Monday

It's mid-January, the weather is horrible, so cold we want to stay in bed all the time.

The kids have put up a tent in the living room and moved in with all their bedding. I see them now and then, bright flashes as they zip to the bathroom or grab another book. We eat on the go: veggies and dip, crackers and cheese, chips with salsa. They consume boxes of cereal dry and bags of rice cakes. I try not to think of the mice infestation they are just asking for in that little tent with all those crumbs.

I let them get away with it. If we were really camping I would never let food in the tents, they need some rule-bending time. No one likes things set in stone. But bear attacks are not likely in the living room. I hope. I did have them haul everything out and shake it before they piled back in for sleeping tonight.

The dogs are in exile. Kuma found a skunk and it nailed them both. Sora Blue is happily living in town with a family that thinks dogs and furniture are a fine mix and who are willing to pet her bald. I am glad she missed the skunk, bathing her is a 4-person ordeal.

The weather is cold, the dogs have never been out overnight before. We ended up putting them in an insulated shed with a heat lamp and extra bedding. They will have to air out at least 3 weeks. It's been 3 days. It's hardest on Jessie, who is happiest when underfoot. Just today, she has escaped about a dozen times, scaling the fence or just unhooking various attempts at latching the wire using her head shoved in the open squares of the farm fencing to pop the fastenings loose. Each time, she looked like she was being sent to the gallows when I commanded her back in the pen. I ended up having to reinforce the gate with plywood, it looks truly redneck out there. *sigh* I hope it's only for a little longer. I have actually had dreams where we wake up and they smell good again. That's just sad, really.

Our tiny cats are growing, I can't say enough about what a joy kittens are. I am all for observing animals and these two are a riot. They come and go, piling up to nap or groom on nearly any surface, including us. They purr and play and get into everything. They will knock you down for butter. We have stopped eating it, the risk for attack is just too great.

Ben's ants came in for his ant farm and his sea monkeys are growing. Both small worlds have given us all hours of fascination. Last night, Matt called the kids in from their beds and they watched, pressing in with their faces touching, as the ants connected 2 tunnels they had been working on. It was thrilling. The sea monkeys have been interesting. There are 2 huge ones in there and they swim in circles 90 miles an hour, they fly through the water. There are 2 smaller ones that are just getting easy to spot and a few tiny hatchlings. The eggs are still hatching from time to time, but the water may be too cold because they die off pretty fast. These seem to be hanging in there, though.

Jake and Chan are listening to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the 2nd book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 6-part...um, trilogy... I am hoping the exposure to hilarious and brilliant British writing will get them off their fantasy kick and into writing stories with wit and bite. They are certainly capable and how many quests can one undertake? Apparently quite a few.

We picked up a Disney Imagineer-inspired roller coaster design game that has kept Ben happy for weeks now. He has his marble roller coaster kit and works on that a while, and with the computer design set a while.

Last week, they got out all the K'nex sets and made cars, which they then smashed into walls and often into the other cars. This went on for days with various designs being improved upon over and over and all sorts of modifications being made. Then, one day all the k'nex were on the shelf and no one has said boo about it since. I asked Ben about any new car designs and he said, "That was LAST week." Like I have the schedule or something. Jake said they were taking a week off to think.

I can hardly fault that logic.

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It's Tuesday

and we get up and do a few chores before heading out to run errands before Off the Walls this afternoon.

We dropped off library books at Decatur. I have a love-hate relationship with Wheeler Basin, they currently are back on my good side, I am skeptical it will last long, but in the meantime, I check out books like mad. Returned some jeans I got for Matt, the kids watch the process without comment, but later pipe up with a few questions. Like later when I was not thinking about returns and so, "How do they put money back in our account?" catches me off guard.

We hit Petco and check out the gerbils and the holiday sale and pick up several doggie stockings for 80% off. These are filled with red and green rawhide chews. Petco has the best training treat selections, cookies and small shaped things I can pop in the Buster cube for the dogs to roll around.

Then over to Pet Depot to look at the gerbils and I get a big bottle of skunk neutralizer that you put on the dog and wait for it to dry. They have the lower prices in general and certainly on bedding. We add a small bowl for the gerbils, but they did not have what we were looking for there, either.

Off the Walls for 3 hours. The kids have a good time and their faces are flushed and sweaty from running around and jumping so much. They meet up with friends and make a few new ones. The moms circulate and chatter away, it's a good time to ask questions and on occasion, vent. We like to think we go to these type things for the kids, but the moms need the interaction just as much. One mom is knitting, another working on some paperwork, a third has a new cookbook that gets lots of going-over. I complain, wanting recipes with 2, maybe 3 ingredients.

Afterward, we make a final stop to look at the new PetSmart store. They have several gerbils, but Chan is sold on the guinea pigs, so we come home with a pair of girls. One is black and honey colored and she gets named Ifrit and the other is white and honey and she is called Olympia. Ifrit is much sweeter and more calm right off the bat, we hope Olympia will calm over the next few days.

We came home with them and Matt said, "I thought we agreed gerbils." I said, "Well...2 gerbils cost as much as one piglet and they live twice as long, and are less likely to get lost or eaten if they escape." He said, as he opened the box, "Well, they had better be cute or else...awwwww!" and he was lost in cuddling them. They are very small, probably only a couple months old.

I did not tell him yet that the kids want to set up the second tank for rescued mice, to keep them from being fed to snakes.

I treated the dogs with the skunk stuff and it helped, but not 100%. We moved them back out for the night and are hoping for round 2 tomorrow to have a better effect.

