Organization.

This is the kids white board school chart.  They decided that they wanted to be able to move things around from day to day and so they used this magnetic white board, magnets and wrote their assignments on card stock.  It's been working really well.

You wouldn't think

that this time of year would be prime out-of-doors time but it is.  The sun is shining.  The temperature is in the high 50s and the kids have been outside every day..   The sunshine, exercise and fresh air is good for them.  I probably need to join them.  I could seriously use a boost of mood and a change of attitude that a nice walk in the sun might provide.  I'm almost done with work, thank goodness. 

I just realized.

That today it's been 2 years since my Dad passed away.  Tomorrow would have been his 82nd birthday.   I still miss him every day..  I noticed a week or so ago that I was thinking of him and smiling not tearing up, so I'm progressing.  I definitely don't cry every day anymore, only once in a while.  I've done some thinking about grief over the past 2 years, how everyone grieves differently.  I had a moment at the funeral of my aunt, with a friend of hers who was talking about her grandson's death.  She said that she had not visited the grave.  I told her that I hadn't visited Dad's grave either, other than the funeral and once to look at the tombstone and make sure everything was spelled correctly.  That's it.  She said that she felt guilty for not visiting the grave, but she just couldn't.  I said that everyone grieves in their own way and that she was doing nothing wrong and she hugged me for the longest time.  She said "I thought I was the only one in the world."  We all have our strange little quirks and I'm glad that our shared quirkiness helped her feel better.  I walk on the sidewalk past my Dad's grave all the time, but don't visit it.  I still haven't looked at the clock in the church sanctuary that has a plaque dedicating it to my Dad.  I've never read that plaque.  Not even once.  I wanted generic, not personally meaningful songs sung at the funeral because I felt like personally meaningful songs would have made it even more difficult and it was difficult enough.  I realize that my way of grieving is odd to some people but it's mine.  Some people bottle things up.  Some people need to vent.  Some people need to visit graves on a regular basis and some don't.  We all just need to be respectful of these differences. 

Impromptu History Lesson

Last night and today my youngest son has been watching This is America Charlie Brown which we have on DVD.  It's pretty interesting and informative.  I enjoy Snoopy as a wild west cowboy with a mustache. :-)    We also have The Story of Us on DVD but someone has borrowed that.  After we watched the part about the transcontinental railroad today, we took a few minutes to look at the Amtrak website and daydreamed about taking a cross country trip by rail.  That is something I'd like to experience some day.

Now screen time is over so the kids have gone outside to enjoy the sunshine.  It's really  a beautiful day for January.

Saying yes.

Last night my youngest son wanted to play UpWords instead of doing his regular spelling and I just said yes.   I think it's important to follow the schedule and the rules most of the time, but sometimes, it's nice just to say yes to a more relaxed way of doing things.  It was good for him.  He got the rule of doubling the consonant at the end of a word when you add -ed or -ing reinforced over and over throughout the game.  He beat me, but I gave him 150 points to start with so I don't know if he really gets to have bragging rights.

Work, school and life lessons.

It's Friday and I wonder at how fast the weeks just zoom by.  I am not feeling great today due to a bruised tailbone and an aching neck, but I am working.  I pretty much never take a day off, but I would sure like to today.   It is surprising what physical demands a job like mine places on the body.   It's a strain, sitting and typing all day.  One of these days, I'm going to have to do something else.  Maybe soon. I'd kind of like to get a standing desk, but I'm not sure what I'd do about the foot pedal.  I use a foot pedal to play, rewind and fast forward the recorded dictations that I type.

The youngest kid got up this morning at 6:00 a.m., did all of his school work and then fell back to sleep on the couch.  Now he's got the afternoon off to do as he pleases.  The girl got up at noon, as usual (beauty sleep!) and is doing her school work now.  She's got a guitar lesson this afternoon.   Time management is one of the things they are learning, I suppose.  Her Dad took extra time with her this week on math and she's back up to speed and doing fine.

I learned a lesson on envy yesterday.  There's this woman I've met online whose life I have kind of envied.  They are wealthy.  They have traveled and adopted kids from overseas and were starting a nonprofit to help others. She seemed to me to have it all together.  Then yesterday she went public with something that gave me quite a shock and reminded me that no one's life is perfect and made me very thankful for the life that I have.

Perspective.     

January 26.

I love my day off and I had a lot of things planned for today.  Usually it's our clean the house day but the house is in relatively good order (for our house) , so I was thinking of doing some organizing or perhaps putting down the floor tiles I got black Friday (Yes, in November!).  I've been dreading that and putting it off because I really don't think I'll be very good at it and I tentatively set today as the day.  Unfortunately, I got up feeling quite bruised in well, as Junie B. Jones would say, my behiney and I don't feel good about the thought of sitting on the cold hard floor for hours.  I have no idea why this has happened.  My son said I sit too much and that is true, but I've been sitting and doing medical transcription now for many years and I've never actually had this issue before. It's odd.  So, today I have done things that don't require that amount of sitting.  I've taken out the garbage, cleaned up the kitchen, baked chocolate chip gluten free cookies and made my son a gluten free dairy free pizza while my daughter made herself and youngest son a gluten-y, cheese-y one.  My oldest son, bless his heart, said that the pizza was really good, although it just looks sad without cheese. Now I am uncomfortably sitting and blogging and ruminating about what else to try and accomplish today.  I may work on my version of this tablecloth which is halfway done and would involve lying on the floor and not sitting.  :-P

Useful things.

I was looking around for notebooking topics and ideas yesterday and I uncovered a lot of interesting things on Squidoo.  Here's the main search page.    This is a cool page showing all different types of notebooking.   Here's a page on anatomy.   Here's one on chemistry.   Here's a page on geography notebooking.  Right now my kids are notebooking their way through all of the simple machines.  This is going to take another week, probably and then we'll choose something else.  Now I know where to look.