Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Hello! I am not sure who actually reads this but if you do please leave a note. We have been enjoying our "Fall Break" this past week. I figured the public schools do it and the private schools do it - so why not my little home school program. It has been a wonderful break and the weather has been incredible. We went to Rock City and Ruby Falls on Friday, September 28th. It was just an incredible day. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Last night while watching the evening news, I found out about a at home mom that blogs about the daily stuff of being an at home mom of 6 kids. I looked up her blog today and she is simply hilarious. She has been approached to write a book and a sit-com!!!! Can you imagine! She also has over 30,000 people reading her blog daily. She posts each evening after the kids are in bed. Because she has so many people reading she can also sell advertisement on her blog. Now she makes abouyt $4,000 a month in advertising. Now you all know me . . . I actually started thinking is my life with these 2 skateboarding boys, 2 mischievous dachshunds and of course the adult "child" - my husband, worth writing about daily. And would anyone actually read it. Am I creative enough to entertain? I have no clue. But it is fun to think that it would be something that could connect me to the other moms in the trenches. You can read this woman's blog at:http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/ She is really worth sitting and reading. It is great to hear we are in the same boat and can still laugh.

Our most recent trip today was to a play at Memorial Auditorium. It was Junie B Jones - First Grader. It took a miracle just to get there. After finally leaving the house, I discover I desperately needed gas. Then we head toward Chattanooga on I-75. We are finally on McCallie heading to Memorial Auditorium, and beginning to think I am going to pull this off, when we get stuck in traffic 5 blocks away. It is now 10 minutes before the play is to start. UGH! So I am thinking this was just a total bust when we notice the lines around the auditorium are still very long. They are still unloading buses and the traffic problem is caused by a line of buses waiting to unload!! Yeah, we may pull this off altogether. We park 5 blocks away and walk quickly to the auditorium and get in and to the ticket table - only to find out that our homeschool group is scheduled to attend the Noon performance not the 10 am. The very kind man took great sympathy and let us sit in the box seats. we had only missed about 5 minutes of the play.

So we settled in and started watching. It was a good thing we were in the boxes because Stephen was having a very hard time sitting still. That is not unusual at all for him. But after 10 minutes he is asking if we can leave. WHY did I think this would be fun?!?! I quickly made the mental note to cancel our reservations with our homeschool co-op for us to attend the ballet. Not gonna happen for this family.

We will be restarting learning time tomorrow. I just hope our class time is productive. I am still learning this process and the boys. Some days are incredible and some days . . . well lets just say some days are incredible. :)

I hope you are well and healthy!! Please keep in touch.

The Mama - aka Terri

Plagued by Injuries!!!

Finally some new pics!!! These were taken Sunday, September 16th at Chattown skatepark. NEW BOARDS!!!!

This has been a challenging week for all of us. I have had a nagging problem with my left hip. I finally went to the doctor - waiting on x-ray results. The only thing I know is the muscle relaxer they gave me knocked me out. Either I was that tired or it works that way. I wion't take it again till this evening. We will see what happens.

The other injury is skateboarding related - imagine that with us! :) Johnathon hurt his foot on Monday. We spent Tuesday morning in the ER. They didn't see a fracture - just some deperation in the growth plate. We follow back up with their pediatrician today and probably with the ortho guy next week. He is still having quite a bit of pain.

Wow has it been that long!!!???

I had no idea that it had been that long since I last posted anything. I have it as a reoccurring task each week. Obviously, I don't get all the tasks done. :)

One of my blogging hang up has been that I don't have a digital camera. I solved that this week. Yep, for those that know me I hope you were sitting. I bought a digital camera. This means that I will be selling my 35 mm camera. EBAY here is come!!

I used the camera for the first time last night. We met some homeschooling friends from New City, our church, at the Creative Discovery Museum. After that fun we took the boys to Chatttown. Our outdoor Chattanooga skatepark. The weather was perfect and much milder than it had been.

It started raining on the way home. For those of you reading outside our area, rain has been VERY RARE this summer. It has actually been months since we had any kind of rain that lasted longer than 30 minutes to an hour. The pond in our subdivision's park had halfway dried up. This morning we realized how much rain we had gotten through the night. There was run off debris everywhere. And the pond was back at its boundaries. It still needs to regain some depth. I would guess that it is still down about 2-3 feet. It has rained pretty heavily all day now. I am sure that the pond looks even better now. You know the trees are signing in relief at the water.

Well, we have started class and that of course has been a learning experience. For me more than the boys. I had preconceived ideas of how this would go. And you all know what a perfectionist I can be. I am very happy to say though that God has worked in my heart to be accepting of what we do and to enjoy the journey.

Speaking of God working in our hearts . . . .

John is having a mid life crisis:) Not the bad kind at all. He has been searching his heart and praying about what God wants for him to do with his life. The general consensus lately has been some type of ministry. I will post more on this in the future. For right now we would covet all your prayers for wisdom and direction on this. It is going to mean a lot of changes for our family in the next few months.

I hope this short update finds you all well.

Love, Terri

PS I will be posting pictures soon. :)

August 11, 2007

I am continuing to use this blog for more than the "Great Summer Trip". We will be using it just to journal life in general. We are gearing up for the new school year. We are homeschooling both boys this year. I had wanted to do this when they were young and circumstances interfered. I am looking forward to doing it this year. The boys are very excited too.

