Forgive Me Father...

...for I have sinned. Since confession is good for the soul, I will attempt to try to itemize the many sins of the last few days.

• I have begrudged and resented hubby for enjoying his true passion (drums and music) many many times.
• I have longed for a larger house instead of being content with the one you have blessed us with. We really do love our home...except for the days the walls seem to be closing in on us.
• I expressed mirth when the perfect children at butterfly tagging erupted into a full-blown fist fight.
• I have had little patience with mini-me(Lilly) for far too many days in a row. Give me the patience to spend some quality time with her today.
• I have not been a good steward of money or belongings. I am surrounded by boxes and boxes of things that should be sold on ebay or released into the world through a charity so that they may be used and enjoyed by another.
• I have not been a good dieter-I have cheated many many times and yet still hop on the scale to find the same weight. I am awed and humbled by your mercy.
• I have not been a patient teacher. I want to make learning fun but the "just get it all done" side of me keeps winning.
• I am embracing sleep too often. I long for leisurely mornings of sleep and naps. My energy level has bottomed out.
• I was happy when I visited my mom yesterday to find her not at home-gone to the DR. with my sister. I hurried to shave my stepdad and fled the scene as fast as possible and hoped I could get to my home before she got back. Wrong, wrong, wrong!!
• I am not studying your word near enough. My prayer life is full but I know you wish me to grow in the knowledge of your word as well. Create in me the desire to do so.
• Most of all, I am not "blooming where I am planted". In fact, most days find me withered on the vine. Help me bloom.

There, I feel much better. This is a small list but it covers most of the biggies. No one wants to read the unabridged version.

Weekend Update
(Bullets, of course)

• We bought "the rest of our yard" from our neighbor. We have lived here 8 years now and a pie shaped section of our yard has belonged to our neighbor. While the land division makes perfect sense on paper-our land was a rectangle, his was a square-in real life the translation meant that our ginormous side yard had a little triangle in the back that was his. It was quite annoying and we have been trying to obtain it for quite some time. The elderly fellow that lived there before not only did not want to sell it-but wanted us to sell him part of our yard so he would have road frontage to his triangle. We had finally worn him down and we were beginning to negotiate the deal when he had a car wreck. He died shortly after of pneumonia while recovering in the hospital. The a young man bought his house. He did not even know about the triangle until we told him and promised to sell it "someday" if we would "make an offer". Someday finally came and the deal will close tomorrow. We now own all of our yard, even the triangle in the back which was surprisingly-half an acre. Now, we can get goats and chickens. Oh wait, I forgot, hubby is still not talked into that. Someday.
• Yesterday we got up at 8, yard saled for about an hour (Lilly got three pairs of shoes for 75 cents-one of them heelies!!!) and then headed to National Public Lands Day!! We had an awesome day of nature. We went back in time to 1850, learned about organic gardening, petted some sheep, listened to the sweet happy snorts of sleeping pigs and played dress up in clothes of that time frame. Then we went to our next stop where we watched the feeding times of the bald eagle and the vultures. The girl feeding them was so informative and friendly that Lilly has a new best friend. We met the newest employee and used our girlish charms to talk him into getting out our friend the prairie king snake so we could share some love. Then we went monarch butterfly tagging. It was nothing like last year because there were NO monarchs OR big butterflies at all, just little ones. This is just one of many of the tagging classes they have had and they have tagged no monarchs. I find this very disturbing. They usually tag about 100. This is so disturbing, in fact, that we will be doing much more research on them in the weeks to come.
• We ran into the wonderful Phillip and Sara who mentioned they had camped with others from church and so we went to properly stalk them at their campground when we had shut all the attractions down. They were not there but the other names-Rob and Penny were. We figured our two families could hang out a bit and we would get home around dark. However, we were pleasantly surprised that there were three families(John and Sandy and Ted & Christina) involved in the camp-out and all were still there. Even better than that was the fact that John invited us to stay and have supper. I hastily said yes and proceeded to join the 2 hour wait for grub. It was delicious and even though we waited much longer than expected, we all had a wonderful time of fellowship and I hope they camp again so we can go too-and actually camp with them, not just mooch a supper!! The best food is the food that is long anticipated!! The longer the wait, the better the taste-right?
• If you have never tried Makers Mark in your coffee-you should. It has a nice flavor and makes for nice sleep. I am not a bourbon fan but a nice friend shared a little shot with some coffee and I brought it home and consumed it. I give it a thumbs up. I'm still not buying any bourbon though-but if perhaps the opportunity ever presents itself again I will partake. It had been well over 10 years since whiskey had touched these lips.
• I finally finished Rich Man, Poor Man and it remains on my favorites list. It is such a good story about life. Then Friday, I started Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin and stayed up till the wee hours finishing it. After reading a VERY long book, a short book can be consumed in an evening. It is a great book and also the beginning of a series. However, My Sister's Keeper is on the nightstand for right now. I am just a few pages into it and I hope I can get to bed at a decent hour not get sucked in!!
• Back to school in the morning and I look forward to a bit of normalcy!! We have run run run all weekend. Just a few errands tomorrow and then we hole up for a few days in this little rabbit hole we call home. I hope your weekend was awesome!!

