Crayons, Playdoh & Wax

I got Better Me going again. Hopefully it will keep up this time and do better!!!! At least I am in smaller clothes!!!

I was really hoping after last year, school would get better. Ok, it would help if I had her at a quiet room, at a table and I could could go about my business. The problem, she doesn’t need me sitting right there, cuz she can DO the work, but you can’t leave her alone because she won’t do a thing.

Right now our days consist of fighting in the morning (to get dressed). She will be awake, and then just sit there. Then even if she is ready, she has to put on her shoes. I figured out why we always wore Crocs, No tying! She takes almost 5 minutes per shoe! They don’t make Good Quality Shoes (that will make the podiatrist happy) that valcro.

Then she gets to school, doesn’t get everything done, not because she can’t do it, but because she is slow. So they send home whatever she can’t get done, meaning MORE homework. So then we spend the after-school FIGHTING, doing homework until dinner, then finishing what she hasn’t gotten done.

If we let her work in the kitchen without supervision, she turns on the TV. If she has to do work on the computer, she goes to the Warrior sites instead of the homework. She is 10, I shouldn’t have to watch EVERY SINGLE thing she does. No consequence seems to phase her. The first thing I actually found that comes close to working was me taking away her Warrior books. I had to explain to her teacher that she was saying she didn’t have a book to read, and I pointed out that she has library books and can read them. I told her teacher I only took away the 1 series to try and teach her about appropriate times for reading. An hour in the bathroom instead of homework, or at 10:30 at night instead of sleeping on a school night. Reading is good, but, HELLO!

She then doesn’t get to sleep on time, doesn’t get enough sleep, doesn’t want to get up, or wakes up late. Is crabby at school and doesn’t want to do her work, which they send home, which means more homework, which makes a vicious cycle!

Tuesday her teacher said to me “she isn’t turning her work in” and how “behind she is getting”, how “it is becoming a habit”, etc… I won’t even start on my frustration of Monday night, I had my reunion group… nothing new… every Monday for at least 3 years now! Tuesday, Ken has bible study, so it was just us. She was almost done with what is in her planner, so I left her alone, and I was not listening to MY doctor and was weed-eating the yard (the teen we hired did not come back as promised, and did a horrible job… Will not hire him again btw, didn’t want to this time, but K wouldn’t let me mow and I couldn’t even guilt the other person in the house to do it) Anyway, using the weed eater was not a problem, til I went to our south side of the front yard… to big of a hill and it hurt my toe! (trying to hold myself up… I had Ken’s croc on the surgery foot and my croc on the other, so toes were covered)

Anyway, my point, cuz I was way off track, she told me she was done except printing her grades and I had to approve the website (I Love my Mac), so I said she could play, and we would print the page after dinner. When I got in the house, I was looking in her folder and found MORE homework that she ‘forgot’ about. So, we spent the rest of the evening doing that. At 9:30, I reminded her she had’t had dinner yet. I had eaten while she was ‘playing’. Our neighbor’s gma was taking them chasing the moon since it was full. So, not only did she not get a shower, I was making her a sandwich at almost 10. Ken had gotten home and was hiding in the basement. Wednesday we ALL over slept, and she still moves just as slow! She gets very upset when her friends don’t wait, but if she doesn’t walk right out the door when they get here, they leave without her! (even when it is early!!) Then I get frustrated, cuz she gets upset.

Then in the afternoon I get a call from the school cuz she is ‘off’ at school and having issues, (she wrote on a paper that one of the para’s was Stupid… kids!!) cuz she is exhausted, which leads to more homework, and the cycle continues. Not to mention the fact she now has NO time for chores, the cats scream at me all day because their litter box is FILTHY, and it is self cleaning, but it is so full, it can’t do anything…. I gave up on her putting away dishes, because the sink was so full of dirty dishes, I couldn’t stand it anymore… and I did it… etc….

On Wednesday night K has bible study. She got her homework done, so she got to go, but was finishing the last 2 math questions and finishing coloring her map on the way up… it is a 15 minute drive to the Ministry Center, and I had to take her, even though I am still not allowed to drive! Then I asked Ken to get her dinner on his way to get her, so she could eat on the way home and get in the shower, cuz today is picture day. And he waits til after so she doesn’t have cold food. Since when does she care? So, at 10:30, she is heading to bed, cuz since when can K take a 5 minute shower… and Thursday is choir, Before school, which means getting up early. And then he wonders why I am putting in a call to my therapist before he leaves to go get her to see if they have an appointment for today!!!!

