriously cute Thanksgiving games and things from around the web.  We're going to do some of them.   Check it out here:  Technology Rocks, Seriously.

On my head.

For some reason my kids say that they have a song on their heads instead of in their heads.  I really have no idea why they say it that way.  It's part of the kids subculture that exists here in this house.  There's all of us, and then there's the parents subculture and the kids subculture.  They have funny jokes that only they get and expressions, like this one, that only they use.  It's funny.  Anyway, speaking of songs in the head, this morning, I woke up with a song running through my mind that was one I "wrote" or made up at least several years back.  I can't do the tune for you all, but here are the words.

Go to sleep.
Go directly to sleep.
And sleep for at least 8 hours.
Go to sleep.
Go immediately to sleep.
and sleep for at l-e-a-st (hold this word out) 8 hours.

It's beautiful, isn't it?  Poetic.

Another song I made up that has lasted through the years is the one I made up when we were lost in Indianapolis for a long time.

You can't get there from here.
You can't get there from here.
You can get there from anywhere else,
but you can't get there from here.

I tell you, I'm a poet.

:-P