NoJoMo Day 10

10 days of journaling.  I thought I wasn’t going to make it yesterday, but I did.  I suppose I just fudged it a bit.  Sammi slept til 12:30 today, but Jerry said she was up when he got up, and he thought Sydni’s alarm going off at 6 a.m. probably woke her up.  She was just playing in her room quietly, talking to herself having a good old time, so he told the girls to get ready quietly, and I guess after awhile, she got tired and went back to sleep.  When I went in there at 11, she was kind of stirring, but she went back to sleep.  I left her door open and checked on her periodically, and finally the last time I checked up on her, she was ready to get up and get changed and get some food into her.  She was kinda soaked, yuck.  I put her clothes straight into the laundry room and got some clean clothes for her, took her downstairs (she’s so spoiled…she can walk down the stairs, but almost always asks to be carried anyway.  Sometimes I do it and sometimes I just go down without her, leaving her to get down by herself… which sometimes makes for an unhappy 2 year old.)  Fed her some eggs, ham and cheese, which had also been my breakfast, only mine was on bread.  When she was still hungry, I got the grapes out, washed them up and put them in a cup for her.  She didn’t used to like grapes, but now she loves them.  We do try to keep a variety of fruits and veggies, and almost everything we make has some sort of veggie either in it or with it.  Fruits are our snacks for all of us, and while I try to stick to "in season" fruits, I do splurge every once in awhile.  This week I splurged on strawberries, which were 2.28 a pound.  We DID dip them in chocolate, I admit. 

I think today I’m going to make oatmeal rasin cookies, I have all the ingredients, even the Crisco, which keeps them from being runny, evidently. 

So more about yesterday, as much as I can remember.  Last week sometime, I re-opened Shabree’s ears, Jerry re-opened mine, so of COURSE, Sydni wanted hers re-opened.  She begged, and she pleaded, and she wanted to be taken to Wal mart to have them done.  Only, of course, we are NOT going to use our Wal mart cards on stuff like that.  I’m even debating whether or not to get them Christmas presents, or just make them.  I’m still in a mind to make a doll house, but time’s awasting, I’m not sure if it’s going to happen.  I need wood.  So we said no.  I’ll get to my feelings on that in a minute.  So with all of this, Becca decides she wants a THIRD hole put in her ears, and asked Jerry to do it for her.  Now, Becca, she’s a tough kid.  She was the kid, when she fell, she got right back up and immediatley said "I’m all right!" Just in case you couldn’t tell from her immediately getting up, lol!  And Shabree is pretty much the same way, tough as nails.  Sydni, on the other hand… TOTAL wimp.  So she wants those holes re-opened, and I told her that I wasn’t going to do it because she’d cry, plus her ears are NOT good canidates for ear piercing, which I am pretty sure is what led her to let them close in the first place.  So Jerry pierced Becca’s ears, after MUCH begging and pleading and asking and cajoling… you get the picture?  She was bound and determined, and Jerry wasn’t really going for it.  She finally pulled out all of the tools he would need, and so he said okay.  And it was obviously painful, but she was her usual trooper self.  No problems.  I videotaped it and took pictures.  Now… with Sydni, he made her PROMISE that if she was in pain, she wouldn’t blame it on him (typical Sydni… her decision, but if something goes wrong or she doesn’t like the end result, it’s ALWAYS someone else’s fault… which I’ll illustrate when I talk about her grades and her report card)  So he stuck the needle through the hole that was there, and of COURSE she started crying and afterwards, even screaming.  He said he’d do the other hole tomorrow (which is today… I wonder if he can bring himself to do it?  Of course, she can’t go around with only one hole, lol)  He couldn’t stand to put her through it again… hurts him as much as it hurts her, even though if she’d just sat still and not wiggled so much, he could probably have done it a lot easier and painlessly.  Syd, bless her little heart… no pain tolerance.  Jerry had THOUGHT I had no pain tolerance until he witnessed me give birth to Sammi with no drugs whatsoever. 

So for the time being, Sydni has lopsided ears.  LOL.

