Household tip #50

 Never give the pot with cream of wheat remnants to your young son and tell him to scrape it into the dog bowl. It will mysteriously disappear for about 3 days, then, when you see it again you won't recognize it, and lastly, cleaning it will take the better part of the next 2 days because you have to soak it so many times.
  Whew, glad to have that off my chest.

 So, in case I haven't mentioned, after much prep and organization we started school again last Mon. It was a good solid start, but in spite of my best efforts stuff just kept happening to derail us. By the time Thurs came around, I just quit for the week....
   First, Ed went back to work a day early (on Tues. instead of Wed.) So I was sort of disappointed to not have just the moral support of his being home a whole extra day. Then Asher started running a really high fever about halfway through the day. He wouldn't eat and just wanted to be held, and I was afraid it might be strep so I started dosing him with all my usual home remedies. Well, he slept with me that night so needless to day I didn't get much sleep. I think we finally both fell into a good sleep somewhere around 4 am so I was exhausted the next morning. I let Aaron fix breakfast while I caught a little more sleep, but then I did get up and we got another good day of school in. I had already decided I wasn't going to church with Asher running fever when Lela started feeling sick too. Long story short...every single one of the kids except for Aaron came down with the same thing over the last week/weekend. It's called hand, foot and mouth disease... a common virus in kids,  with fever and little blisters on the hands feet and mouth, and it basically has to run it's course. Well, I felt better about it not being strep, and found that peppermint oil at the base of the neck was a great pain reliever/fever reducer. They all got over it pretty quickly, but with it being highly contagious I still couldn't go to church Sunday ( I guess that was yesterday).
    Oh yeah, AND ( I almost forgot) ...Thurs morning when I was still going to try to do some school I had a run-in with the neighbor over our dog, first thing.  Maddie is a half Shepherd/half Boxer mix that we got  over a year ago as a puppy. She was adorable, but as she has gotten older she has gotten bigger and more hyper. I have not had the time to work with her so she is mostly lovable but untrained, and she learned to jump the fence. So, we put her on a run and she broke the cable, then, we put her on a stake and she pulled up the stake and broke the cable, then, we got a bigger cable which she had succeeded in breaking Thurs. morning and jumping the fence. Again. Aaron has just caught her and was bringing her back in the yard when the neighbor lady(whom I had never met) came marching over to speak to me. She informed me that this was the 2nd time my dog had bothered her dog who was in a fence and she was highly irritated. And obviously something was wrong with our fence and if we didn't do something about our dog she was going to take pictures and go to the law, etc.  I apologized as best I could explaining what all had happened but there was no appeasing her.  Sooooo...I had to tie Maddie up with a leash (praying it would hold) while I loaded up all my sick kids and went to Petsmart to get a new cable, before I could even start the day. Then I called Angie  to see if she and John wanted a dog. Thankfully they did, so at least I didn't have to call Animal Control. The kids were almost in tears thinking about it (I was in tears), but I knew there was no way we could risk a lawsuit. Anyway, it has all worked out...we got the dog delivered today and hopefully she will behave a little better over there....maybe.
     So here I am...the beginning of a new week... and we haven't made a whole lot of progress on the school thing. But I hope to try again tomorrow.  =)