Thankful Thursdays....

This is my first, and likely last, foray into the Thankful Thursdays blog thing. Mainly because I am never going to remember to do this every Thursday, but hey I might and it might happen again, but don't hold your breath, I would hate to be responsible for you fainting and causing undue stress on your family and friends. (I don't always like to use periods you might notice (I also don't like to have periods but that my friends is a different post))

I am thankful for my friends. I don't have many IRL and I like it that way. I occasionally wish I had friends that lived here in my neighborhood so I could hang out with them, but I'm such an odd duck (every time I scan those two words I read "dork", still works) the times I've tried to make friends near me I've messed it up so I stick with my old friends and happily they stick with me.

My Dad is retiring after nearly 50 years in the printing industry and as part of getting ready for the party we are going to throw him we have been going through family pictures, I found the pictures of my 16th birthday party. We are all in the basement and my BFF is in them. We had met the first day of 10th grade, and by that afternoon were forced to sit on opposite sides of the Ancient History classroom for being disruptive. Most people at the school thought we had know each other forever, and I admit it felt like we did. Now 29.5 years later it still does, the difference now is we have know each other forever and not just since 1st period.

Here is one of the pictures, that would be me in the purple top. I liked rainbows, a lot and what else can you see, a Unicorn.

Now you can know who is who and where the unicorn is. I leave it up to you to find the rainbow.

Oh yeah, this is why I homeschool...

Homeschool has its ups and downs, when it is down I question every moment, why I'm doing this, am I going to fail in a huge, huge way on this 'project', this project that happens to be a human, a human I love more than any other in the universe. Shouldn't I just trust the local school district to teach my child so I can have a life other than this one I'm living? (I get kind of pessimistic when we are having a bad day)

Most days are not that down, most days are just kind of chugging along we get through the lessons, we don't really have discussions but we do the work that has to be done and we move on.

Then we have the up days, the days were I am reminded, this, THIS right here is why we homeschool. A day where he hits the ground running and all I can do is try to keep up. Where everything he touches becomes new insights into the world. Where he can't get enough of the new information. Where learning is a fun game and can we just do a bit more. Where learning to read is understood to be the gateway to more information. Oh, those days make my heart soar. They fill my psyche with happiness and joy and allow me to face the down days with some resilience.

We had such a day recently. One where he woke up and was ready to take on the world, and he did. It started with him playing with the dog and me. Some freeish information came in on the Lunar New Year celebration (freeish as in it was from Panda Express and so it ended up costing me lunch at Panda) and he dove right in, found the DVD, watched it while I finished making breakfast and my coffee. We talked about it, we talked about the Chinese zodiac and what the meaning of the different animals was. We moved on to computer programming and worked on that for a bit. We went searching for fortune cookies at World Market (they didn't disappoint) We came home and worked on the reading and he is just getting so much more fluent in his reading, the halting and struggle over every single word is gone. The beating himself up over reading a word is, while not gone, diminished. He jumped into the new math program and we had discussions about why the designers of the program would choose certain settings for the lessons. We talked, we discussed, we learned. It was wonderful and chaotic and exhausting. What it wasn't was draining. While I was ready for bed I did not feel the overwhelming need to have a beer or mental down

I'm back again...

So how many blog posts are out in the world that say that same thing? How many have I personally put up?

What has happened in the month that I've been ignoring my blog? Let's see shall we?..

• The holidays happened and were lovely (I got a new coffee maker and a new coffee mug) 
• We had a very quiet week between Christmas & New Year. DH took off much time from work then we all had to adjust to him leaving the house 5 days a week rather than the 3 it had been for most of December. 
• We went to Behind the Myths to watch Adam Savage & Jamie Hyneman explain science and why they do what they do. It was the best science class we've had yet.  
• The boy built his pinewood derby car for this years race
• DH got the track ready for said race.
• The boy & I have gotten back into the swing of the school thing. (He is starting to read on his own!)
• We found a new math program that he loves and I think helps me get the ideas across better. We had kind of out grown Singapore math. So for now it is Elevated Math (it will get its own blog post soon)
• I've drank lots of coffee, I ate lots of food, and decided to try to get in better shape (again).
• I did not make any resolutions at the new year.

So yeah, there you have it. Life happened and I didn't stop to blog about it. I did take some pictures and maybe I'll post some of them. 

Remember that medical thing from last summer?

Yeah, I'm gonna talk about that so if you don't want to hear about female reproductive organs it is best to move on now.

Back at the end of July my doctor scraped the insides of my uterus and removed a 'lesion' (which, btw, just means something odd in shape, does not mean an open wound as I had always thought it meant) and it was all clear. The endometrial hyperplasia was gone and while she wanted to do another endometrial biopsy in 3 to 6 months we breath a bit easier and get the Merida IUD.

