Rain, Rain

It rained all night long. Boy did we need it. We rarely ever just have showers around here; it always comes with a lot of thunder and lightening. It got bad enough that it woke me last night. All I could do was thank the Lord for sending it and roll back over and go to sleep. I know it means we'll have to mow the lawn again but that's what boys are for.

New Names

For some time now I have been thinking that the boys deserved better names than my oldest, my second oldest, and so on. I didn't want to use their names because you never know who might read these things and they do deserve their privacy. So after much thought I have decided to name them after characters in the Three Musketeers because there are four and because in a very loose way it sort of fits. My eldest will be Athos, who was the father figure of the novel. My second eldest will be Porthos who was the fun loving one. My second youngest will be named after Aramis who loved to chase after intrigue and adventure. Finally my youngest will be named after d'Artagnan who was also the youngest and most naive.

I think this will help make them more personal and yet still respect their privacy. Now there's only one more question; what to name my husband?

Here, Have Some Beans

I love beans and not just because the are cheap and taste good. For more than 15 years now I have used them very successfully as math manipulative's. We've used them for counting and for adding. I've made bean sticks to teach the boys how to carry. Now I am using them once again to teach multiplication.

Multiplication can be a difficult concept to understand. Yes it's a short cut to addition, but if you think about it, it's a rather complicated series of maneuvers that we do thoughtlessly once we know the process but in the beginning are difficult to remember and think through. This is where the beans come in. I can say "If I give you two beans two times how many beans do you have?"

After completing the first 10 digit problem together he was off and running on his own without my help. I checked his work as he went along but he had a decidedly Please mom I'd rather do it myself attitude. And he was having fun. How cool is that?

I may appear as if I am schooling out of the 1800s sometimes, but as I told the guy who said he couldn't understand how it could work as he watched me thump watermelons, "Neither can I but you can't argue with success." Besides, when your from a rural southern tradition beans are the perfect manipulative because you always have some around.

Back Home Again

We are back from our trip to OSU. After two days our son is safely installed in his dorm room. He has a microwave. His roommate has a refrigerator. It's a small refrigerator and my son wasn't sure that his roommate would allow him to use it, but I explained that he would want to have access to the microwave so he would let our son use the refrigerator. We picked him up a cell phone (important to us,) and food (important to him.) We also picked up a book case for $20.00 dollars at Big Lots. We put that in his closet and stored all his food in it. The beds where lower than my husband or son thought so he did need the bed lifters.

There is actually more storage in his room than I was led to believe. One ten foot wall is all closets and two dressers and over the top over them are cupboards for storage. It is rather hard to get to so he wont want to store anything there that he would want ready access to. Still it would be good for storing luggage and other things he only needs once in a while. Things he wants access to all the time will need to be in the closet, drawers, or under his bed.


He still needs a printer but said that he could use the one at the library till he gets one. I'm not sure where we would put one though. His desk is rather small and his computer takes up almost all of it. There is only one small drawer on his desk. The rest of the space is taken up by a bookcase on the side of his desk closet to his bed. I thought we might put a printer there but the more I think about it the more I'm sure it won't fit even if it is small.

There is a shelf that runs the length of the other 10 foot wall over the beds and desks but there isn't enough room for a normal sized textbook let alone a printer. It's wide enough to set his speakers for his computer and that's it. If he had a laptop that would free up space for a printer, but any laptop we could afford wouldn't cut it for his engineering classes. We would need well over $1,000.00. With all the other expenses we couldn't justify it; not when he already had an excellent PC. Besides he is always tinkering with his PC to upgrade it. The guys say that it is difficult to do that with a laptop. It wouldn't be long before it wouldn't meet his needs any more.

He had to go to a meeting at the engineering college while we were unpacking. When he came back he was excited for the first time in months. He has worried so much over the finances of it all that it was nice to see. They talked about different projects that the engineering school was working on. He came back with tales of Mars airplanes, competitions, places people have been fired. He was like a kid in a candy shop. He was also told that if he took one more class he could have a double major; one in Aerospace engineering and one in mechanical engineering. I think he is seriously considering it.

Right now we are working on his resume. Can you believe it? He's only a Junior. He needs one to get an internship on get into the cooperative program though. He really wants to do one or both of these. It will help him to earn money for school and work in engineering at the same time. Plus it will look good on his resume when he finishes college and is looking to get work.

Menopause Stinks

I think I have started to have hot flashes. And of course it would be happening at the hottest period we've had all year. It started all of a sudden about a week and a half ago. I get so hot I thought I was going to be sick. I had to leave the sanctuary, which is unusual for me so two people came out to check on me during church and several after the service. All I could say was that I just got too hot.

