My Day!

It is so late and I should TOTALLY be in bed! But why when you can blog, right??

Today was a big and crazy day!
It was the first day of school for my two oldest.



Mississippi started 4th grade! Can you tell how excited she was?? She hasn't had the best luck with teachers over the years, but I am hopeful this year. Her teacher is Mr Manning. So far he seems like he might be a good teacher for her. (crossing my finders here!)




And Calvin is starting 3rd grade... Can you tell he posed himself?? I'm not really sure what he thinks of school! I'm sure it's mostly that it's keeping him from his Star Wars Lego video game. But who knows. He came home with 3 pages of homework today. This was all work he should have done in school, but it was handwriting and he HATES that! It could have been done in about 30 minutes, but with Calvin we worked on it from 4:30 until 8:30 with a 1 hour dinner & family night break. So 3 HOURS OF HOMEWORK!! But we FINALLY, FINALLY had a break through (again, crossing fingers!). At the end of the homework he was very frustrated and wanting to watch a show with the family when he said that if he finished more of the work at school he wouldn't have to work so long at home!
(OH MY GOODNESS! I've been saying this for years!)
And yes, he did ask me why I hadn't told him that before, little stinker! But hopefully he will remember tomorrow when he's doing his school work. And if he only has one homework tomorrow it will be a success! (fingers still crossed!)

I also did some rearranging/organizing today! I put up some shelves in Shawn's "office" and put all my craft stuff (that's not in storage) on them. He LOVES (said very sarcastically) the fact that I have craft stuff in there! He almost taped off the floor so that my craftiness could not cross over into his office space any more than it had. Dumb boys, they just don't understand! ;) But we also put together the kids computer desk and it must go in the livingroom for now. I am not happy about this, so hopefully it will help motivate me to work on the basement. But tomorrow we will have to move the TV so it will all work. Fun, fun! It's very "if you give a mouse a cookie"!

My crazy visiting teacher came over today for a "visit". She is a very interesting lady, who I just don't understand. But her companion is very sweet and ALWAYS keeps the visits very short and sweet. But it is also a great opportunity to catch up on housework. So right now I am enjoying a clean house.



Last Wednesday, Calvin's cub scout den went to the fire station. He did great! Usually he is afraid, but he did awesome. So I thought we could talk about fire safety for family night. He had this pamphlet with a fire safety quiz in it, so we did that (we had an excellent score thank you). We had good discussions and just the typical biyearly fire preparedness stuff. When I look at Calvin and his lip is quivering and he was trying to be brave, but was about to loose it. He was NOT ok with talking about fires and the house. So we had to do damage control. We talked about how we have never seen a house fire, how we have smoke detectors and see they work, we don't ever expect a fire in the house but we want to be prepared,and mom & dad aren't worried so you don't need to worry. So he calmed down at least until bed time when I go in to check on him and he had worked himself up again! So we talked some more and said a prayer. And I ended up laying in bed with him until he fell asleep (it's part of the reason I'm still awake right now!). Holy-moly that boy is exhausting! He has had a day.

I don't know if yaw'll are aware of this, but on the first day of school you have to come home to a plate of warm, fresh out of the oven, cookies! You HAVE to! So I made cookies for the kids. Right now I don't have pictures or a recipe, so you'll just have to "use your imagination". But, these cookies are a Jackson family favorite! You are supposed to use 2 sticks of margarine and 2 sticks of butter, but I don't buy margarine and more so these baby's have 4 sticks of butter!!! YUMMY! It's an oatmeal cookie so it's healthy, right? ;) But I made half of the dough into oatmeal raisin cookies (my favorite) and the other half with peanut butter and m&m's (the kids fav). You need 4 cups of oats plus one more cup that you grind up. Well, I had 3 cups of oats. So I used the oats and ground up 1 cup of quick barley instead and it worked out very well!

And finally, I also ripped about 14 cd's on to my computer. So my happy, happy, joy, joy part of my day is that I now have an 80's music playlist on my ipod! It will make my big organization /cleaning /finish the basement plans go so much easier!

Well, after this CRAZY day, I must actually go to bed! Goodnight!