While we were traveling, John finished out our bonus room. It created about 300 square feet of space. We will be moving my office to this room as well as setting it up for a classroom. We are working on that this week and will hope to have the upstairs completely finished by the end of next weekend. We still have some finish work to be done on the rooms.

I will be sorting and organizing the boys stuff. We are getting them settled in a new room upstairs. It is so funny that they have the ability to have 2 different rooms but they don't want to. They have shared a room since Stephen came along and they don't want to stop now. We are moving them to the larger upstairs room. The room used as an office will stay a craft room for me until it is needed by another child. The remaining room will be set up and reserved for a new child as well.

I started ebaying this past week. I am hooked. I am also very surprised at what people will buy on ebay. I sold some Arbonne products that I had left over and an Indian Kurta outfit. I made $250!!! Needless to say with all the stuff that we have in storage and just around the house, I am rapidly taking digital pictures and starting to sell. We have so much stuff with Celebration s- vinyl records as well as retired EQ. I plan on selling as much a spossible. Not to mention stuff that we put in storage from teh old house and never moved down. The only thing we aren't selling is the boys older toys and clothes. Not knowing what ages we will be adopting, it might come in handy.

Well, that is it for today. I will try to update weekly with pictures. I will have a first day of school pic for you next week.

See Ya!

June 21, 2007

Okay, we were determined to get home today and we made it!! We left Benton, Illinois and headed East on I-24. We finished our book about 1 hour away from Nashville. The boys wanted another book so I stopped in at a Cracker Barrel and exchanged the book. We pulled into Chattown Skatepark about 7pm. John had an event on the boat that finished at 6pm and so he met us at the park. The boys showed him all their new skills and then we headed off to eat and go home. HOME sounded like a wonderful place for me!!

When we got home, the dogs came up to the rental car and started barking. But then I opened the door and they realized who it was. Needless to say, they were quite happy their family was back home. John arrived behind us and asked if the dogs were in or out when we got home. I was confused and said they were out of course. That was when John showed us their new dog door. They hadn't quite figured out that they could go in and out at will. They have now of course and love it. I do too because like my human boys they go in and out all the time.

It was great to be home and John wanted to show off the bonus room. He had finished it !!! It is huge and he did such a great job on it. The plan is to move my office in there and use it as an office and classroom for the boys. We are very excited about that.

It was so great to be home! For the 4-5 days that followed we were still very much recovering from the trip. But we are now more in sync. We have settled into the slower summer schedule. We have been to the pool almost daily and that is great for us all. Very restful. The boys swim and I read in the shade. We definitely need that after this trip.

June 20, 2007

Okay we got on the road leaving St. Joseph much earlier than we had been leaving. But I knew we needed to get to St Louis in time to do the Zoo and then get a little farther east/south.

We arrived at the zoo at 230pm Central. Just in time to get to the Sea Lion show at 3pm. It was really cool. We had great seats. The larger male sea lion, Alex, threw Frisbees into the crowd and Stephen caught one. It had teeth marks and smelled like fish but we thought that was really neat. Stephen was very excited. Unfortunately he stayed excited at each exhibit, and the Frisbee got left somewhere. We will have to go back to this zoo. It was huge and the boys and I stayed until it closed at 7pm but we still didn't get to see everything.

We got on the road and my goal was to try to get from St. Louis to Nashville. We would stay with some friends in Nashville, Jay and April Clark. We ended up having to stop around 10p and checking into a hotel because we were just so tired. I asked the lady at the check in desk how far we were from Nashville and she said about 4 hours. I was so surprised because I had figured us to be much closer than that.

I got into the room and the boys settled somewhat. I called Jay to let them know that we were not going to be able to make it that night. I mentioned we were 4 hours away and he said that made sense because we still had to go through Kentucky. Now, I am an amateur at map reading and thought I had been doing pretty good up until this point. The atlas I was using was one of the state by state things. I had followed interstate to 24 east and then to the state line of Illinois, where we had stopped. Then I picked it up again at the Tennessee line and calculated the mileage to their exit and added them together. After Jay mentioned Kentucky, I realized that I had completely forgotten that I had to take I-24 through another state!!! Oh well, we got a good nights sleep and headed out the next day!

June 19, 2007

This turned out to be another day that we just didn't get very far. I was getting pretty tired and the driving was getting the best. We decided to stop in St Joseph, Missouri for a decent dinner at Cracker Barrel. VEGGIES!!! and nothing wrapped in paper! It was wonderful! In the retail area , we got a book on CD to listen to in the car. We got" Half Moon Investigations". It is about a 12 year old private investigator. It sounds good and should keep us engaged. And hopefully awake.

After dinner, the boys played checkers on the porch. Stephen beat Johnathon and was quite proud of that accomplishment. We decided that we were too tired to continue driving and went to the closest hotel with an indoor pool. The boys swam til 10pm local time. Then we crashed and slept in. The next morning we got up and headed to the breakfast bar. It turned out to be a real breakfast instead of the continental kind we had gotten used to. It was a nice break and we needed it.

We headed out and started the book. I recommend it. It was very funny. Our goal for today is to get to St. Louis and do the Zoo!!!!