Farmer Boy

Superman is very excited about the fall weather. He is getting to wear his cool long-sleeved outfits now. I was afraid that he would not get to wear lots of them because he might outgrow them before we got any winter here in Florida. I'm not packing up the short sleeves yet, but we are enjoying the long sleeves. So far he hasn't developed my brother's aversion to corduroy, so it's going to be a staple of his wardrobe this winter.

This is his outfit from Wednesday. We had some doctor appts (III at the pediatrician and me with the plastic surgeon) and then church last night.

Public Speakng at Roses Prep!

One of our extra curricular activites at Roses Prep is Public Speaking. At this point, we call it "Presentations". The kids are assigned a topic each month and they must prepare a presentation on that topic. We encourage them to write note cards, have props, have an inventive introduction, and to focus on their audience. We are hoping that the children will gain confidence in their public speaking and be able to communicate without fidgeting, mumbling, hopping around, and saying "um" constantly.

Our first presentations were given last night. As we were about to begin, III tells me that he has a headache. I was functioning as "teacher" and not as "mommy", so I told him that we would deal with it in a few minutes. It turned out that he had a slight virus. He ended up skipping supper and going to bed early. He felt really bad physically, and I felt really bad emotionally for telling him to go ahead and do his presentation when he was sick.

Rosy was in costume for hers as Junie B. Jones, First Grader, going to a sleepover. I just forgot to tell III to change into presentation clothes. I'll work on that for next month.

We also painted pumpkins and wrote Halloween alliterations Monday afternoon. Our extra curriculars took longer than our regular classes.

Everything I needed to know about Fall Festivals

Test Run of the Outfit Friday night

With Thing One and Thing TwoWith Daddy at the Fall Festival

Several years ago, there was a popular book entitled, "Everything I Needed to Know about Life, I Learned in Kindergarten." The kids and I made the round of Fall Festivals this afternoon, and I am now filled with all the knowledge I will ever need about Fall Festivals. I learned it all in one hot, tiring, frustrating afternoon.

Here's the deal:

III and Rosy will be with their Bio Mom this Halloween. Through a fluke in scheduling, Hubby and I have had them every Halloween since we got married. Halloween is BIG for me. We all have to dress in theme. Planning usually begins in August and costumes can take weeks to make. The kids are accustomed to this and excitedly participate each year. Rosy has asked me many times what we are going to be this year, and I have had to tell her each time that we aren't doing a family theme with them this year because they will be gone.

Our church Fall Festival will be on Oct. 31st and Superman is going to be the Cat in the Hat. Hubby and I are going as Thing One and Thing Two. We really needed costumes where we could easily manage him, and this group seemed like the perfect answer.

Late this week, I started to feel bad that III and Rosy were going to completely miss out on seeing Superman in his outfit. I looked online at our newspaper's "Things to Do" section, and found 2 Fall Festivals scheduled for this Saturday afternoon. The kids and I made plans to attend them. They agreed to dress as Thing One and Thing Two to keep Superman company.

The first Festival was at the local Methodist church. It was advertised from 9 - 5 with a supper at 6 and a "singing" at 7. I picked the kids up from Bio Mom at 2PM and we hurried home and got in costume. We got to the Festival about 2:45. There were NO other kids in costume, so we spent 15 minutes unpinning the Thing One and Thing Two patches from their shirts and ditching the wigs. We were parked way out in a field and it took forever to get Superman in his stroller. (He rides sitting up like a big boy now!). We got to the entrance and the sign said "Tickets and Information". There was no one there and no one seemed to know where to get these tickets or where anyone with any information was. Finally after wandering around for a few minutes, we saw a sign that said, "Games Inside". We went inside only to see the workers dismantling all of the games. The only thing that was still working was the bounce house and, guess what, you had to have tickets to bounce. But, no one was still selling tickets! No adult that I asked for information seemed to care that I had three small children who were getting to do NOTHING! I was disgusted with the whole thing. If that's the face that the church is putting out to this community, it's no wonder that no one bothers to attend.

We then loaded up and went to the Fall Festival at the Methodist church across town. They had a cute little Festival going. The games were far below III's level, but that is sort of to be expected. Rosy had a great time, and we got to enjoy it as a family. Hubby wrapped up his meeting and was able to join us.