Excitement!

We have managed to now get two full days of school in a crazy week where one might think we could do none! We have doubled and tripled up on just the basics because our field trips count as school as well. Hubby is on vacation all week. (Maybe you have noticed he likes to consolidate most of his vacation in the hot humid part of summer. He is a very smart man who has to work outside for a living.) We had our little mini vacation to St. Louis and now there is a big festival that hubby likes to e a part of at the end of this week. He will be playing with all three bands and he also volunteers(works like a dog for free-and loves every minute of it) as the entertainment/stage manager for the whole festival. Yesterday we enjoyed one of his perks-we walked to find him to say hello and he drove us to our car in "Big Red". It was fun to pass by all those poor chums that had to walk to their vehicle. (It should be clarified that we did have to walk one way.) Tomorrow we will take advantage of a wonderful science excursion and to accomplish anything this busy busy week is a miracle-yet we have done our schoolwork. Thank goodness for a syllabus and an already planned school year or I would curl up in the fetal position and accomplish nothing.

On a side note, Lilly amazes me. She has learned how to "carry" in addition in one sitting and can't wait to do it. She masters math so easily. I hope "borrowing" comes as easily. However, fractions are kicking the other two in the rear. We are at 2 weeks and I think we will have to have at least 4 to have mastery-which freak that I am is what I work toward no matter how long it takes. Fractions(GCF, LCM, mixed number conversion, adding and subtracting with different denominators) are a bit challenging but I never dreamed they would struggle this much. I hate it that our finances did not permit Teaching Textbooks this year...although I am totally asking Santa for it for Christmas!!

Have a productive and exciting weekend!!

At Last, My Time Has Come Along...

My time to completely understand why some people (not naming any names here) have a hard time keeping up with their blogs. First, I have to say I never sit at this keyboard and have a hard time finding something to write about. I never have writer's block. Probably never will. I never struggle to keep up with conversations either. I have trouble allowing other people room to talk, but never any trouble holding up my end of the conversation. (Stop laughing and amening-real life friends.) However, I am having a hard time lately finding time to post every day and decide which of the ten blog posts dancing around in my brain I want to write.

There is much to catch up on. Early Tuesday morning, our family took a little road trip to St. Louis. We had tickets to a night game and before that we were going to do a little sight seeing. We went to the butterfly house and it was glorious. So many beautiful butterflies!! We loved it. Erik was the only one lucky enough to have a butterfly land on him. We took lots and lots of pictures but it was on a disposable camera not our digital camera. I understand why the world has gone digital!! Waiting to finish a roll of film and then get it developed is maddening!! After the butterfly house, we checked into our hotel. We also walked up to the 18th floor to see the pool and then we took off for the arch. Erik and I had not gone up in a long time and the kids had not ever gone up so it was very exciting for them. They have done a whole lot of remodeling and it now includes a little movie about the history of St. Louis. It was great and we could see our hotel pool from the top. Then we went to eat at a local restaurant with great pizza and pasta. After that, we were off to the game. It was such a wonderful surprise to find out that Busch stadium now has margaritas!! Live baseball and margaritas!! Good times, good times. The cards won and we saw a homerun. The next morning we got up early to swim in the two rooftop pools. They were very warm and it was totally awesome to know we were swimming up 18 floors from the ground. After swimming we checked out and headed homeward. We stopped at Joe's Crab Shack for a delicious lunch.

