Weekly Review March 7 '09

Well, March definitely came in like a lion! We woke up to a couple inches of snow Sunday morning, and it was cold…brrrrr! March has become much more “lamb like” the last couple of days, though. Yesterday and today have been in the 70’s—nice!

Most of the snow melted before Sunday was over, but then more came the next morning. School was already scheduled to start 4 hours late because of parent-teacher conferences, but they ended up cancelling school (and parent-teacher conferences) completely. We did get a good 3-4 inches of snow that morning, but I think they still should have had school—the roads weren’t too bad by early afternoon. I think they were just afraid it was going to be worse than it turned out to be. I had Scott’s conferences scheduled for Tuesday, and I was really glad those didn’t get messed up.

However, I was supposed to talk to both of Tanner’s teachers on Monday, and it turned out to be pretty unfortunate that I didn’t get the chance to do that. Instead, they sent home grade sheets with Tanner on Tuesday, and I was shocked / dismayed / horrified to discover that he is failing three of his four classes! They set up a homework hotline this term which I was checking frequently and according to Tanner he was getting everything done, so I was under the impression that he was doing better than last term. I guess I should know by now never to assume anything where Tanner and school work are concerned.

This situation caused quite a bit of stress and work for me this week, just trying to figure out what is really going on and what we need to do to get Tanner back on track. I spent most of the evenings on Tuesday and Wednesday just going through Tanner’s folders with him to help him find missing assignments, helping him to get better organized (he still had papers in there from the beginning of the school year—no wonder he is losing things!), and helping him complete some of the assignments he had never completed. There were also a number of e-mails going back and forth between his teachers and me. Most of the problem is not that he is not doing well on what he does, it is that he has a lot of missing assignments. It’s pretty discouraging and frustrating to me that he is still forgetting to hand things in, not completing assignments when he gets stuck (instead of asking for help), and not following up when he’s absent to find out what he missed. I mean, he is in 7th grade! He has the memory and organizational skills of a kindergartener. How is this kid ever going to learn to function in society?!

We’ve made quite a bit of progress this week, and I will be meeting with his teachers next week to talk some more. I hope we can figure out some things to do that will help him. There is some good news, though—he has a 90% in Language Arts--yeah!

I met with Scott’s teachers on Tuesday and he is doing well. He has As in Honors English, Keyboarding, and PE. He has a C in Algebra right now, but that is mostly just because he didn’t do really great on a test. All of his teachers commented on how well behaved he is, also, which is always nice to hear. I didn’t schedule a conference with Jared’s teacher because I know he is doing just fine.

We still had sick people at our house this week. Scott stayed home Tuesday with a sore throat and Jared threw up Thursday morning. I am hoping that someday we will all be healthy again! My days have been so unpredictable; it’s hard to get anything done.

Frank was able to work from home on Monday when all the boys were home from school also. He was supposed to go to a site in Laurel, Maryland which is near Baltimore and they got a lot more snow than we did, so he opted to stay home. He was able to do most of what he needed remotely. That evening we took all the boys out to eat to celebrate getting our state tax return. They don’t get to eat out very often, so we do that every spring. It was a nice day to go out since we’d all been cooped up inside all day. We got our federal return on Friday. I just filed our taxes less than 2 weeks ago. Three things I love: Turbo Tax, electronic filing and direct deposit! They make the whole tax filing process about a million times easier and quicker.

Jared got to go to a birthday party on Tuesday after school. (They got out 3 ½ hours early that day for parent-teacher conferences.) The party was for his good friend Sage. They went to a place called Adventure Park which has laser tag, rides, and games. He had a good time.

Because this week-end we have stake conference, all meetings and activities were cancelled. It turned out to be a good thing the boys didn’t have scouts since I was so buried under with Tanner’s homework issues.

I finally made it to sewing again on Wednesday—we haven’t met for the past several weeks because someone was always sick. I actually did some sewing, too! I sewed a button on a sweater and got 3 merit badges sewn on to a sash. I’m not sure Seth will want to go back there, though. He had so many mishaps—fell down the bottom couple of steps on the stairs, knocked over and fell off a chair he was on, got his arm stuck in the slats of a chair, and the dog (who is significantly larger than Snickers) jumped on him twice, which terrified him. He never got hurt, really, by any of these mishaps, but they all scared him.

I took Tanner to the grocery store after school on Thursday in search of white chocolate for his science fair project. (Yes, we are doing a project that involves chocolate again this year! But it’s a little different and (I hope!) simpler than what we did last year for Jared’s project.) We were only able to find white chocolate in chip form, but that will work. While we were there, I noticed they had Easter candy out and they had all these cool new kinds of jelly beans like Hot Tamale jelly beans, Mike & Ike jelly beans, and new flavored Lifesaver jelly beans. Yum! I have a real weakness for jelly beans and I am proud of myself for not buying any. Then we got to the check out line and a Snickers bar caught my eye because the wrapper looked like a football (leftovers from the Super Bowl, I think.) I thought maybe I’d get myself one of those (can you tell I was hungry?!) until I looked at the price. $1.00! This was no “king size” bar, either—if anything, it looked a little smaller than the standard size. When did candy bars get to be $1.00? They used to be .50…last week, I think! I just couldn’t bring myself to pay that much for a candy bar. I guess I don’t really need the extra fat calories anyway. That is my gripe on the state of the economy (don’t get me started on how I feel about bailing out greedy home owners while I am living in a tiny house because that’s all I can afford…) and I am thankful that I don’t have something a lot worse to complain about (like unemployment).