Here's what I've learned:

1. Stick to the posted times. Just because you're tired doesn't mean that a family that needs a church isn't going to show up with 5 minutes left in the event.

2. Identify the people who can provide information. Sometimes it was hard to tell who could help us find the next attraction or even the end of the line. What if I'd had a real problem? Or, needed a bathroom? Maybe church members or Festival workers need a little "My name is" pumpkin badge.

3. If there's a fee, state it up front. The first festival made no mention of having to buy tickets. What if I'd shown up with no cash? The second festival didn't charge anything. They just wanted you to have a good time.

4. Be generous. Both of my older kids said that they really liked that you got a good prize whether or not you won the games at the 2nd festival. Also, no one complained when we made a second round of the games. I had told the kids that they couldn't get candy the second time around, but the hosts insisted that it was okay. They had plenty!

5. Don't play favorites. The second festival we went to was at the site of a daycare. You could really tell when a daycare kid was playing one of the games. The workers really made over them. If it's an outreach, we need to reach out to the newcomers more.

6. Put on a good face. I saw and heard more than one worker ( and, I suppose, church member) at each festival say how glad they would be when "this" was "over". It didn't make me feel welcome.

7. Share Jesus. We spent several hours at church festivals and only one lady mentioned Jesus. She nicely painted Rosy's fingernails and as we were leaving, she said, "Rememer, sweetie, Jesus loves you." NOW, that's a message that the community needs! I'm married to a pastor and we talk about Jesus often, yet it stood out to me to hear such a simple beautiful truth from that stranger.

8. Make it fun! I always went Trick or Treating as a kid, so this idea of games is kind of different to me. I know that the church I attended in my 20s, did a Fall Festival with games. . Right now, our church does a Trunk or Treat with a hay ride. There are some mega-churches in our area that can (and do) put on a mini-fair for their Fall Festivals. Maybe, we should let them stick to the "midway" and we should do what we do. I've never been involved in planning our Trunk or Treat, and it has always come off beautifully without my two cents worth. I figure they don't need my nagging at this point. All I know is that whatever we do, we need to remember the fun of it.

Happy Halloween!

Plastic Surgery

Well, I called my dermatologist yesterday and got the results from my biopsy. Just as she suspected, it is a basal cell cancer. I don't really know a lot about what that means other than that it has to come out! She recommended that I see a plastic surgeon to have it removed. I'm really bummed that after all the damage Superman did to my looks, all I get to have the surgeon do is cut out a little spot on my collarbone. It seems like they should have a BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deal. I (or my insurance) pays for the cancer removal, and they throw in a tummy tuck. Don't y'all think that's a good idea?

At least in the face of that kind of bad news, we have some cute pics from this last week.

I finally realized that the key to getting Superman to take a nap was to surround him. I have to watch him like a hawk when he is like this, but if I give him something to snuggle, he goes out like a light! In this pic, he is lying snuggled inside his Boppy with his bear, Larry, on top of him.

Hubby and I went out on a date (including Superman) Friday night. We stopped on the way home at Krispy Kreme. I order each of the big kids a pumpkin iced donut. The ones in the picture were cream filled with orange icing on the top that had a Jack-O-Lantern drawn on it in black icing. I never looked in the box. Imagine my disappointment when (after telling the kids about their pumpkin looking donuts) I opened the box and it was just regular donuts with orange icing. So, I whipped out the decorator icing, and told them we planned for them to make their own Jack-O-Lanterns.

III is at the age now where you don't dare not get him a Krispy Kreme hat because he'll feel left out, and you don't dare imply that you thought he was young enough to want a Krispy Kreme hat. It's a tightrope walk with him these days. I guess since we were at home and he was decorating a donut, it was cool to wear the hat. Or, maybe it was retro-cool. Or, maybe he was just trying to humor Mommy and Daddy. Who knows?

