Countdown

Countdown to what? Sanity? Not sure, but I'm counting. I was a little shocked to see my blog was still here. Thought they'd have booted me by now. We've just been so busy. The first weekend in April was the homeschoolers' conference, and wow, I was just really taken by it. It was really settling to get next year's curriculum all decided and ordered in one weekend. This usually takes me months and can even change my mind several times, but this time it's a decision I'm going to live with. Stop second-guessing myself. I looked through everything Friday, then brought Michael to help me make final decisions on Saturday. What was really nice was just to talk it all over out loud and let him know how the kids do best. So those have been arriving bit by bit and I've been getting them organized and ready for next year. We also learned so much from the workshops. I was really ecstatic to have him along. One thing that I pulled from a speaker has settled many a fight around here. Mallory has always done all dividing and passing out of anything that needed split. One of the little tidbits I learned was to let one child split and the other child pick. That way, things look more fair to all parties. It really has been fun and I see them work together more.
Ok, anyway, back to the countdown... we just found out that the bank that has been making us jump through one hoop after another and made us wait until our banker got back from vacation before returning any of our calls, really didn't want our loan anyway. They didn't like how much of the job we planned to do. Fine, but did we really need to get Federal flood insurance and wait 3 weeks for you to call back and tell us this? When I don't plan to loan someone money, I simply tell them "no," which is something else I've been practicing. Another speaker at the conference spent a lengthy amount of time on the simple linguistics of saying "no." For instance, did your teacher take knucklehead calls from CitiBank while you were in class? No, so don't answer the phone. Put the answering machine in the basement and take care of its business after class. Easy. Did the church call your second grade teacher during spelling class to see if she could bake six dozen cookies for tonight? No, and lack of preparation on your part does not necessarily constitute an emergency on my part. Well, that didn't really have anything to do with the bank or its rudeness, but anyway, my head is just swimming and I thought I'd just get some of it out!
We had a really wonderful Easter, and I was going to attach a photo of six of the cutest little girls one family can produce, but I think I better get back to my class before downloading this weekend's photos. 2/3 of my students seem to be outside somewhere and I think I'd best channel some of their excitement towards higher learning. At least 1/3 is almost done!!