Every sence I have been miserable. I don't sleep well at night because I wake up way to hot and have to kick off the covers and then I wake up again freezing (my husband has turned up the air in an attempt to help me,) and have to pull the covers back up again. By morning I am exhausted.

My Grandmother was right, it's hard getting old.

Finally

OSU is finally listening to us. They have corrected my son's Bursar account and so we are poorer in pocket but richer in peace. Who would ever have thought it would be so hard to give money back? We now stand were we where originally, with my son quallifiying for a Stafford Loan.

My husband was asking me yesterday if we be able to put money directly into our sons account with OSU and for once I got to be the techno geek with the answers. How Cool is that? Oh, and the answer is yes we can, we have our own password and everything. He laughed and asked "Can we take money out?" I put on my firm maternal don't even think it face and said NO. He laughed all the more. And people wonder where my boys get it from.

Can You Ever Have Too Much Money

That's the question that we have been having to ask ourselves for six weeks now and the answer is yes. The bad part is that the people at the college are treating us as if we are crazy. We sent in our paper work for our son's fasfa but when we took the paper work in to prove our income the college finance took one look at my husbands disability income and corrected it in our favor because they felt we had made a mistake.

I can understand why they felt we had made an error because the letter does make it appear that we had less income than we really did. For this reason they are trying to give us not only a full pell grant, but something called a smart grant. The criteria for a Smart Grant are:

1. That you qualify for a pell grant.

2. That you make a grade point average of 3.o or more.

3. That you be a third year student.

4. That you major in one of the engineering, science, or math fields.

This grant is worth over 4,000 dollars and the pell grant is worth over 2,000. We sure could use it. Between that and the money we already have, it would totally pay for his schooling; if it were our money to spend. But it's not. Every time we try to correct it they ignore us and act like we are insane because we keep trying to get rid of this money.

We are at a point were we are so frustrated that we would like to say fine then we'll keep it but what would we be teaching our children? Besides the bible say not to grow weary of doing good and that our sin is sure to find us out. How could we keep it? On the other hand we are fast approaching a point where we wont have a choice. They have already dumped the money in his bursar account. While our son has to tell the school if he is willing to accept a loan or scholarship he has no choice where grants are concerned. If they say he qualifies he has to accept it.

On the other hand when they finally realize that he doesn't get the money then they will want it back. So we have to just let the money sit in his account and somehow not let them spend it. Mean while my very Type A son is starting to bounce off the walls in frustration. Some days I'm ready for a rubber room myself. Who ever thought that trying to do the right thing by giving money back would be so hard.

Two More Days Until We Start School

I seriously thought about putting it off another week. I just don't feel like I've got it all together. I've been tweeking schedules, looking through our books, downloading things from the net, and checking to see that my plan meets my objectives. Add to that the craziness that has been going on trying to get things pulled together for my son to get transferred over to OSU, plus the fact that we will be gone Friday so that we can get his stuff over to Stillwater and into his dorm. Right about now I could use a vacation.

Funny thing is here we stand just two days till school starts and everything is beginning to fall in place of its own accord. It can only be the Lord's hand. How else is it that a text book that I ordered and was told two days ago would not be available until the end of next week should arrive today. Today I also found a book that I had needed to buy but couldn't afford on the net for free. It's an older version but I don't care, there's not that much difference between the two editions. It's like that old saying "The Lord is never early, but he's always right on time."

Isn't it funny how He cares about even the little things. Sometimes I find myself saying to myself, Oh it's not important enough to pray about. Suck it up. But God is our Father and just like I want to hear about even the seemingly unimportant thing from my boys, so He wants to hear from us. Imagine if your husband came home day after day and sat in the same room with you, at the food you place before him, wore the clothes and slept in the bed that you prepared for him. Imagine that he took all that you offered but never once talked to you let alone said thank you. I think that must be how God feels sometimes.

I feel such joy when my husband praises me. He feels the same when I praise him. I want to know about his day and he wants to know about mine even if it just goofy things. If we are the bride for Christ, and we are, then doesn't it make sense that God feels the same way about us? If we are going to spend an eternity with Him than maybe we should start working on getting to know Him here and know and that starts with prayer even over the little things.

Doing the Homeschool Count Down.

Only five more days until we start school. I'm still shy a couple of books that aren't in yet. One is for my son's High School foreign Language and the other if for his history. He changed his mind on what Language he was going to take because while the idea of studying Farsi sounded good in the short term; it's so different from English that it was difficult. At that point he tried to sell me on studying British English as his foreign language but I wasn't biting. Finally he settled on German, but that has put us behind. As for the history book, it's supplemental so it isn't critical.