This is my new babysitter. I took a storage cube and lined it with a towel. It is just the right size for Superman to sit in. He sits up so he's happy. It's big enough for him to wiggle around in, but not big enough for him to lose his toys. It's perfect. This usually gets us about 20 minutes of peace during school.Rosy has found the Junie B. Jones chapter books and is reading them at about the rate of one each day. She has decided to teach Superman to read. The two of them LOVE to cuddle each other. They never get tired of it.
We went to the Pumpkin Patch Monday afternoon and got pumpkins for everyone to paint. Carving them is just a little too gross for us this year. I just know that Superman would end up eating pumpkin guts.

A Week Can Fly By...

Superman getting ready for Halloween!

Superman with an outfit on this head. He looks like a preppy sultan to me.

Superman in school.

I don't really know where this week went. It seems like just yesterday that I was blogging about my biopsy, and then I realize that it has been over a week. I think that by the time our whole family makes it through a Sunday and then gets back on schedule for school on Monday, I am too tired to function the rest of the week.



We have two services on Sunday mornings with a Sunday School time in between. I would prefer to go to the earlier service, but Hubby and I can't figure any way for us to do that without him having to get in the shower at 5:30AM. Realistically, if he has to get up at 5:30, he's not going to be at his best to preach at 9AM and 11:30 AM and teach again at 5:30PM. So, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that I may have to attend the later service until Superman is a little older. But, on the plus side, Mrs. Gail arranged for some baby furniture in our "Cry Room". We have a sound-proofed balcony area in our sanctuary for fussy babies and their parents. Superman and I end up there quite a bit. Sometimes he's just fussy and sometimes he can't understand why Daddy won't hold him (while he's preaching). The new swing in the cry room was a life saver last week!



Superman is tough to deal with on Monday mornings. He loves the attention he gets on Sundays and he thinks that there should be a crowd of people around to hold him on Mondays. He usually cries a lot during school hours on Monday. After listening to this fussing and whining all day Monday, Rosy and I got smart on Tuesday...we hauled his high chair over to the school room and let him have a seat with us. He loved it and we got done a lot more quickly and with fewer interuptions.



An update on III - School has really improved over the last week or two. We got Mid-Term Progress Reports at Roses Prep this week and he has 3 As, 3 Bs, and 1 C. We would like to see all As and Bs (really, I would like to see all As), but we understand how the C in Math happened. He takes a Math test every 5-10 lessons depending on the topics covered. So far, he's only had 2 Math tests for this grading period. One was a 102 and the other was a 66. Averaging those scores with his Quiz scores and his grade was a C. We have re-covered the material that was giving him trouble on the Math test, and his latest test grade (after the Progress Reports) was a 92. We expect this grade to be at least a B before the end of the term.

He has the starring role in the Christmas Play at his new stepdad's church. They attend church there every Wednesday night.

Hubby has started getting III up at 6AM each morning to have some study time before school. III then starts his lessons at 7AM and is usually done around 9AM. Then he reads and studies until 10AM. At 10AM each day, we administer any tests and quizzes for the day. This is a great plan for him because Rosy and I don't start school until around 8:30AM each day. This means that III is working with NO distraction for most of his school day. We've been doing it this way for a few weeks and his grades, attitude, and study habits have all improved. We've also thrown in a few afternoon naps that seem to help.

We also discovered that he may be suffering from hypoglycemia. Monday morning he was acting kind of "out of it" and went to the potty 4 times in 1 hour. I immediately assumed that he was either trying to skip his study time or he had developed diabetes overnight. I checked his blood sugars and discovered that it was 69. That's low! Not "dead" low, but pretty low for most of us. I know that I feel disoriented and confused when my blood sugars are in the high 70s. We have decided to start checking him mid-morning for a little while to see if this is a pattern. It could really explain why sometimes when you're talking to him, he really seems to be completely spaced out.

I'm working on matching Alabama outfits for Rosy and Superman. I decided to learn to applique. Hopefully they will be really cute and I will have pics to post soon.

The Big C

A while ago (long before I was pregnant with Superman), I noticed a blemish near my collar bone. It was just a little red spot and I didn't really pay it any attention. I assumed it was a bug bite or something and it would do its thing and go away. Then, while I was pregnant, I noticed that it seemed to get a little larger, but I was busy and didn't do anything about it. Now it's a few years since I first noticed it, and I decided that I should get it checked out. I mainly made this decision because it started changing in shape and texture. Well, today I went to the dermatologist, and she took one look at it and said that I had a skin cancer.