We got a letter from the school, and I’ve been kind of waiting for this.  Sydni is in the 4th grade, and ever since the 2nd grade, she’s been struggling, struggling, struggling in school.  Just falling further and further behind (so much for no child left behind, eh?) and so when she took her STAR testing last Spring, she didn’t do very well at all.  I keep thinking they’re GOING to hold her back, they have to, otherwise she’s going to be just not even able to keep up.  Well… it caught up.  We got this letter stating if she couldn’t bring her scores up this year, she’d have to be held back.  It MIGHT be the best thing for her, but it’s hard to see, because of course, it puts her behind all her peers the same age, and makes her the oldest kid in her class, just like Becca.  Syd is not a stupid child, that I can tell.  Though she might very well be dense.  I’m not sure.  She was talking before she was walking, and at 2, you could hold a conversation with her, even though a lot of what she said held NO relevance to what it was we were talking about.  So when I told Sydni that she was going to get held back, she blamed them taking her out of Math to tutor her.  She said she was missing what they were doing in class.  Well, YEA, because you can barely keep up, and need to do some catching up before you will be able to keep up with what they’re doing now.  She did not see this.  She blamed her teacher, she blamed the girl she sat next to, saying that she makes too much noise, and she’d ASKED her teacher to move her and her teacher HADN’T moved her.  I don’t know what to believe with Syd. 

She, they, just got home, and the computer was off.  Syd started yelling at me, "Why is my computer off?"  Sydni complains so much.  Oh, and it was said with a loud whine too.  So I am already being driven nuts with this… this behavior.  So I yelled back.  I wanted, truthfully, to throttle her.  When they came home, I said "turn off the tv, and get started on your homework."  So of course the tv stayed on.  And Sydni said "I was doing my homework and listening to it."  Well, Jerry has told her, plainly, that she’s not allowed to have distractions while she’s getting F’s in school.  He said when she brings her grades up, she can do her homework the way she wants… that’s another thing, she always fights us on how her homework should be done.  She’s a stubborn child, and if she thinks she’s learned it one way, well, dammit, that is THE ONLY way she’s going to do it, parental intelligence be damned, Sydni knows it all.  Can you tell she’s really

on my last nerve, and she’s only been home 50 minutes? 

Okay, I’ve got to get off that subject.  We’ll just leave it at Sydni may get held back unless she really starts putting some work into her school work.  Some really hard, serious effort.

Let’s see… I’m not sure how much of the whole "lack of money sucks" yesterday… I know I talked about the couch, pretty sure I did anyway.  Oh, I know.  I asked Jerry if money and freedom are not the point, then what is?  He said unequoicably, money and freedom ARE the point.  I asked him what he was going to do if this simply didn’t work out, and he said get a real job.  He put in an application today, for management at Blockbuster here in Elk Grove.  That would be good if he could get something like that, but it would have to pay decently. 

I just called my mom, and yay, she’s talking to me.  She just doesn’t want to talk about Obama or politics.  Okay.  She got off the phone pretty quickly with me.  She’s definitely going back to "old mom" who is just an utter recluse and antisocial.  I don’t really know what to do for her though… this is pretty much who she is.  Intelligent as hell, emotionally unstable.

I should get to reading this Girl Scout stuff already.  I think… oh, I don’t know.  I could do it now, Syd and Shabree are taking Sammi to the park.  Alex is asleep on the couch (Yay, about time!), Becca is off at the library with Jerry.  I think for dinner we’re just going to do leftovers from last night, though I think I already ate the last of the bell peppers.  Maybe I’ll take a lasanga out of the freezer and nuke it.  I like to have a combination on hand of easy to prepare foods plus make from scratch foods.  That way, the nights that no one feels like cooking, it’s microwave food, and Jerry cooks the other nights… lol, just kidding, though it’s NOT that far from the truth.  I helped him out a lot last night, and it was definitely a team effort, but I had to go feed the baby, and he took over.  Then we had Becca do the actual spaghetti of course, which she did, though not altogether willingly. 

Sydni wanted to take my iPod to the park… like hell no.  Then when I said no, she asked for BECCA’S iPod (which I found on a plane and was finally able to initialize.  I actually have 3 iPods, but we can’t find the old one that I won from Apple.  I won some neat toys from that place.)  I told Sydni that if anyting happened to the iPods on a PLAYGROUND, Becca and I were going to be awfully upset, so no.  Becca… well, the iPod has been given to her (though I can’t say why for sure.  Sigh.  I capitulated to Jerry really.  He’s the one who asked why she shouldn’t get it… I must admit, so far, so good, she’s kept it nice, and she still has it.  Yay for that!)  I wish I could find my headphones… I’d use my iPod as an MP3 player, instead of as a hard drive back up… which actually, I barely ever use it for.  I have so much hard drive space with two hard drives… I haven’t really found too much need for the iPod.  I have used it to drag stuff between different computers, and that’s about it.

What else?  Eh, I’ve got to go take care of Alex, who woke up with all the danged door slamming (thanks girls, I needed NO time to myself, none at all…) so guess I will get this posted already…. and day ten, down.  YEA!