We do exist!!

We're still here and finally not super busy!! The past couple of weeks have been crazy--I've been doing a lot of teaching, which brings in extra money and is great for the budget, but leaves things a bit frazzled around here since I do the childcare/cooking/cleaning---oh, who am I kidding, I don't clean---thing during the day, then run off to teach in the evening. Thankfully, Josh hasn't had soccer games at the same time, we'd be stuck just passing by each other 10 minutes a day.

We were also very very lucky to get to go to Schlitterbahn again this year without having to pay hardly any of the expense ourselves. It was a great vacation that we would not have been able to take without the generosity of a few family members. I have some pictures of that, but will have to scan them in (on our new printer/copier/scanner obtained via freecycle :-) since I don't have digital copies.

The garden is not happy. A guy from the local ag extension office does a gardening show on NPR every week. This week's show (no joke) consisted of "misery loves company". It's so hot and so windy and so dry (no measurable rain yet this month) that the plants just have no hope. We did get our water bill and it was as bad as we thought. We've had to make the tough decision to let the less productive beds go and only water the ones that are still giving us a couple pounds of tomatoes every day. I've decided the money in our "gardening" budget is going to have to go towards more rainwater collection barrels instead of towards adding/rearranging garden space too. There was opportunity to collect way more water than we did, we just didn't have the storage space for it.

Sedona has developed QUITE the temper. I'm frantically trying to teach her more sign language, b/c as it stands, she lets you know she disagrees by: screaming; grabbing whatever you're handing her and throwing it on the ground; or leaning forward and banging her head on the floor. She finally got two more teeth, so now she has all four middle ones (well, the top ones are BARELY through). Not that the previous lack of teeth held her back at all. We already have to buy her her own kid's meal when we go out, or buy one adult meal for her and Sierra to split. She usually out eats Sierra and handles everything from sandwiches to pizza to chicken nuggets just fine. She was tested for Celiac disease and that came back negative--yay!!! Also, our GI retired and I'm not super fond of the new guy, but I like his underling that works with him (not sure of the set up---he is a doctor already, but I think training to be a pediatric GI, or maybe just starting out?). I especially like that the underling (again, he IS a doctor already) called us himself with test results/plan for the future rather than having a nurse do it. Since she is doing better lately, we have tentatively discontinued visits with the GI. As long as her weight is good at her one year check up, and nothing else pops up, we are going to go with the theory that she had the lymphonodular hyperplasia (the bloody stools, that resolved itself) and the weight gain issue was just a fluke and her "finding her curve". That's basically the short story.

Sierra is turning into a little adult. She's had some major vacation detox going on. She got lots of attention and lots of fun for 3 days and did not do well at all with getting back to the normal routine. Yesterday was terrible. I don't even know how many times she got in trouble. This morning I woke up and planned to make everyone pancakes. I told Sierra that and she tells me...."pancakes have syrup and they're sweet and they're really only for if your being real good, and I wasn't very good yesterday, so I can't have pancakes" I looked at her like an alien had just landed in my kitchen and told her, no, really, it was okay and I was just gonna make pancakes. The kid was insistent--no pancakes. Exasperated, I asked her if I could make biscuits. She thought about it for a minute and said, "hmmm......yeah, that'd be okay. I'll just have butter and no jam on mine". I suppose I should jump up and down and rejoice that she seems to be learning some sense of remorse, or at least right and wrong. I'm sure part of it is her need to control something, but I *totally* understand her need to control and if she wants to gain that by denying herself pancakes, whatever! The only bad part was Sedona managed to get her biscuit crumbled into 10 million pieces and I found it down her shirt, in her diaper and even after I undressed her and brushed her off outside, I still found one last crumb in her belly button LOL

Have some major updating to do to my reading list and for cooking posts...will try to get to that this weekend.