When Life is CRAZY (and where I’ve been the past month)

A whole month gone and blank WordPress pages make me wonder where I could ever begin. My desktop calendar says APRIL. My paper calendar is blank nearly back through March besides scrawled attempts at adding appointments even though I knew it was hit or miss that I would even pick up the calendar again to see what I had written. There are seasons in life where all you can do is just cling to the boat and pray Jesus calms the storm.

Let’s see where we left off…. oh, yes. Laundry piles. I bet if you took the amount of laundry piles in my house over the past three months and stacked them end to end, they would reach the moon and back fifteen times. I have gone through nearly 2.5 bottles of concentrated Thieves household cleaner, unfathomable amounts of Lemi Shine, Tide, and OxiClean, jugs and jugs of Apple Cider Vinegar, half of my essential oils starter kit, hundreds and hundreds on the credit card for medical and organic healing, and a truckload of stevia laden chocolate.

On the upside, things could be worse. I’ve learned not to complain and to count blessings in the difficult times.

Ringworm Update:

Everyone is healed for the most part, but we aren’t FINISHED with this season yet. My 5 year old and 15 year old have lingering spots that are nearly gone or just scars from where they used to have one – we are still doctoring. My 3 year old who had the scalp ringworm has only one or two body spots that aren’t completely gone but he still has scalp spots (nothing new – just the same ones that he had, if not somewhat faded and changed in appearance).

I am of firm belief after the last two months that fungus, like bacteria, is able to adapt and become immune to different types of treatment. We have had to change up the things we are giving him. Each of us had different things that worked better than others. There are a lot of things that do help and work, so that is nice. I’ll be able to write a book about this when we are finally done.

Right now, what’s working for little man is Rosemary oil. It actually makes it reddish looking after I apply it, and then it makes the skin on the scalp spots dry out and turn into a flaky scab-looking crusty thing. TMI, I know… but it seems like it’s “doing something” (to coin my teen son). There are areas on his head that were red and yucky and they are gone now. The main ringworm spots on his head are there, but they look ‘better’. The natural doc has him taking internal things to cleanse and help his body rid the stuff also – and some of the tinctures I can’t really understand much – but so far he hasn’t gotten worse and seems to be improving. I’m not going to panic until the washer and dryer give out. And hey – he smells like the dipping sauce at Italian restaurants after we “doctor” him, so it’s not all bad.

Other Disasters:

My mom fell and broke her hip at the end of April and had hip surgery to replace her entire ball and socket two days later. She was coming out of a piano student’s house and their cat weaved in and out of her legs while she was walking down their driveway, causing her to accidentally step on it and it began clawing and climbing her leg and tripped. When she hit the pavement, her hip joint completely severed.

Since that night, she’s been in two different facilities, and neither of them were properly monitoring and managing her glucose levels (she’s brittle diabetic), so I took her home with me and was on duty every 2 hours as her at-home-care nurse until recently after she finally saw a new endocrinologist who has helped her to regulate her sugars better. It’s hard for someone who has lived with diabetes since the 70’s to learn new tricks… but I’ve got her hooked up with an iPad mini and an awesome blood sugar app called mySugr. She uses MyFitnessPal to count her carbs for meals and enters the number into mySugr to chart her progress every time she checks her sugar. She’s going to physical therapy three times a week for six weeks and staying with us until she’s well again.

On top of this, my teenagers and I have had some stressy health issues and one of their other grandmas is recovering from a pretty serious surgery this week, also. I sprained my ankle yesterday, too. Thankfully, today I’ve felt a little better even though it is swollen a little. Last night it was MIGHTY uncomfortable. Even the ice pack was no help. You should have seen me and my mother getting out of the car when we tried to go see “Mom’s Night Out” — both of us hobbling and hanging on to her walker. When it rains…

Skool:

Along with all of the doctor appointments and the crazy of normal life for us here, it’s been the end of school (for some subjects – we’ll be continuing to summer school for most of the summer). The Spanish II Exam has been taken (praying hard that they both got an A). The Apologia Class is done meeting for Chemistry labs. English II is complete except for an essay due in June. Driver’s Ed has begun for my 17 year old who hopes to be finished by August and we still have no idea what he’ll drive or how we will afford the insurance. Tomorrow my teens are putting on an extra credit Spanish play they wrote and are trying to memorize – hoping to add an extra good grade in because they got a ZERO on an assignment during all of the chaos of the past few months at our house. They have learned the hard way that sometimes teachers aren’t as lenient as mom would be. Good lesson, even if it’s a hard one. I’m hoping they can still at least pull off a B for the year. The great thing is: they have learned a LOT of Spanish! I’ll be blogging soon about summer school and what our plans are for the courses we have to finish before next school year begins.

My 5 year old is begging to start Kindergarten! He’s also begging grandma to begin his piano lessons. I love to hear a kid ask to learn! We may have a party and start Kinder this summer while the big kids suffer through the rest of tenth grade.