So I got an the IUD the first part of September and life has just gotten easier since. I'm no longer bleeding like I might die each 3 weeks, in fact the bleeding is effectively gone. Everything else is easier as well, PMS is much less intense, cramping doesn't exist really all in all good times.

My doctor sent me a reminder email last week that I need to come in and have the follow up test done. I figured if I just ignored it I wouldn't have to go back in. Apparently pre-cancerous conditions warrant careful followup. Sigh. I keep trying to act like it was/is nothing extraordinary but apparently it is and when I got the results from the test this week, they are normal with no hyperplasia or anything else out of the ordinary but we will need to do follow up in 6 months. What this means is that I'm not out of the woods. This has been scarier and more worrisome than I thought it would be when I got the first diagnosis in May. I'm coming to terms with it. I'm so happy that everything keeps coming back clear but the fact that I have to come back means it isn't really done yet. Sigh. So I'll put it out of my mind for the next 6 months try to forget about it until the doc sends me another reminder email.

So much time so little posting....

So September took it all out of me, and October ended up being a try to get control of the house and school time and some how I'm now nearly to Thanksgiving and it has been 2 months since I posted anything. I have a couple of posts in my head that I want to get out so I finally decided to just work on one at a time and get them out of me.

My child turned 9 a few weeks ago. My boy child, my heart that walks around the world, that happened 9 years ago. He decided to have a LEGO party and you would have thought that a party had never been planned before and the world was going to end if everything wasn't just perfect, and this time it wasn't me projecting the doom and gloom. It is interesting to see my child have the same anxieties that I have. I don't get worked up about parties anymore so I don't think he has ever seen me act like that you would have thought I did it every time we think of having a party. It was fun to plan it with him this time, he had definite ideas about what they should play and do.

The cake he wanted was not the cake he got, he wanted a LEGO minifig to be standing 1 foot tall. We tried to make it happen and ended up with a collapsed cake and a drowned Mac Book. It was not a happy night. What we ended up with was this...

He is missing one of his arms in this picture .

We used the bag that we got from the LEGO store and the minifig is rice krispie treats and marshmallow fondant. The fondant was easy but getting red and not pink was hard, this ended up being more of an orange color than red but the boy liked it and we were all happy.

The party ended up being fun, it had snowed a couple of days before hand but most of the snow was gone and they played out front for awhile then we did a pin the head on the minifig game and I had them build something with bricks that they could bring home. It was fun and the birthday boy had such a wonderful time.

2 weeks school done and How we give back.

I did my lesson plans, sometimes the morning of classes but I did them. I put them into the computer made them assignments and guess what happened? Things went smoother. I am so very glad I did because we started a new level of the Barton Reading and Spelling program and new levels are always a challenge. New things get added and The Boy does not like change.

Something I love about my boy is that although he is change adverse his self talk is that he loves to try new things. I work hard to accept the self talk and encourage the actual behavior. I know what it's like to want to try new things and be too anxious to actually try them. It isn't fun for anyone at that point.

So reading was a challenge and he has taken 3 hours plus likely another 15 minutes on Monday to finish one lesson, I know it will get better once he is used to the procedures and we have done them for awhile he will settle in and do well. I really like that there isn't a lot of repetition in this, or maybe that the repetition is hidden well enough that he doesn't see it as such. She also works on introducing small enough bites that he can be successful with it about 95% of the time.

Now to the fun thing we did, the really fun thing. We have been members of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science since 1988 when DH gave me a membership as my Christmas present the first year we dated (I knew we were meant to be together forever). Over the years we have increased our membership level when we can and it is one of the 'untouchable' expenses in our budget. It is a place I have taken The Boy since he was born, a place that is as comfortable to him as home. Last night the museum had a behind the scenes event for curator level members. They offered a Halloween themed buffet, and we got to see behind the scenes of Expedition Health where they do testing on the genetics of taste. I found out anytime the lab is open you can go back and participate in their testing, they are looking at if you can taste bitter flavors. Here go to their website and Dr. Nicole can explain it much better. It was so cool and I didn't think to ask if I could take pictures there, we were able to touch a goat brain, and a cow eye. Observe some differences between a goat brain and the pictures of brains we have looked at for my sister's surgery.

Then we went to the big bone room which is some of the old halls of life that are now filled with shelves housing all of their bones. Including some from the Snowmastodon dig they are doing in Snowmass where they have found over 4500 fossils. Here go to that site as well. They also had a T-Rex leg bone and a Triceratops leg bone out to look at and the scientist brought out a T-rex tooth and let us touch the serrations on it. This was the actual fossil not a cast of it that they usually have out for the public to touch. Again no pictures because I didn't think to ask and well really I was loving seeing all of this stuff. If The Boy had been a bit older when they found the Snowmass site I would totally have volunteered us to go to the dig. We talked to one of the women who was on the dig and her eyes just lit up when she talked about what they were discovering, and finding a mastadon femur and carrying it over your shoulder to the examination area. There was plenty of talk about how we can become involved as volunteers and citizen scientists at the museum.

