Rambling, rambling, rambling

I admit, I'm a bit of a mess right now. Dh is home until Monday and then he's going to be with his mom until the end, however long that is. We've been touch and go with our lessons this week, we certainly have not been "on" schedule, just doing what we want, when we want. It's 9:00 am and kids are outside playing while I finish putting TOG's Redesigned Year 2, Unit 1 in sheet protectors. Since I'm not using TOG this year, I'm taking it out of our lesson room so I can put our games within sight/reach.

I guess when circumstances outside of me are a little out of control, like MIL's cancer and dh's grief, I need to have something in control. So this week I'm tackling our home library both our online catalog and our shelves, reorganizing our school room because it gets hot which I think is due to the A/C ducts being on the floor with too much stuff around them, and handling just regular household stuff.

I've been in "fix-it" mode, I know it's because I can't fix MIL or Dh's pain- I'll fix anything around me. Camille's math woes have been fixed with the math facts copywork, and I've read about math in every homeschool book I have here at the house and read various websites, enough to relax and realize she doesn't have to have immediate recall in 2nd grade. After reading about Sarah's math lab, I realize I have a lot of things we already have I could collect and make something similar for my children- a little math corner. Which is another reason for the learning room reorganization.

I'm not the only one trying to figure out how to deal with MIL's cancer, while Dh was with them last week, MIL looked around at her boys (grown men now but always will be her boys) and saw that Dh was the only one without logos on his shirt, she made a comment about it and *poof*, FIL took Dh shopping for shirts that had logos on them. When MIL came home from hospice, they put a hospital bed in one of the bedrooms and there is a little tv in there, she said she couldn't see the tv and *poof*, FIL went out and got a huge flat screen tv. Dh brought home the little tv and now we have 3 tvs! (Keep in mind, I don't like the kids to watch tv in the first place unless it's educational or for G rated movies). We're all coping in our own ways, some more funny than others but still just trying to cope.

We now have a tv in our learning room on an experimental basis, for educational viewing purposes only. There is not cable access so the viewing options are severely limited to my control. We have one of those small DVD players that we can easily move from tv to tv if we wish. We have a tv in our bedroom and in our den, I can't say Dh and I agree on what to watch at night, chuckle. I'm just not sure about the tv in the learning room. If it were up to me, I would say no tvs at all but dh isn't on board with that yet, maybe with some more time, who knows.

In my coping, I plan on clearing out the kids' closets of clothes that don't fit anymore and making a list of winter clothes they may need. Both of the kids have gone through a growth spurt in the last month of so and it's not noticeable until you put pants on them that are 3 -4 inches from their ankles! See, summer shorts are deceiving. We have about 2-3 months before the cold weather will hit here in south Georgia, we're still having 90 degree days right now and the humidity...oh the humidity.

It seems the interlibrary loan system has been fixed and we finally received the books I requested 3 months ago, which means a lot of reading. It's hard to decide not to read these books, the kids love them and I love reading to them so we're just squeezing in all we can.

Okay, I'm done with my rambling for now.