Tag: family

Fun and Dr. Appointments

On Wednesday night we were invited to dinner buy some new friends. It was absolutely wonderful to get to just sit down and chat, and the food that they made was delicious. They are Korean and so they had all this good Korean food. It was a really refreshing experience because I haven’t had very much Korean food before. I did have some good stuff back in college when I was doing ESL tutoring for a Korean family in Blacksburg. I absolutely loved that job. And the family was so kind and invited me to dinner sometimes. But since then I haven’t had any Korean food so it felt like a brand new experience.

I was grateful that I felt well enough to go, since I was worried that I wouldn’t feel well enough to go and I would have hated to have to back out. But I felt good and it was so wonderful to have the company. M and D are wonderful, kind, interesting people. I want to get together for another couples evening soon, and I definitely want to just hang out with M. 

I have been reading my abnormal psychology textbook that I got at a used bookstore a while back. I’ve been studying the section on personality disorders. They are absolutely fascinating. Psychology would be such a good field to go into, although I would rather be a researcher than a therapist I think. I have a lot more to read too. I just got several back issues of Artful Blogging that I was never able to buy before because they were out of stock on the publisher’s website. But I found them on Amazon so I’m happy. I’m waiting for a new parallel Bible to arrive, and I have tons of books on my Kindle to read too. If I can get to where I feel well enough again to read regularly I have so much good material to cover.

Craig has been off from work since Monday, but it feels like we haven’t spent that much time together because there have been so many doctors appointments. Of course Angelica has to speech appointments every week. we at least got to go to those together. But I have had appointments too and have been out of the house a lot. I finally got the second MRI done on my foot. This one was with contrast so they had to get an IV in me. That is never easy or fun. I told the nurse up front that it was not going to be easy and sure enough it wasn’t. I hate IVs. That’s a good reason not to have surgery right there! I saw an optometrist too, and my prescription hasn’t changed. I’m so happy that I don’t have to order new lenses for my glasses. I still have to buy new contacts obviously, but that’s not as big of a deal and they optometrist doesn’t do that thing that some of them do where they try to force you to buy contacts from them. The doctor just gave me my prescription and I can go wherever I want. So of course I’m going to have to do some price comparison and shop around.

Angelica adores magazines!

Angelica and I have gotten to spend some time together though, and that has been really nice. Today we cuddled up in the library and went through an Origami Owl catalog. There’s a ton of stuff I want to get from the fall and winter season, but I always forget or just isn’t the right time. But soon I really need to get some charms. Angelica wants her own necklace and to choose her own charms, but at this point I just feel like she is not responsible enough to take good care of jewelry. I have given her some jewelry that I have already and she is getting better about taking care of it, but she still not really to the point yet where I want to spend 70 or 80 bucks getting her a necklace. I’m afraid it will just get lost or tangled ip and broken. I look forward to the day where I can shop for things like jewelry for her.

She really likes magazines too, just like I do. She came across one of my old issues of Life:Beautiful and went crazy for it. One of her grandmothers has gotten her a Highlights subscription and I think she’ll really enjoy that. We’ll see.

Hitting a Wall and Getting Help

We plugged away at BJU Press for as long as we could, but we just hit a wall. It’s actually a very good video curriculum taught by experienced teachers, and with accompanying review material. The problems we ran into were numerous. Angelica did not grasp phonics at all. They were teaching how to sound out basic words like sin and tin. Nothing worked. Phonics cards didn’t work. The teacher’s lessons didn’t work. Our explanations didn’t work. She wasn’t catching on and would cry with frustration.

Then there was the issue with math. She did finally count to ten by using this curriculum, which was great. But Angelica didn’t always connect numbers to actual objects, and getting higher than ten just wasn’t happening. Lesser and greater were difficult for her. And comparing ordinal and cardinal numbers, forget it. Tallying did not go well either.