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Wednesday and the day starts with watching The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We have been listening to the first book in the car and the second in the house for the last week. The kids have seen the movie so often, we ended up with 2 copies of it. They loved it. Until...today. Jake shuts off the computer when the movie is over and says, "It's just not as good as the book." We sing, 'So Long and Thanks for the Fish' like usual while we make lunch afterward, but Jake dwells on the glaring omissions and plot holes. He skulks off to think a while.

There is a knock at the door and we check and see the UPS guy has dropped off a box from Handwriting Without Tears. I don't like workbooks and busy work and much prefer the kids to come up with their own plans for the day and for some of those plans to involve reading and writing and math practice. But, we used HWOT a few years back as just letter formation practice and they really liked them far and above other handwriting programs we tried out. So when Chan asked a few days ago for some way to work on her cursive on her own and Ben said he wanted more writing practice, too, I ordered another round from the website. I threw in a 5th grade level printer for kids who prefer to print for Jake.

They opened them right up and did 2 pages each and ran off again. And I remembered why I hate worksheets. One finishes fast for the sake of finishing first-so there is some gloating-and one tries to get the letters EXACTLY like the examples and the other dawdles around the clock anyway, and is barely started when fastkid is done and there is some whining.

Tomorrow, I plan to divvy up the sit-down time or pull out mazes or something else they will want to do, so the handwriting practice is not the big focus.

This afternoon, my main task is to come up with an animal care chart and combine that with the regular chore chart. The ants are self-contained, but the light needs to be checked that it is shut off each night and the sea monkeys are only fed once a week, so that does not need to be forgotten and so on, down to the twice-daily water checks for everyone. I am thinking about adding personal hygiene as a chore.

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The dogs have been rubbed down with de-skunk stink again. It's better than it was last night, but we can still smell it on them. They are currently laying down panting, I imagine the 68 degree house is an oven after a few days of being in below-freezing weather outdoors.

We spent the afternoon at the library, picking out a few books and going through their movies and books on tape. I am in the mood for a good, gripping book. One that I wake up in the middle of the night and have to read more of before going back to sleep. Ben has just started reading and I was looking for good beginner books for him. And of course, they have to be about something actual and not anything silly, so Cat in the Hat is out. I got a couple folk tales, hoping maybe the literary value will make it more worthwhile in his brain.

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Thursday

Woke up to freezing weather-again. I guess I will quit complaining about the lack of cold, but for a while there I thought it was not going to freeze at all this winter. The kids picked up How to Eat Fried Worms on dvd at the library last night. I think only a few words were even similar between the book and the movie. The kids watch it now and then as some sort of confirmation that homeschooling is the only way to go. They like the silliness of it all, but there are complaints about how it is nothing at all like the book, just the title and a few names. The first time they saw it, they were amazed how some of the kids told other kids who they could be friends with. And that the adults in the movie were so clueless and sometimes mean. I guess that means I am both brilliant and kind, but I sort of doubt it, hahaha! After all, I enforce vegetable consuption, bedtime, bathing and dental check-ups.

I did the budget for the rest of the month/first of next month. Matt gets paid every 2 weeks, so no 1st and 15th, it moves all over the place. The first of the year is always a bit tight, with annual bills popping up like subcriptions and our home insurance. Matt's life insurance comes out 4 times a year, the car insurance renews in January and so on. This year we get a nice surprise, our auto insurance dropped $12 a month from last year. I move that to the savings, it's not much, but it will be nearly $150 at the end of the year that we did not have to change a thing to save. That will cover more than half of next year's house insurance.

I have stopped focusing on getting debt-free and started looking at smarter ways to help ourselves out and ways to save a bit more here and there. It's not our $1,000 a day crack habit, it's the $250 a month we spend eating out and the quick runs to get dog food at least once a week that end up being $30 instead of $20. That $10 a week is nearly $500 a year. Disney tickets for a week for the 5 of us are only $875. If we eat out half as often this year, we will have saved $1500. Add that to cutting back on small purchases of only $10 a week and that's $2000 in time for the Disney trip at the end of the year. Woot.

I was reading where a credit debt of $8,000 at $5 a day, or a $150 payment a month will take 30 years to pay off, but the same amount at $10 a day will be paid off in 3 years, and that's providing for the interest rate. Our credit debt is no where near that, but the van...ugh. I have applied for refinancing to lower the interest rate and have new offers (via lendingtree.com) but we are waiting for a refund to come in from the dealership before we can actually proceed...and waiting.

But back to our day,

On Friday
we take the Volvo for an oil change. First we have to get the oil and filter and then go get the oil changed.  Mr. Holmes and I go round a tree every time I get anything done on the cars there.  He is DEVOUTLY devoted to his religion and I am not.  He yelled last time, "Well, if humans came from monkeys then seems to me like some of them would still be born with tails!"  We had to google image search, he just had no idea.  He shut up for the rest of the oil change, but I could tell he was thinking of a new approach.  I felt obligated to tell him humans did not evolve from monkeys.  We are the same branch as the great apes, which are different in that they do not have long tails and live mostly on the ground and not in trees.  I told him that really, humans are more like chimpanzees, orangs or gorillas.  But that did not seem to make him feel better.

I wanted to talk about what I had just read about modern humans being the dumber and slower species compared to our ancestors much like cats and dogs are not quite up to par with lions and wolves any longer.   I guess he is not the one to talk about that to.  Problem is, here in North Alabama, it sometimes feels as if there is no one to talk about such articles with.