She didn't seem very disturbed by it, and even said that it was a "good" skin cancer. Obviously, she thinks it is good because it is not on her. It is on me, and I do not think it is good. It reminded me of people assuring us when Hubby had thyroid cancer a few years ago, that thyroid cancer was a good cancer to have. Clearly, it is better not to have cancer. However, we know so many people who are struggling for their lives right now fighting cancer that I considered not even blogging about my "good" cancer. I am thankful that God is with them and with me. No one likes to hear that they have any cancer, but I am thankful that my situation is very manageable. She biopsied the tissue today and I will know for sure whether or not it is cancer on Oct. 20th. My dermatologist was 99% sure that it was. So, soon I will probably be having it removed. Doesn't that sound like fun with a 5 month old?

Please keep us in your prayers!

A Blast from the Past

My mom is cleaning out the closets at her house which means that I have to sort out my junk. Most of my stuff is from high school because that's the last time I lived there. We are talking about prom glasses, report cards, old magazines, and other stuff that seemed vitally important at the time.



I don't know how everyone else communicated in high school, but we wrote "notes". My high school days are from a time before email, text message, and cell phones. If we wanted to catch up with each other (and have something to do while the teacher bored us with "knowledge") we wrote letters to each other talking about what we were wearing, what other people were wearing, what cute boys we had talked to, what cute boys we had seen but not talked to, and who we were liking that day. Somehow I ended up with buckets of these notes. Several years ago, right after college, I was home one weekend and flipped through some of them and threw all of them away. OR, so I thought.



This weekend, as I cleaned off the top shelf in the closet in my old bedroom, I found an amazing treasure. Most of you know that Hubby and I had a relationship when we were in High School and Junior High, and then we didn't speak for about 15 years after I graduated high school. Believe it or not, I found our letters from 1987 when I was in 8th grade and he was in 11th grade! Most of them are from me telling my friends about our relationship, or from my friends talking about our relationship. Little incidents are documented in these letters that we would never have remembered if we didn't have them written down. It's funny that we can both remember certain conversations that we had in certain places once we read these notes.

It's amazing, but we still interact today in much the same way we did then! We still talk around each other and aren't clear with what we mean. He still teases me, and it still hurts my feelings if I don't get the joke. I still get really mad and don't tell him why. He usually has no idea why I'm mad, so he just pretends that I'm not. We tend to get defensive and we both hate to admit where we are vulnerable. On the other side, it is amazing to me that all of the things that I listed in one letter that I loved about him are pretty much still the same. I could get mushier with this, but I'll spare us all that.

God is good to us, and we really enjoyed sitting down last night and looking through the notes. Remember to treasure the person you share your history with!

My Homesick Baby

I've been at my parents' house for several days. I left last Friday morning and got back last night. I took Superman with me and picked Rosy up in Alabama from her stepdad. We have had a nice, long weekend to relax in the country. There was only one real problem. It turns out that Superman has decided that he doesn't like to be away from home.

He cried pitifully every time he was put down ALL weekend. I had taken his Jumperoo and his swing, so he wasn't without his usual things. I got only one or two hours of sleep at a time all three nights. Even when he would fall asleep for his naps, he had to be held. If you tried to lay him down, he would SHRIEK! My mom and I decided that he was teething and gave him Tylenol. It helped a little, but he was miserable. When I left yesterday afternoon, he was laying in his car seat whimpering.

We got home last night around 6:30. I had warned hubby that it was going to be a miserable night and that he should be prepared for the baby to scream. Superman was asleep in his car seat and we moved it into the house and just let him sleep there while we unpacked. Believe it or not, that baby woke up in the best mood. He was SOOO glad to see Daddy and his house. He grinned and cooed and acted like he didn't even know how to cry. We were able to put him in his Jumperoo and his swing. He was okay in his crib. I've never seen such a change!

We may never go anywhere again. But, that's okay. After this weekend, my mom may not let us come back again. We are both soooo tired from the non-stop crying baby. The big kids (III and Rosy) go back to their mom today, and I am hopefully going to get to catch up on some rest.

When Daddy Fell Into the Pond

Another poetry reading from the Cantonment campus of Roses Prep!