We took her to a developmental pediatrician twice and what she determined is that Angelica probably has dyslexia and dyscalculia. She doesn’t handle those disorders though, so we have scheduled a full evaluation and diagnostic session at a literacy center in Denver. They were booked out until January. The Colorado Springs location, where we live, was booked out until April. The center will test for dyscalculia, dyslexia, and pretty much every other learning and developmental disorder. It’s expensive, but we need to do it. Something is clearly wrong, and we can’t seem to overcome it. We need to find out what Angelica has so we can learn how to teach her in a way she will understand. Hopefully we can also find a tutor with experience in whatever disorders she has who can come and do math and language arts lessons with her each week.

Amazing Family Vacation

We just got home the night before last from an amazing family vacation. I have always wanted to see the Northwest, and my husband made my dreams come true. We went to South Dakota to see Mt Rushmore, and then a historic cemetery. We explored Wyoming and Montana. We saw Devil’s Tower.

After that we headed to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I wanted to see Idaho, but I had no idea I would adore it so much! Coeur d’Alene was a picturesque town by a lake nestled in the mountains. Over the course of our vacation I saw southern and northern Idaho, and northern Idaho is my favorite. Those mountains! That lake!

Then we headed to the coast of Washington. We spent a night on Whidbey Island. I love Whidbey Island. Everything about it has a serene loveliness and an introspective air. We spent the following day on the Olympic Peninsula. Craig drove us up to the very Northwest tip of the continental United States. It was a difficult hike to get to the overlook where I could see the water, but it was so worth doing. I managed to get back to the car tired, but not in too much pain.

The sight was gorgeous. The land ended in a sheer cliff drop into the ocean, with blue blue water rising and falling against the rocks, struggling against them.

We headed back across Washington and through part of Oregon to get to Utah and Salt Lake City. While we were on Antelope Island in the lake, we saw wild bison. The shoreline and salt flats were lovely in an almost scifi kind of way. While we were in Salt Lake City, we visited the Mormon Tabernacle. 

After that we headed home through western Colorado, which I had never seen before. the mountains were so inspiring, with their stripes of autumn yellow in between rows of evergreens.

All in all it was a fantastic trip. I am very tired now, but I am so glad we got to do this. Craig really did it for me. These were places I wanted to go. He had seen some of them, and wasn’t interested in others. He knew I wanted to go though, and he planned this trip for me. I love my husband.

Housewifing

This morning we ran over to Home Depot. Craig was helping me choose wood for my newest creative adventure – watercolor on wood. When we got home I did a test run. The way the colors spread through the grain is lovely, and the colors stay so vibrant.

After we ate lunch, it was time for school. We did a lesson in reading. It was her first lesson in reading for the curriculum, so there were no actual words in her little reader for the day. It was just sort of an introduction to books, although coming from this house she doesn’t really need that! We fell on a review day for math today, so we will be doing some review, but went on ahead and did the next lesson.

Craig has been working all afternoon and he won’t be home until bedtime. So I am flying solo for the pm hours. And I’ve been trying hard to get things done! After Angelica’s school day was over, I started cleaning the house. I reorganized the homeschool supplies, cleared off the dining room table (which had become a storage space for school supplies and little toys that had been brought downstairs by little hands), reorganized the kitchen to the best of my ability (and I did a lot of organizing…took about two hours), did dishes, took out trash, took out recycling, cleaned out the refrigerator, and began organizing Angelica’s clothes for the trip. In between, I painted with Angelica, took her to the park for over an hour, helped her mail something to her grandparents, made her dinner, and after all that was through I took a hot shower. Now I have some laundry to do, some sweeping, and some mopping. I’d also like to put away my second, though small, round of clean dishes. I am really going to push myself.

Exhaustion is setting in though. I hate this overused analogy, but I only get so many spoons per day. I normally breakup my housework and activity into smaller, shorter chunks. I am just now sitting down after my shower. It is almost seven and I’ve been going at it since before noon. I guess that isn’t a lot, but it feels like it. The shower felt good, but even that took a spoon.