Then we went to the zoology department. The museum has 1.5 million specimens and about 1 million of those belong to the zoology department. They have the largest dung beetle collection in the US. I finally remembered to ask if I can take photos when I saw something that reminded me of the Bloggess and HAD too get a picture of it.

I will get you, No I will get you!

It made me laugh so much and also I now have some pictures of the last of our night and I will let the pictures tell that story, you know so you don't have to hear another 3,000 words from me.

Look it's Perry, no he did not make noise
although that would have been kinda funny.

Scorpions in jars, there are 2 Rowland heads looking intently at them.
The third felt it was better to just take a picture

Beetles, just below writing on the board that said
"Dead Beetle Society, Meets at Midnight"

I did not get a picture of the next area, it was the room where they prep the specimens and clean the bones with flesh eating beetles and was warned that it stinks. As soon as the curator said "flesh eating beetle" The Boy lunged forward and said "Where!" So he and his father went into the room and saw the beetles crawling all over the bones. Of course his father had done some volunteer work back in the 80's cleaning specimens and getting them ready for the flesh eating beetles so had already seen this. 

As we left I made sure to let the woman who organized it know that we had a wonderful time and she said they plan to do something like this every year opening different back rooms to viewing. I said that if it could be the gem & mineral area next year I would be ever so grateful. She at least acted like she would remember it. Heh. 

I love our museum and I will always support it but it was really nice to get to enjoy more of it last night. I know this was a value added experience to try to get new members at the curator's level and to encourage them to stay at that level. I know the economy is hard right now and it is a tough time to be in a sector that depends on the good graces of the public to support it. I am glad that my husband 23 years ago started us down a path that shows our son now that giving to support the community is just something we do. We support our local public radio station, we support our local science museum and our local zoo, we support efforts to help people in other areas that are in need through Doctor's without Borders. We don't belong to a church, we don't give in that way, but we do have a tradition of giving and helping others. I hadn't thought about it but we really are teaching our boy that we help where and how we can.

The boy is saving some of his money to give to The Cat Care Society, and I'll probably encourage him to give it soon during their fall pledge drive. Also this week we were listening to CPR and they are doing their fall pledge drive and on this morning if they could get 1,000 pledges they would receive $10,000. They boy was encouraging me to call in to help. I would have too, with a pledge of $25 or so just to help if they needed it. He was so happy to hear they made their goal and would get the extra money. I'm glad it has become just something we do.

September is done, the celebration may begin

You know September has always been a kind of low time of year for me. I've often blamed it on a choice I made in September 24 years ago. Then this year I saw this post by Dooce, and I know have something else to blame. The sun.

Now this September felt like a random gathering of bits and pieces that made something close to a crazy quilt on top of just the normal seasonal, personal baggage things I have dealt with. That and it ended with such a cluster of good and bad that I'm beginning to wonder if September doesn't just need to take its bipolar meds.

The last week went something like this....
Sunday bad thing happens to cat, great family time.
Monday Cat needs surgery, DH's car explodes, School goes great, I get house cleaned and dinner made. Overall crazy day.
Tuesday DH has my car, boy finished boat, cub scouts Overall good day.
Weds Boy wakes at 4AM puking all over the carpet, then toilet overflows, then boy gets the other end of stomach problems, DH gets toilet cleared, boy sleeps in bathroom, take cat for surgery, I do a million loads of laundry. DH gets cat from vet(he is doing well) We pick up DH's car late Overall crazy day.
Thursday We finish Barton level 2, Boy wants to go to library to get "something to read", I get sushi & cookies for lunch, boy & I eat them and nothing else for the day. I get library books returned, sold books shipped out and dinner made. Dog pukes her dinner. Overall good day
Friday Boy puked all night long, doesn't want to go to library, doesn't want to sell popcorn, isn't feeling well, dog pukes everything she eats or drinks and starts to get dehydrated, Overall I am D.O.N.E. day.
Saturday, quiet, we hang around the house, cook food, relax, go to dinner with my folks and sister & bil, celebrate The Boy's accomplishments Celebrate the first day of October.

Somewhere towards the beginning of the week, as in Monday, I bought a 6 pack of beer for me and a 6 pack of hard cider for DH, we have each drank 3 of them. Everyone who knows us understands that this is not typical it was necessary.

I'm refusing to talk about what happened today because I makes me think October may be off its meds too and I just can't cope with that knowledge quite yet, but here is a picture from the day.

This is why we tried a practice cake.