Short Family Update - May 11

We are doing as well as possible at the moment.   Nothing has broken and needed fixed ... outside of Vannan's hospital trip.

Vannan continues to improve, though her head is still sore to touch and her elbow still hurts.  She has not returned to her volunteer work - but we must redo all of her paperwork and requirements before she can return.   With Tim's schedule, that may take quite a while.

We are currently working on birthday party plans for Joel, Matthew, and Paul.  The boys want a science party ... we are searching for really cheap ideas.  Hard to believe the boys are 8 now (well, Joel still has a few weeks to go).

Kendra has purchased her new computer - she found one discontinued that was exactly what she wanted at a sizable amount less than what she had saved ... it is the same size as her old one, so she can use her bags and such with it as well.  

We are trying to do a new arrangement in the school room ... I sure have a LOT of stuff to go through ... but I think I'll start letting some of it go.  It is too hard to find what I need or to clean or even work with as much as we have in the room.

Mother's Day is tomorrow ... not the happiest of days for us ... hard to believe that it has been 4 years since my mom suddenly died.

We finally have most of our garden planted.  I'm not sure we will do more.  I found a potting pot at Horany's the other day that might be perfect to put in our bathroom - a huge rectangle one ... so we can keep lettuce growing year around.   It's suppose to be deep enough to grow tomatoes ... so we should be able to plant all kinds of things inside in it, onions, herbs, radishes, carrots  ... we never found a price though, so I don't know if we can swing it later or not.   Our lettuce is still so small, we could easily transplant it and have lettuce all summer.  ...  We only have ONE good window to plant and grow things, and it is in our master bath behind the bathtub, where a nearly unusable countertop is located ... with an indention for a fake flower arrangement.   Other than that, we have no window ledges.   It's a bit frustrating.

My other dream is to have more clothes line space in the yard.  What we have is under a tree, and not very long.  It only holds one load most of the time.   We've been managing with it though, and share it with Aunt Viv.

Vannan dreams of getting cages fixed up for her rabbits - the building they are in is literally falling down around them.

Kendra dreams of getting more books published.

Joel dreams of science experiments.  He wants an Android tablet for his birthday, so he can play Angry Birds and other games.  He saw a telescope at toysRus that he thought was really cool, as well as some night vision spy glasses.  He loves building train tracks for his train set ... and would probably love track to build for racing his collection of HotWheels as well.  His hot point currently is science - with electricity, space, light, magnetism and experiments ranking pretty high on his interest grid.  He also loves playing with his Hex bugs (he has 2), free playing with his Lego's (he makes inventions - telephones, shrinkascopes, robots), and shooting with his rubber band gun.   He also loves to create with "trash" ... he has a large array of self made toys, such as puppets, robots, cars, animal discs (for Kratts Creature Suits) and anything he can dream up.   He also loves when I put science videos on his MP3 player.  It is his constant companion and has seen more use/abuse than any tiny gadget should.  He also absolutely LOVES reading in bed under the covers at night with his flashlights.... or under the bed if he can get away with it.

Happy Mother's Day to all of the mother's in my life ... and especially to my New Mom Ann (my Mamaw never let us use the word Step) and my Mother-in-Law Joyce. ... As well as all of my sisters and sister-in-laws and best friends.  I love you all!