Frank was going to go to the temple on Thursday after work, but then there was a minor fire at FSA that day in the server room where he was working (something about a battery sparking and plastic burning) so he inhaled quite a bit of smoke, his clothes were really itchy, and he smelled like smoke. So he had to come home and take a shower instead. The fire had nothing to do with anything he did—it was someone else, and he told that guy not to do what he was doing, but the other guy didn’t listen! I’m glad nothing worse happened. He was pretty hoarse on Thursday evening and I was a little worried about what exactly he had inhaled, but by Friday morning he was a lot better.

Friday morning I had a mammogram—that’s the first time I’ve done that, now that I have reached the magical age of 40! Since it was a new experience, I was kind of nervous about it, but it turned out to be no big deal. I think I felt more motivated than most to get it done since 2 women in my book chat group have had breast cancer. Now I am finally done with all the routine female check ups for this year—hooray!

Frank and I got to go to the temple together Friday evening. There was a special meeting for our stake at 7:00, so we planned to go to the 5:00 session, but Frank ended up being at work longer than planned and the traffic was pretty bad, so we didn’t get there until about 5:15. Instead, we decided to do some sealings and that worked out well. We were doing names of English couples who were in India in the military—pretty interesting! We enjoyed our stake meeting afterwards; it is always extra nice to be in the temple with a lot of familiar faces. After the temple, we went with another couple from our ward (the Schlenzs) to Baja Fresh (Mexican fast food—the good kind!) for dinner. That was fun. We got home around 9:30. Scott babysat for us, and he did a pretty good job. He put Seth down for bed a little earlier than we would have done, though!

We got to bed late, and then Seth woke up around 2:15. When I went in to get him, I discovered that he had thrown up in his crib—yuck! Frank cleaned that up while I cleaned Seth up. Somewhere in there he threw up again (I got him to the bathroom in time). We got him settled on our floor, but by then he was wide awake and didn’t go back to sleep for hours. I stayed up with him until about 4:30 and then I went to sleep while Frank took over. Frank finally got him back to sleep, but then he was up again around 6:15. Frank got up again—I never really woke up all the way—and the next thing I knew it was about 8:00! So neither of us got much sleep last night, but I got more than Frank did. Seth has been fine today and has been able to keep down food, so we are not sure what made him sick. We are really glad he didn’t throw up while we were at the temple!!! I asked Scott what he would have done, and he said “call someone”. (We told them to call some friends who live nearby if they had something come up that they didn’t know how to handle.)

This morning Frank went to a client to get a little bit of work done. Then I had to be at the church at 10:00 to help with a cub scout fundraiser. The Super Derby (regional Pinewood Derby for our district) was held at our church building this year, so we figured it was a good opportunity to sell lunch to the people coming to the Super Derby. We sold pizza by the slice, chips, and lemonade. Jared actually isn’t going to Day Camp this year (the proceeds are going to help pay for Day Camp) but I figured I should help since I’m the Primary counselor connected with the Cub Scouts. We really had no idea how many people would actually come, and I think we overestimated how much pizza to buy, but we still did a pretty decent business. I didn’t stay for the whole thing, but I helped set up and stayed for about an hour and a half to help serve and make lemonade. When I left, I bought one of the pizzas and brought it home for everyone to eat.

Originally, Frank and I planned to go together to the adult session of conference tomorrow, but we don’t feel comfortable leaving Seth (just in case he gets sick again) so Frank is going to go tonight, and if we decide to keep Seth home tomorrow I will go with the older boys then. I’m supposed to sing in the choir so I’d like to be there for that although there are a lot of altos, so I’m sure they’d do fine without me. We combined with another ward for the choir this time, which really helped out with numbers! Hopefully we’ll all be able to go tomorrow, though. Frank has a meeting at 4:00 also, but he is not going to go to that, either—he’s taking a nap!

Snickers learned to go up and down the stairs this week. He actually has known how to do it for quite a while, but he has been too chicken to go up or down more than a couple of steps. I didn’t encourage it—keeping him confined to the main level made house training easier! But now he is very confident on the stairs and follows me up and down all day long. (I guess it couldn’t last forever.) At least he is getting more exercise!

One of the cutest things Seth does these days is he says “thank you” whenever I give him something he wants (a toy, a cookie…) Then one day this week I said “thank you” to him when he put something in the trash for me, and he said “you’re welcome”. It is so sweet hearing him say things like that! Seth is also learning to take his plate over to the sink when he is done eating. He is at the age where he likes to help…I wish they would never outgrow that!

We hope you are all having a nice week end. We have the windows open and are enjoying a really nice only-slightly-cool breeze! Just perfect weather! I’m sure we’ll have more cold weather before we’re done, but it is nice to get a break from the cold temperatures for a while. It’s the beginning of the end!

I guess no pictures this week—we’ll try to do better next week.