I am going to spend the night in Denver tonight, so I don’t have to get up so early tomorrow. I just need to get away!!! Women of Faith is this weekend. I so NEED this!

So, incase you haven’t noticed, I have been talking about my feet a WHOLE lot lately! I had surgery on the 3rd on my little toe. This toe is the toe I broke in 2003. I have even had physical therapy on this toe to try and get it so I could wear closed toed shoes, but no luck.

I had finally, half joking, asked the doctor at one of K’s appointments to cut off my toe. It was then that he said we could do hammer toe surgery. The doctor asked if I wanted the big toes or little toes done first, and I said little. If we had actually x-rayed my foot first, we would have figured that the bone spur on my right foot was as bad as the one on my left. My mom tried to talk me into postponing my surgery to do both, but I didn’t want to wait and the doctor didn’t have time in his schedule to add the 2nd toe, and if I wait, I wouldn’t have my boot off by the cruise. (yah, I haven’t gotten that far in my posts, we were going to do the Alaskan cruise, but that is a whole lot of money for not knowing if we get sea sick or if the weird ‘issues’ will tolerate the closeness, so we are going on a 3 day cruise next month to Mexico)

The doctor never x-rayed my toe until the week before surgery, and no wonder I had so much pain! My toe was shaped like ) instead of l and there was some extra bone. Plus I believe when I asked him about my big toe spur, his exact comment was ‘oh, that is interesting’. Not something you really want to hear from your doctor, and something I hear way too much!

So, I think my toes have something to do with my closterphobia, as well as being my thermastat. I made it til Tuesday last week before I had to cut the new bandage off my toes. Tonight, I made it about 4 hours before I cut it open, but that was my toes itched! I told them that when I called last week about the itching, it wasn’t healing itching, cuz if it was, Zyrtec would not of taken care of it. I said something about being allergic to the dressing. The tech said, it doesn’t have latex. I laughed and said, since when do I do anything normal? All I know is my foot itches and my toes look like water balloons. I put lotion on both feet tonight (the parts not covered at least) but now BOTH feet itch. The weird part is, it was one of the lotions I could use and not have a reaction. Not sure what is up, but looking for my Zyrtec again!

And 1 more week til they remove the stitches! (btw, pictures in Flickr ->)

July started really nice. My MIL & SIL were in town with 2 of the 3 nieces, so K spent a lot of time at Kerry’s.

4th of July we spent in Broomfield with friends and could see 10-12 firework shows at once from the park we were at since Broomfield is just a little higher.

We celebrated our nephew Z’s 2nd bday early, so the family could be there. His bday is the same day as mine, and we were in San Diego for mine. My MIL & crew left on Monday and we flew to San Diego on Tuesday.

We were so excited. We realized that we had not taken a family vacation since we went to Hawaii when K was only 16 mo. Ken says going to visit family doesn’t count, even if we do try and do something fun during the trip. We went to Carlsbad Caverns in 05, but it was on the way to Texas for his sister’s wedding. K and I went on a month long vacation in 05, with my Mom & Sister, and it did include family, but Ken wasn’t with us.

We got the Go San Diego card, which included so many things, just not Sea World. We thought about the 3 for 5 pass, but then we had to pay for everything else, and the zoo & wild animal park were on both. So that is why we decided to go with the go card. We got a great deal on ou Sea World admission too. We got the adult tickets for the price of a child and got a 2nd day free. K is old enough, she is considered an adult for Sea World. That is also one of the things that helped us decide on the go card, cuz with the 3 for 5 card, we had to get K an adult card. Every where else, kids are up to 11 or 12 and Sea World is 9.

Well, I will do our trip in its own entry. This is getting long on its own.

So, my favorite part of summer is all the new movie releases. I think between Memorial Day and my bday, I saw almost all the movies available (that I was interested in!)

Ironman… getting clean did good for Robert Downey! This was a great movie and set it up not only for a sequal, but set it up for them to make The Avengers.

Wanted… I saw this one twice. I love action movies. This is definitely not for kids. Practically the first line of the movie has the f@*’ word and the last line. I think that people have become too numb to the use of that word, and it is not needed. I did try to explain to a friend, that for this movie, it was just more appropriate.

Walle… Very cute movie. Pixar & Disney did good. Good story and entertaining.

Kung Fu Panda… I need to see this one again, as I had to step out in the middle, but it had a good ending
Don’t Mess With the Zohan… yah, we saw the beginning of this at Panda (theater messed up that one) which was not appropriate. This had a great story with it, once you get past the pelvic thrusts and hacky-sacs with butt cheeks. A good Adam Sandler movie.

