Don't box me in

I can't believe the last time I posted was AUGUST.  I have blogged a lot in my head during that time, I guess it just never made it out to my fingers and the keyboard.  :)

I think one of the biggest problems (besides being inarticulate and using way too many parenthesis, I mean, lol) was that I would see that other bloggers were doing something like "Simple Woman's Daybook" one day, and I would say to myself, "I should do that! Let's see...hmmm, I think I can fill in only half that meme, but not the rest. I could make up my own! Nah, too random."  And just give up.   Who wants to see only a {happy, real} when everyone else is doing a {pretty, happy, funny, real}?  

However, it's lonely here in my head. :)

So I decided to be random despite how it bothers me.  I *want* to be a joiner, it just never seems to work out. Maybe after a few brain dumps I'll be able to be normal again. ;-)

Let the randomness ensue:

(in other words, run for your lives!)  :)

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  I can't believe we are lighting 3 Advent candles already!  Except in our case, I never get around to getting ADVENT candles and so we are lighting three white candles with a fourth and fifth white candle waiting impatiently for their turn for the fourth Sunday and Christmas.  The kids don't care, they just like singing 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel' every night.

O come Emmanuel... ransom captive Israel...

The kids are addicted to clementines.  I hate to just throw all those peels away!   We made clementine candles one day, and simmered the peels with cinnamon and cloves  a few times for a nice scent.  That is the extent of my craftiness.

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We are enjoying our milk delivery.  I feel so retro.  We are able to get cream line pasturized milk in glass bottles delivered along with cider and eggs.  Their chocolate milk is also to die for and I'm thinking of stopping the egg and cider delivery -- since only 3 of us are eating the eggs -- and get the chocolate milk instead. Because it's just THAT good.  Juliet has taken it upon herself to make butter every day from the cream she scoops off the top of the milk.  I think the marble clinking against the side of the little jar for an hour a day is going to drive me crazy, however.  She may build up some arm muscles, at least!

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We have an offer in on a house and we will find out tonight or tomorrow if the owners have accepted it. We are in competition with another family so my hopes are not really high.  We didn't entirely 'low-ball' but we did offer a chunk less than they were asking.  We thought it was fair and so now we are just praying!  The waiting is killing me though.  Heck, it drove me to blogging!    We've been house hunting for almost three years! I'm so done. And then we try to come into our own house and we all fall all over each other in the 3x4 foyer while I fear someone is going to get pushed down the stairs (split foyer house) and I remember just WHY I keep going...and going...and going...

Sanity is a precious, precious thing.

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Did you know that the sound of all my children laughing together is my favorite sound in the whole world?? Especially after a day of snapping and yelling at each other.

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School is going along swimmingly in some areas, and not AT ALL in others.  We have plowed through Lightening Literature 7 so fast that we are almost done.  We are 3/4 done with Apologia General Science.  No, I'm not going all the assignments for either by far, but I think we are covering what is needed.  I'm doing these with my 8th and 6th graders, and therein lies the problem...since they are both technically 7th grade (or younger) curriculum, should I plow on with one or both girls to get through LL8 and Apologia Physical or similar this year?   I'm sure my 12yo could handle it, but she's in 6th grade and doesn't *need* to be plowing ahead...then there is the 14yo who struggles with school but has such a good mind for some things.  I hate to hold her back, but pushing ahead is very hard work for both of us.  So often I just want to BE, not plod and drag them along with me.  

Part of me says that none of this really matters, and the other half panics that I am in no way doing enough and they will get to college age and fail life and hate me.  And then I'll die and God will tell me I did a lousy job and ruined them and should have worked harder.  How hard is a person supposed to push themselves? And how hard is a person supposed to push another person?

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I'm so tired.

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Could someone please put the sun back on?

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A topic I hope to cover more is Jeffrey's arthritis and how that is going, but I feel funny throwing that out there in a stupid random post like this.  As at least one of you already knows, we are thinking of going gluten-free on top of our other allergen reductions in order to see if that will help the auto-immune issues in our family.   I know I should at least try. I owe it to my kids! And then I sit down to make a menu, or eat a snack, and say NO WAY.  There's got to be another way.  Wheat is our life.   I sincerely don't know if I'm capable of turning our lives upside down like that right now, with everything else we are dealing with.   I even think I could handle wheat free dinners, but breakfast, lunch, and snacks are next to impossible (in my whiny mind).  When we bring everything down to rice/veggies/meat/fruit nothing seems to keep us full and we are hungry allllll the time.  I worry about my 8yo who is already stick thin and below the bottom of the charts.  Everyone says "add good fats!"  but HOW?   Pouring oil onto everything is unpalatable in the short term and doesn't even help us stay full in the long term.  Most nuts and seeds are out (allergies or cross contamination).  I can barely eat raw veggies with my braces and besides they (and rice) give me a stomach ache.  And how fair is it to my normal 12 year old to have to eat weird, but how fair is it to her 4yo brother that she gets to eat bread/cookies/pasta/whatever that he loves right in front of him?

And whahhhhhhhhh, we are already freaks, I don't want to do one more thing that makes us totally OUT THERE.  I just want to be normal.

But I also want my son to stop waking up in the middle of the night crying, and I don't want to give him chemo drugs, and I want my daughter's hair to stop falling out.

So maybe after Christmas I'll starve to death  lose my mind  try going gluten free. 

On that note, I need to get a dinner full of gluten ready. :-P

Thanks for reading.