Truly, I love my job. I love being a housewife, and I love being a mom. And I get tremendous satisfaction from a good day of work.  I just run out of energy and stability….quickly a lot of the time. But I’m so glad I’ve done what I’ve done. The kitchen took the longest time. It was in need of a massive organize. We just have a lot of stuff. And I have more to do that I am really going to try to get done before bed.

Tomorrow is my sixth wedding anniversary. We celebrated last week by going to a little french restaurant, and hanging out just the two of us. Tomorrow I’ll be with Craig for our anniversary (and the holiday) in the morning, but he will be working all afternoon and evening. It will be just me and Angelica. I’m not sure what we are going to do – probably have a quiet day.

Okay, well that was my day so far. Now it is time to review Angelica’s speech therapy lesson with her, sweep up, mop, run laundry, and put away dishes!

BJU Press

We have decided to go another direction in our home schooling. I have ordered the BJU online curriculum. She will watch videos online everyday that cover math and language arts, and through the subject of language arts science and social studies will be studied as well. There are corresponding worksheets to do and little projects. I am excited to get started on this with her. We showed her a sample video of the kindergarten math and she seemed to like it and get into it.

I actually looked into this curriculum months ago. Actually years ago even, as I was beginning to ponder exactly how I was going to homeschool Angelica. I was worried that videos might bore her, and I wondered if she would need me teaching and if the videos would be too much of an easy way out. But as I have found out from having her do the Time4Learning Subscription Service, she loves videos. Or at the very least she loves those. And doing pure workbook assignments with nothing else to go with it, like we did with Christian Light Education, is something she hates. She likes to have audio and visual and colors and possibly to do a little kinesthetic movement. These videos seem to encourage some of that. And it’s a more well-rounded education than what we were using because kindergarten covers science and social studies, even if they don’t have their own videos devoted to those subjects. I watched a sample language arts video and was impressed. I hope that the worksheets are well designed and that Angelica really get something out of them. And I like the fact that each day I have to lay out her work for her and we follow along with the videos and then we do the work that’s assigned in the parent guide each day. I can enter grades for her online through the parent portal. Starting in fifth grade I think students take their tests and quizzes online, but until then I will be grading them, which I think I like just as well.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but I really think that at the very least this will go much better than the last curriculum. I will have so much more help teaching because it won’t be just me and my methodology. She’ll be watching an actual professional teacher teach the first time she hears the lesson and then I will just be reinforcing the lesson. Between laying out her work for her each day, pulling up the videos and being ready to stop them at the appropriate time for her to do activities, and grading her assignments, I will still be heavily involved in her education. But she will have the audio visual stimulation that seems to keep her interested in school, and I will have the assistance of having a professional teacher give her her lessons. So please dear Lord let this work out.

New Domain, Life

I finally took the plunge and bought a domain name today. I had a horrible time picking between so many options, but I decided to use one that describes who I am on a daily basis. It gives me subject matter versatility (a housewife can be a writer, a reader, an artist, anything), and I love headcovering with my veils. Headcovering is an important part of my walk with God, inspired in me by the Holy Spirit.

I have been running low on memory, so I knew I needed to buy a hosting plan and that plan came with a domain anyways.  I got so sick of those awful, tacky ads that my free hosting was putting on my little blog, so that was another good reason to get a domain name and hosting. I have been mulling over the choice of a domain name for weeks and have been paralyzed by indecision. I think though that this was the right choice. I hope so anyway.

Life has been busy lately. I’ve been doing a ton of digital creating. I have also started learning new things, reading new things, and studying a new devotional. Last weekend I got to see one of my best friends. She lives down the street from my old house we just sold in North Carolina. She came out to Colorado on a family trip, and we got to meet up for dinner and ice cream in Denver. It was so good to see her! I missed her as soon as we drove away. I can’t wait til we meet up again.

Today we went to church. I had some anxiety during all the singing, but overall it was a good service. The sermon was about Communion, and the difference between the Catholic view (transubstantiation) and the Protestant view. Personally, although I am not Catholic, I believe in transubstantiation. It was really interesting though.