Still I thought about putting it off one more week because of that and the fact that we have to head to Stillwater on Friday but decided not too. I think I can go a couple of week with what we have without too much trouble. The boys will like the slightly slower start and I probably will too.

More OSU and Homeschool Stuff

We've been getting a lot of OSU related letters this last week. My son has told me to open any of them and call him to tell him what they are about. Isn't it funny how different kids are? If I were to open any of my second son's mail he would have a cow, my eldest wants me too so I can sift though what's important and what's not. Strange how two children raised in the same family can be so different.

Any way, he's been getting letters from the Bursar (Latin for "the keeper of the purse" they are the ones sending him his bills,) the engineering department, Residential Life (about his dorm, roommate, and food plan,) and the BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries.) He also has been getting letters from the First Baptist Church at Stillwater. There are several Baptist churches in Stillwater; two of them fairly close. One of these is First Baptist Church and the other is University Heights.

Our pastors wife went to University Heights so I had a good feeling about it which grew after I had checked out their web site. It has the added advantage that it is very close. She had told me about First Baptist as, well but she had only been there once. She said they had a good worship service but that they were a little further away and he would have to drive to service. I couldn't find a web site so I wasn't sure what to think about them. Well we got a second letter from them and guess what they have a brand new web site. It's not finished yet but it's coming along.

I called my son to tell them that they had sent him another letter and seemed to really want him to attend. I gave him their web site http://www.fbcstw.com/ so that he could check them out. The first thing he did was go to their Belief section to see where they stood. (Most boys would have started and stopped with the Wednesday Menu and the college section, but not my son.) The next thing I hear over the phone is "Oh... they support both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Hmmmm... they follow the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message." Coming to the Baptist Church from a Catholic background the first part didn't mean a whole lot to me. All I cared about when I joined was do their follow what I understand the Bible to be saying. Hearing the second part though my first thought was Older = more conservative and said as much to my son.

At that point my son gave me a short lesson in the Southern Baptist Church and why that was wrong. So to make a long story short He has decided that they are probably a little more liberal than we are. That doesn't bode well for them as he tends to be even more conservative than I am. Still he may give them a chance, he is fair to a fault. Right now though he seems to be leaning toward University Heights. On the other hand, all this is based on things we have heard and what we have seen from their respective web sites so all bets may be off when he starts attending services in the area. Oh, out of fairness here is the University Heights Site http://www.uheights.org/

Home School lesson planning is going well I have planned through to the middle of the year for everything and all they way through for a few thing. Still this is very fluid. Stuff happens and changes tend to need to be made at the blink of an eye. If my husband ends up in the hospital again then all bets are off. In those times we flip to a schedule that only includes the bare minimum and put the rest off till later.

Normally, if it was in a lesson plan book, I would only plan two week into the future to so that making changes would be easier. This year I am doing something different. I have made a Sonlight type schedule that I have put in the computer and will print out a week at a time. This I will use as a checklist for my sons. The oldest still homeschooling will be able to handle this by himself. The youngest will need my help. That's OK though because if it works then next year he may be able to handle a lot of it by himself and the year after that it will be easy for him. By keeping it in the computer and only printing out a little at a time, making changes will be easy. I can just go in and cut and past to get things where they need to be. I have also geared in an optional week at the end of every trimester. We can use these if we need to, to catch up without destroying the schedule too much.

This is a new way of doing thing so I expect bumps in the road. Still I think it will be good to make my second youngest more responsible for his schedule at this point. He only has a few years before college and I need him to understand how to do it before then. I have a nephew who didn't know how to handle the responsibility and he ended up totally blowing his first year. I don't want to see that happen to my boys. It's so hard to pull your grade point average up after that and a lot of times those kids will just quit instead. We'll see if this works.

How to Homeschool in 152 Easy Lessons

Over at homeschoolblogger they are having a homeschool open house, Now I know that not everyone is interested in homeschooling but I am so I was tickled to see this. Check it out at
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Tiany/366106/ if you want to see how it's done. Well actually there is no one way to do homeschooling. As a matter of fact I have come to believe that there are as many ways to homeschool as there are parents doing it.

The thing that really opened my eyes is how young some of these families are. I guess it's a sign of my age but I have gone along for years thinking that I was the norm and that most others were like me. Excuse the Okie hillbilly in me but it ain't so. As I read the different people's blogs I began to feel old indeed. I couldn't help remember the surprise of the leader of one of the class I took at the local homeschool convention this year when, after asking how long each family had been homeschooling she got to me and heard that I had been at this for 15 years now. The first thing out of her mouth was "You should be teaching this class not me."