Blogging:

I know it has been quiet in here, but y’all… stress is a creativity killer. I’ve been doing good not to have a mental breakdown lately. I keep my aromatherapy diffuser going nearly 24/7 with oils and dose myself with dark chocolate regularly. I finally feel like I’m moving to a place mentally where I can start to write again. There may be some silence in here now and then, though. If you feel the need to check on me, there’s always Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Instagram. Of all the social media outlets, I’m a picture girl at heart. Instagram is my heartthrob. If you don’t see me for 48 hours on there, you might consider calling the police to check and see if I’m alive.

I gave up my position on the team at the Homeschool Post last month and resigned permanently there. It was hard, but I knew it was time to let go. But hey – where God closes doors, he opens new ones. I’m watching and waiting on Him to show me where I need to focus my time and energy, and right now, the obvious thing is FAMILY and HOMESCHOOL. Sometimes I wonder how other fabulous homeschool bloggers are able to actually get anything done AND blog… because even when I’m not driving Mrs. Daisy (Chickie) and washing enough clothes to dress a Chinese army (because my Tazmanian devil of a 3 year old has ringworm), I’m STILL not able to stay consistent with daily blogging. Am I the only one?

Stuff:

In other news, I have this strange suspicion that sometime in the future I might be moving. I don’t know for sure, so don’t freak out. Big honking planet-sized issues are going to have to line up first, people. Lots of them. I’d love for you to pray about it with me. My heart is torn, but I’ve always kind of thought this day would come.

I was going to protest my INSANE property taxes and all of our medical and family crises caused me to miss the deadline. Before it passed, though, I did manage to send off an email asking our former realtor what the properties in here were selling for. I’ve done this for years and even asked many times if he could help us sell the house again and he ALWAYS told us that we would totally lose money if we tried to sell. The market has never been good since we moved here seven years ago. I was expecting his normal shpeal about how the only thing selling was foreclosure or bank-owned stuff.

It shocked me when he practically begged me to sell now. He said I could make a ton of money. Apparently the market is better than it has been in decades. There are at least three houses on my street and a ton in the neighborhood for sale. I think the one next door sold in only a month or so… and if they got what they were asking for, they sold it for much more than they bought it for seven years ago. More than I bought mine for, too – and their house is smaller and their yard is gross.

Not only that, but my mother has been toying with moving into an apartment for years. She’s just not able to do much of the work required to keep up the house and land where she lives. Part of my heart is there. Lots of childhood memories out there. Lots of reasons why country living would be so good for my little ones.

There are pros. There are cons.

Financially, I’m pretty sure if we were able to get a vehicle that got 30 miles per gallon, it would be a huge savings for us to move. It would change a lot of things – eating out would cease (which would be a good thing), planning ahead would increase (another good thing), gardening and farming would be so much fun… CHICKENS! DONKEYS! DOGS! COWS! SHEEP! Oh, my!!!

I’d be pretty far from a few friends I can’t live without. I know my teens feel the same. I’d be a LOT farther from the hospitals, restaurants, and stores we are so used to being near to. There are benefits to living right around the corner from places you love (Natural Grocers and J&J’s Barbeque and Catering). My doctor, the big city for spur of the moment field trips (OK, who am I kidding, spur of the moment trips in to town to eat at Tacodeli). And lets not talk about all the WORK that needs to be done to the house we would be moving in to. Talk about your fixer-upper. We’d be downsizing for sure. It would force us to get creative and learn to live with insects my 5 and 3 year old have only read about. #shudders

BUT there are remedies to the cons.

Remedies for missing friends? Trips in to town. Sleepovers.

Remedies for conveniences? Stocking up at stores and planning the occasional errand day in the big city once a week or so. I heard it from a little birdie that Natural Grocers will ship to their favorite customers, too… all but the cold stuff. Shhh! Don’t tell them I said that.

Remedies for remodel/repair needs? Extra finances available to patch up the farm house because of NO mortgage payment – yes, I said NO mortgage payment. Wait, let me say that again: no mortgage payment. I love the sound of that.

Remedies for scary bugs and arachnids? Diatomaceous earth. COWGIRL BOOTS. Hey, we might even collect a few critters in a bug case and call it Kindergarten science class?! Stranger things have happened… especially in MY homeschool.

What do you think? What would you do?

Now you know what I know. Too much stuff. My brain might explode.

Too much to write about or think about at this late hour… and tomorrow there will be lots of URGENT to crowd it all out again.

If you think about us, keep us and our family in your prayers. Healing, wisdom, strength… and all that good stuff. I pray you are finding Jesus in whatever season you are in and hanging on tight to Him. Wherever He takes us, I’m banking on Romans 8:28:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

In Him,

Heather

P.S.

Hey, by the way, if you are looking to buy homeschool curriculum, I’ve purged my shelves of books galore. I’m going to be at the CHEACT book sale in Austin. Come by and say “Hi”.