We’re still here! Emma’s been dealing with a doozy of a cold this past week, and it has been a bit of an ordeal at times. She also got to experience her very first earache (poor thing!) which was really quite an experience. Luckily the pain only lasted from about 6 pm to about 1 am when I finally managed to get her to let me put some garlic oil in her ear and she was finally able to sleep. The next morning, she was pretty much fine - a little pressure in her ear, but no pain. Phew! It was incredible what the ear infection did to her personality - it was like someone had taken my wonderful, sweet, generally cheerful little girl and replaced her with a wailing banshee. It didn’t help that she was just so tired and couldn’t get to sleep. I gave her a heating pad sort of thing (a sock w/ rice, warmed in the microwave) and that helped her to at least doze, but it took the oil for her to sleep. I was beginning to think I was going to have to pin her down to give it to her, but luckily I was able to convince her that it wouldn’t hurt. I am so thankful that Gregory was happy to be with Daddy for the evening, and went down easily that night so that I could focus on Emma. I am also so thankful that she was feeling so much better the next morning! Thank goodness for strong, healthy immune systems.

Because of all this, things have been pretty quiet around here. We’re still doing our “homeschooling block” and that is going well. I’ve changed it a little bit so that on Tuesdays and Thursdays we’re doing just the Bible story, church book, a very brief reading lesson (generally just a sound review), and a chapter from our chapter book. On the other days of the week we do a longer reading lesson, another Bible story, and we’ve started a nature study sort of thing with a little bit of a creative aspect with it. This week we started a batch of bean seeds in an egg carton and made a little book to record our observations. She’s telling me what to write, and we’re each drawing a picture of what the seed looks like. We’ll do another one tomorrow and we’re both anxiously waiting to dig up seed number two to see if it has any roots yet!

I’m still running, or walking and running, I guess I should say. I didn’t run on Friday or Saturday last week as I was supposed to, so I decided to repeat a week. I accidently started on week 2 anyways, so now I’m just finishing week 2 again. The running is getting easier and I’m really enjoying doing this. I’ve started listening to an audiobook (Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin) as I run, and that increases my motivation to go out and do it since I don’t have much opportunity to listen otherwise.

I just heard Gregory - I think my typing time is up!