Our exciting news

My daughter is in second grade and they have a hamster for a pet in her class at school. If you have good behavior in class your reward is the opportunity to bring the hamster home for the weekend. They had a hamster last year also, but even with excellent behavior she never was never chosen. Last Thursday she came home with a note saying she had been chosen to bring "Lily" home for the weekend. I said how wonderful that was and how excited I was for her. Then she told me the most exciting part of the story that I hadn't even thought about...they are out of school all of this week. So we don't get just 3 days, we get 10. For a member of the rodent family it is very cute. But, it stinks and it is very messy and loud.(I guess you could say she fits in perfectly with our family). She has a squeaky wheel in her cage that she loves to run on all night. My girls had to have friends sleepover so they could all play with Lily... it has been quite exciting. For the first couple of days everyone fought over holding her. I was sure we were going to give her a heart attack or something. The second day my four year old came to me and said "Mom, my sister won't let me hold the chinchilla." I just looked at her and asked her what she was talking about. Yes, I really knew what she was talking about, I just wanted to know if she did. She said " you know the chinchilla or whatever its called." I asked her where she heard that word and she just looked at me like I was an idiot and said with attitude "Diego." All of those hours of tv, watching Dora and her cousin Diego, really paid off. Thanks Nick Jr for the education.

Don't try to take the dumb quiz...It sends you to all kinds of ads before giving you your score. It didn't do that the first time we took the quiz. I don't know what happened.

It took 3 of us to get this score

Will anyone even notice?

I know that you have all given up on me and I sorry. Someone told me the other day how much they enjoyed reading our blogs and reminded me that I hadn't written in awhile. So here's what's been happening....

At the end of July the baby girl we had went to live with her grandmother. That gave us a nice little break before school started the first week of August. The three older kids started school(the oldest now in Middle school), the youngest started Pre-k and I went back to work almost full time. We still have the little boy, who presents his own daily challenges. I work where she goes to preK and the baby goes to daycare, so we get to see each other during the day. I'm not used to working everyday, so trying to re-adjust all of our schedules has been fun. Working all day, then doing 3 different grades of homework, keeping the house sort of picked up, and all of the laundry mostly done, have made for one tired mom. We have gotten into the swing of things now and its not too bad.

This weekend we have had the baby's sister with us (she's 5). It has gone a lot better than I thought it would. They haven't gotten along so well in the past. No big problems though until tonight at bedtime. I think she was just exhausted from such a busy weekend, but when it was time to go to bed, she started crying because she misses her mom. I was doing my best to console her and talking about her schedule for the rest of the week until she gets to see her mom, and mentioned her going back to her other foster home tomorrow. She started crying harder. I asked her what was wrong and she said she didn't want to go back there, she wanted to stay here. Working with the older kids who have some understanding of whats going on, but don't really have the ability to process all of their feelings requires a lot of prayer. The finer details to make this story a little more understandable are too long and complicated to write here, but if you read this, please say a prayer for her. She is having a really hard time and has been taught by example to keep her true feelings bottled up. She tries to say what she thinks you want to hear and so doesn't always know how to say what she truly feels herself. What a life for a 5 year old.