Great Stacation.

Our wonderful stacation is over.  I actually was working minimally during the week so I don't know if that counts but we did a lot of vacation-y type things and we also did a lot of homey things so whatever, it was a great week.  Now it's over and we have to go back to real life.  :-P   These are random pictures off my phone .... babies, a drawing, the dog photos I always include in every post, and the pool.  I didn't get in the pool much during the visit because I was pretty busy most of the time, but yesterday the pool and I had a reunion.  It was great.

Now, back to real life.  Homeschooling and home-college-ing will begin shortly, so stay tuned.

Enjoying the week.

We've had pictures made, visited grandmas and aunts, got to have dinner with my brother (and will tomorrow with my husband's brothers and mom and dad),  We gone to the local parks and seen the some of the local sites.  We've spent a lot of time at home, cooking, grilling, watching TV, playing games, having friends over, etc.  Sometimes when I am outside with Freckles (the dog) waiting for her to do her thing, I look in the back door and think about how blessed I am.  I hope that I can take some of my blessed peaceful feelings into the next few weeks when we are back to trying to get things done.  :-)

Having fun!

We are  visiting with my son and his girlfriend baking brownies and bread and seeing friends and family.   It's pretty wonderful.

Positive News?

I set up some google alerts some time back.  I have been dealing with depression so I set up google alerts for joy, happiness, depression and positive news.  All of them seem to work well with links to good, helpful articles, except for the positive news one.  I've thought about deleting it because it really doesn't work in the spirit that I had intended, although it did give me quite the laugh this morning.  Here are the positive news headlines I received in my inbox this morning.

Mosquitoes test positive for West Nile

Cannondale-Garmin's Tom Danielson Tests Positive for Banned Substance

El Niño: Destructive, but positive for economy, farming

Woods at Wyndham 'would be positive chaos'

Stray kitten in East Haven tests positive for rabies

FOX CT

  

Truck driver tested positive for meth after crash

Not quite what I had intended when I set it up.  :-)

A little less whiny today.

Maybe it was watching 4 hours of Gilmore Girls last night ( I really love that show that we have recently discovered) but I am in a slightly better mood today, less whiny.  Whatever the cause, I'm going with it.  I don't mind feeling better about things today even though nothing has really changed.

I may have defeated the wasps around our back door that kept stinging us when we were turning the key, with 3 cans of wasp spray and a glob of green playdoh (to block their entrance to the inside of  the wall.)

I art journaled my first bookmark.

Yesterday, was just a gorgeous day.

My daughter made this fake fire for VBS.  The kids were playing like they were camping out.

Feeling stressed.

I'm stressed about big things and little things; mom's house, mom's rent and all the stuff that goes into elder care, the impending visit with my son and his girlfriend (though I love them and can't wait), the conflicts between our dogs, the wasps that are haunting our back door and won't go away despite taking aggressive measures and spraying them with cans of wasp and hornet spray, my job,  my messy house, the pain in my hand, which I am really starting to think must be broken.  I did call and ask for a referral to an orthopedist today.  I'm even stressed because VBS is this week and my kids are helpers which means that I had to take the garbage down by myself and that set my hand to throbbing.  I'm not stressed about homeschooling because I don't stress about that anymore.  This is the last year and I'm kind of sad about it and maybe sad is a kind of stressed ... but we haven't started even planning homeschooling this year other than buying an engineering DVD course and planning to continue German on Duolingo. (which we recommend, by the way).    When things just keep going on and on and on like this (remember, we've been dealing with mom's alzheimers for 10 years and trying to sell her house for almost a year now) I really feel that I understand phrases like 'the straw that broke the camel's back, how it could be a silly thing like being out of chocolate that can just send you over the edge.

I can't take the Gilmore Girls advice and wallow because I don't have time but maybe Gilmore Girls will come from Netflix and I can at least escape reality for a bit while watching it.  We've just discovered it and are all really enjoying it.  

It occurs to me too.

Awesomeness and modesty.

We were sitting around today talking about possible college majors for my daughter who has to go to college to keep her Dad's health insurance.  I went to college right out of high school with no idea what to major in  and finally decided on Child Development.  I planned to be a preschool teacher because I like kids and I had several years of teaching Sunday School and I really had no idea what to do.  If I had it to do over, I might major in architecture or interior design.  I mentioned this and my youngest son said "If you'd majored in something else besides Child Development, I might not have turned out so awesome."  :-)

True that.

Great Homeschooling Article

Homeschool This. Go read this article.  It's awesome.

Here's tiny excerpt:

Gather supplies. Here is a helpful list 

• Books. More books than you can accomodate. Go to libraries, book sales, yard sales. Let the kids bring any book they want into the house, short of pornography. Even ‘Garfield’.