Pictureless Update

I never get on the computer anymore.  I need to make more of an effort.  I know there's a lot to catch up on, but I don't know where to start. 

We've been working in our yard a lot lately.  We've got a beautiful flower bed built up behind the pergola.  All we need to do now is get the sprinklers hooked up to it and start planting!  We needed a lot of dirt to fill it, and ended up getting a TON of dirt, which means that we're also prepping every flower bed that we've every though of putting in our yard.  We've got bricks to put down today, and then a whole bunch more dirt to move.  It's been fun working together on this huge project, and now we're getting to the fun part of putting the flowers and bushes in.  It's gonna be great!

We've decided to go back to homeschooling next year.  There's a lot of little reasons for doing so, but mostly because I miss teaching the kids, and I know that we can do it successfully.  Other reasons include the fact that Alyssa doesn't get home from school until after 4:00, and I feel that a big portion of her day is wasted at school, and then when you add soccer and ballet into her schedule, it feels like we never see her.  She basically comes home, does her homework, and leaves again.  Plus, next year Ethan will be starting soccer and gymnastics, and that will add a whole new level of busy-ness to our family schedule, and I want us to be together more than just for a few minutes in the evenings before bedtime.  We're lucky that Brian has most Fridays off from work, otherwise he would never be able to see the kids.  When we decided to home school again, he volunteered to teach Science to the kids, which will be a fun opportunity for him, I think.

I'm trying to concentrate on eating better and exercising more, both for me and our whole family.  I've been having healthy fruit smoothies for breakfast, and I've cut way back on making sweets.  (Yes, Christina, even with all the times I've made no-bake cookies lately, that's still cutting back.)  We found out at a recent check up that Alyssa has higher cholesterol than most adult men.  It's not a huge surprise, given the fact that her favorite breakfast is fried eggs and her favorite foods are steak, prime rib, and cow tongue.  A few months ago I started regulating her breakfasts by cutting her back from three fried eggs to two, and forcing her to have oatmeal or cereal every other day.  Now, after finding out about her cholesterol levels, we've cut back eggs to once a week, and we've got to eat those red meats a lot less frequently as well. 

My book is coming along very slowly.  I don't get any time to work on it during the day, and once I get the kids to bed each night, I collapse into bed myself.  I'm hoping that now that Becca is getting better at sleeping at night, I'll start to have more energy to stay up later to write.  I finished two chapters a while back, let Brian ready them, got some pretty healthy criticism from him (meaning he was nice about it), vowed I would never write again, then realized I was being silly and got to work fixing things and filling in the gaps that Brian said didn't make sense.  I really need to scrap the second half of Chapter Two, and I'm excited to start over on that part and see where it takes me.  Something I've discovered about writing is that even though I have the whole story mapped out, as I go along and write each part, little things are changing, which change other things, and I think the end result is going to be a lot different than I originally imagined it to be.  It's almost like reading a book, because even though I know what's going to happen, I'm still going to be surprised at how it's going to happen.  It's interesting, because even though I'm wiring with my thoughts and ideas, the story is really writing itself, and the characters seems to be developing and becoming clear all on their own. 

Oh, it's almost nine o'clock, and we need to get working in the yard.  The sun is shining, and it looks like it's going to be a beautiful, warm day.  I'd better go get my work clothes on and get outside!