Upon arriving home, we checked messages and discovered that Mom had gone with my sister to get her new leg. The girls and I ran over to see it before church. She is very excited but still a long way off from getting to walk on it. She needs lots of prayers. She has not been an ideal patient so now she will have to do some catch-up to make up for all the rules she has broken. She has not been walking with her walker or flexing and unflexing her knee. This gives her some new hurdles in addition to getting used to a leg.

So that covers our life up to today. Today we have spent the day chilling. Tomorrow and Saturday we will finish our school week. Saturday we will be nature detectives and we can't wait. It is going to be a very busy and fun weekend.

Some Days Are Diamonds, Some Days Are Coal

This one is coal so far. We have seen glimpses of diamonds glittering below the surface. The next two days will be extremely busy ones so the need to get alot accomplished today is bearing down on me. This means the day has been completely unproductive so far(at least as far as school goes). Since Erik is on vacation, the kids have gone into full helpless mode thinking that if they can make the day difficult, we will just declare the day an off day and they can play. It AIN'T happening. I love having Erik at home and it just infuriates me how the kids are so uncooperative when he is home. I know it infuriates him as well. He doesn't know whether to be menacing or ignore them or just leave and let us do school. Usually the latter is what happens and that just isn't fair-to anyone.

I wish, just for once, the kids would act as if he wasn't here(without him having to physically leave!) and just have a normal school day.

GRRRRRR!!

Random and Odd

• Daisy has finished her quarantine time. However, it is Saturday and neither agency is open that could issue her walking papers. Oh well, she prefers being a housedog anyway.
• Daisy is at least half goat. While she doesn't eat everything, she will chew almost anything in her path.
• Go and enter this contest!!! Especially you, Mia!!
• We have a hammock now, score!!! It was only $5 at a yard sale, score!!! We obtained other valuables to numerous to mention while yard saling today!!! SCORE!!!
• Rich Man, Poor Man is just as awesome as I remember and completely responsible for my sketchy blogging lately. Irwin Shaw is the author. A must read. R rated though, for those who might offend easily.

My phone rang at 8:30AM and it was my mom. (YAHOO, we have a phone with a good battery and caller ID finally!!) That is never a good sign since my mom very much enjoys sleeping in. My stepdad fell down and she could not get him up. Could I come quickly? I will be there as quick as possible but Kayla JUST got in the shower so it won't be quick. I also took a very quick shower after her because I was pretty sure there was an ER visit in my future.

I was wrong, Pete is fine and was able to get up before I arrived in a record 20 minutes. (Sometimes speeding is not wrong, right?) However, the bad news was that he had been on his way to the bathroom. Soooooo, my morning started with some hard core service. Mom felt terrible that I drove out for nothing, but I told her call me anytime. They have a hard life taking care of each other and I feel blessed to be able to be there for them. I thought of Hulagirl as I usually do when driving to Mom's (since I drive by her road) and decided that living next door would be pretty ideal. Of course, this is not an option as the houses by Mom are mostly farms that stay in the family and not anything anyone puts up for sale.

I have decided maybe I should get up and shower first thing though as this sort of thing is getting to be more and more likely and odds are good that I will be the first call due to our flexibility.

We have had a pretty good day after that. School was very abbreviated, but it did happen. We will play the fun game of catch-up tomorrow. Have a good Thursday!

Because of Winn-Dixie

No wait, I mean because of Daisy. Because of Daisy, we are meeting lots and lots of new neighbors. News has traveled quickly of the bite and then the subsequent animal control vehicles. The neighbors have expressed outrage at the man who reported her and we are getting phone calls and visits from people who love her and miss her. One neighbor even checked the pound and she planned to spring her out of jail if need be. It has been very touching, we affectionately refer to them as the "Daisy fan club". Toby has the same fan club but he is still making his rounds, so no one is beside themselves with worry over him.

I never thought of our dogs as being community property before but I think we must as they have endeared themselves to the masses. This also explains why our BIG dogs eat such small amounts of food. Apparently everyone gives them a few treats and snacks when they visit. It's a hard knock life.

I am just very very thankful everyone has been so nice and positive (even the man she bit). With dogs and neighbors, we could be getting to know them in a whole other way!