I couldn't understand at the time because I really enjoy the classes and the ideas I get from them; they fire me up for another year. Plus I really did believe that there where numerous others just like me. Now I'm not so sure. I know I started homeschooling in the early days when things were a lot harder than they are now, but so did a lot of others. Surely they haven't all dropped out. Surely not all their children are grown. I know there are second generation homeschoolers out there now. Surely there are still some old timers around too.

On the other hand, lets be honest I will be nearly 60 when my youngest finishes high school. Then I will be the old hand of the bunch. I'll be able to stand around and say "I remember when we didn't have classrooms and co-ops. We had to walk two miles uphill both ways to and from the dinning room table in three feet of snow just to be able to do class." Until then I've decided to be young and continue to learn and glean from other's experiences.

Check you the site. It truly is interesting even if you don't homeschool. It's fun to see how someone can homeschool 9 children at the same time. I wondered at times how we accomplished anything with just 4, these women are amazing.

More OSU Prep Stuff

My husband was late coming home today. When he got here he was carrying socks and underwear for himself and a microwave, t-shirts, and gym shorts for our eldest. My second eldest thought we had finally lost our mind when he saw it, but the microwave is a good idea. We had our eldest pick a rather lean meal plan because:

1. College students tend skip meals, or they buy a bag of chips and call it a meal rather than eating at the dinning facility. (I survived a whole semester on Doritos and picante sauce. What a waste of my parents money.)
2. He can feed himself cheaper than he can eat on campus. (His roommate is bringing a regrigerator, so add a hot pot on top of the other two and they have a pretty good little mini kitchen going.)
3. If all else fails and he eats more than we thought we can put more money for his dinning card without having to pay a penalty.

My second eldest gave the t-shirts and shorts a once over and I said "I figure with a roommate this is better than sleeping in underwear since he's not family." My son happened to have a friend spending the night who looked at the two of us rather funny as I explained this. At which point my son told him "Not me, my brother." His friend look rather grateful as he said "Oh, well, that makes sense."

Only two weeks left. My eldest is kind of scared. To be honest so am I. I know fear is a lack of faith but there are so many unknowns. Will we be able to afford to get him all the way through? Will he continue to do well? Will he continue in his faith? Is he going to be able to get a job? Will I ever see him again?

It's funny in so many ways I am so proud of the man he is becoming. On the other hand when ever I look at him I tend to see that day when the Doctor handed him to me as this tiny little bundle. It's so weird. Where did all the time go?

Menu Planning

My boys hate it when I plan my menus. Not because I fix awful things they won't like, but because they know they are going to hear the same thing. "Don't eat that I need it for..." Now not everything is off limits, but some things are so they need to check first.

Today it was the soda. That should have been a no brainer because we rarely have soda in the house and then normally only when I have a plan for it. Today I had two renegades who saw the soda and decided to drink it without talking to me. One was my son, the other was my husband. My son had gotten in trouble when I caught him with a glass of soda earlier that day so when he saw my husband making the same mistake I heard from the next room; "Ooooh Daaaaad, Mama is going to get you."

My trouble senses went into overdrive and I came in to find out what was going on. When my husband saw the look on my face he said "It's ok I'll get you more." I hope so or we will be short one meal, then he will have to listen to me muttering about how I had planned to make cola chicken but can't because everyone kept drinking the soda. Any way the next two weeks are planned out and the groceries are bought. Short of bread, milk and another bottle of soda, we should be alright.

I've actually been making our bread over the last two weeks. I'm really not sure we are coming out ahead though. Loaf for loaf I can make it cheaper than I can buy it. The problem comes in that they tend to go through a two pound loaf a day when I make it where as a store bought 24 oz. loaf of store bought bread will last three days. If you asked they would say that they just like bread, that it didn't matter if it was store bought or not. But I'm the one buying it or making it and they definitely go through more of the homemade.

The same is true of cookies. I had a friend say once that she didn't make cookies because since we have the Little Debbie's Thrift shop close by, it is cheaper than making homemade and her kids liked them just as well. My first thought was that's not right, but I asked my boys and they said that they didn't care either. My feelings where more than a little hurt and I stopped making cookies and started just getting stuff from the thrift shop. Then one day we were out so I decided to make cookies for the boys. It was then that I noticed that they ate a lot more of the homemade things. At that point I knew the real truth.

Do I still buy things from the thrift shop? Sure, but I know that they will never take the place of the thing I make at home. So now they are the exception and not the rule.