Mama Mia!… I got to see this one for my bday. I so LOVED it. Not only the story, but the music was fabulous! I took my sister and niece to see it when I went to Phoenix in August. I did laugh last week when I heard they released a sing-a-long version. Apparently they didn’t go into any of the theaters cuz both times I saw it, I was NOT the only one singing along (Ken said he had it in stereo the night we saw it in San Diego)

Hancock… Another Will Smith movie smash! Dd and I went and she said the rest of the summer that it was her favorite

Dark Knight… Well worth the wait. Heath did do an amazing job. Not sure if I agree that it is Oscar worthy, but will not be surprised to see him nominated.

Journey to the Center of the Earth… 3D… Brandon did great in this one, and it is set up for a sequal

Indiana Jones… It was all that I hoped for in an Indiana Jones movie. Harrison still looks amazing, much better than he did in Firewall!

Narnia-Prince Caspian… great sequal. Granted, I haven’t read the books, or I wouldn’t have been disappointed in the ending (it was good, just not how I hoped it would end)

Going to have to go look at ticket stubs to see if I missed any.

Still on my list:
Sisterhood 2
Fly me to the moon
The Mummy
The Women

So I did post some at the beginning of summer. I had to go back and look. I didn’t see anything aboutour trip to Montana though.

Memorial Day weekend we tookan extra day since school wasn’t out yet and we went through The Teton national park and Yellowstone. I was extremely disappointed because it was cold, rainy and overcast. I was excited about seeing the Tetons. The problem, cloud cover was so low, I didn’t get to see a single mountain! Yellowstone, however, was wonderful. Only in Wyoming do you have a traffic jam because the bison are walking down the center of the road! Our pictures of Old Faithful are sad though, because you can’t tell the geyser from the cloud cover.

Our niece, Andrea graduated on Sunday. It was a really nice ceremony. The nice part of small towns is that these kids all know each other. There were less than 50 kids, which is a whole lot different than my class with over 450!

Speaking of my class, this is my 25th year, so I kept watching for something about my reunion. We finally heard something in August. They are going to have my 25th reunion next year. The cool part is, they are having 3 classes together, 83, 84 & 85. This could be fun, since most of my friends were younger than me.

So, we got home and K finished 4th grade. I have not been so glad to have a year finished as I was this last year. K’s teacher announced to them at the end of April that he was not coming back. I questioned his timing choice, but thought he made that decision a year too LATE! This was the worst year of school for K. Granted, all of her diagnoses came through this year, but if he had said to me one more time ‘I just don’t know what to do with her’ I was ready to scream!

My parents got here about the 12th, and our niece, M, came with them. She stayed w us the rest of the month and then I flew her to catch up w my parents. I was going to drive her to NE, but with the price of gas, and my time, I decided to buy the ticket. We had a not so good incident while she was here, and that ended our visit on a sour note.

The last week of June was Bible school. I was the preschool craft coordinator. I was supposed to work a Walk to Emmaus weekend that Friday, but they ended up cancelling the men and women’s walks.

That Wednesday of VBS Ken’s Mom, sister and nieces arrived for a visit. K spent a lot of time at Kerry’s visiting with them. Ken’s Mom finally got to see our house. She hadn’t been here since we moved out of her house.

Our niece Heather was in a Miss Teen Texas pageant, and I was trying to figure out how to go to that as well, but Ken promised if she won, he would buy us tickets to fly to the Miss Teen USA pageant. What I didn’t realize was that it was not the one that went to the Miss Teen USA pageant.

Pictures of all this should be in flickr ->

I have had a really crazy summer, and have been very horrible about updating this. Not only did I get a new computer, but I got a new phone, so my excuses are going down on why I am not doing this. And since I am laid up for at least a week with my foot elevated, I really have no excuse anymore! So, I am going to attempt to do a few entries and get caught up.

I had surgery on my little toe yesterday, the one I broke back in April of 2003. It took me asking to have the toe cut off to get someone to do something. I thought it was all scar tissue, until they finally did an x-ray last week. (yes after the surgery was all scheduled… nothing like after the fact) I think something would have been done a while ago if they had done a simple x-ray! My toe looked like a parenthase. Not only was it crooked, but there was an extra bump on the bone. The toe was called a hammer toe.

The pain is not too bad. Advil seems to be holding me, as long as doesn’t get bumped. No to figure iut how to keep my hand from going numb while typing in bed!

Keep checking back. I am going to attempt to get at least June done today, but first I have to turn off the button clicks so I don’t drive Ken crazy!!!