Sweet Life in the City

We have had a wonderful few days! Friday morning Jeremy and I had our meeting with Chloe's speech teacher and she is improving by leaps and bounds. Starting in January she will be starting to work on her 'r's', but she is doing so well that they are going to cut her back to 30 minutes a week of speech therapy. After her meeting Jeremy had to head to work, but I stayed to join Samuel's class for breakfast and book reports. It was a little bit of a madhouse, but I enjoyed sharing this precious time with Samuel. I love watching him interact with his friends at school and my heart swells with pride for the young man he is becoming. After his breakfast I headed home for a few hours to get some things done and then headed back to school to help Chloe with her party. Her teacher once again noted how much she has changed since that meeting we had with all of the support staff. I said we had been laying hands on her and praying for her. The teacher lit up and hugged me :). A...

This has been a busy week! I ended up working at the craft fair at the kid's school all day Monday and Tuesday. Samuel has chess club on Monday's after school so Monday it was later before we got home. Wednesday I had to catch up on laundry and groceries and I had a few little presents to get for Christmas. This morning has filled with a few more loads of laundry (decided to do laundry in our building this week), doing some baking for treats for teachers, and getting clothes put away from laundry. The girls have a music program at 1:00 so I will be heading to their school in a few hours. Tomorrow morning at 8:30 we have Chloe's IEP meeting which is just a meeting to see if she is making her benchmarks for her speech services and make any changes if needed. From 9-10 I will be in Samuel's classroom for breakfast with his class. The class had to do a cereal box book report. The students will be sharing and the parents were invited to join them for breakfast. At 1:00 I wil...

Look at me posting on the weekend! Next week if filling up fast so I thought I would go a head and sneak in a blog post before the insanity begins. I first want to say that I am so thankful that I slept so good last night. I think I got 10 hours in and I was in the same position this morning as I was when I went to sleep last night so I know I got some good sleep. I also do not remember looking at the clock once during the night, so I think I may have slept the entire night. Jeremy had his work Christmas party last night so the kids and I headed to the mall after I picked them up from school. I let them pick out something they wanted to get Jeremy for Christmas. It is funny the things they thought he might like and it makes me a little nervous as to what they picked out for me when they went shopping with daddy :). Thankfully they each found a gift at Kohl's so we did not have to go through then entire mall to find gifts. We then ate an early supper at the Subway in the mall and ...

Chronic pain entered my life about 10 years ago. It was a few months after my surgery and my doctor thought that is was due to stress, emotional turmoil that I had gone through, and my new adjustment to the lack of hormones that my body was not producing. It started with chronic headaches and within a few years my whole body hurt almost every single day. Over the past 10 years I have had many sleepless and painful nights, but last night would be in my top 10 of the worst nights I have suffered through. I try to not mention my pain often, but I have not mentioned it much the last few months because I have been doing much better. Being able to stay home this year has played a major role in helping me manage the pain. I also have cut back from 4-5 cups of coffee to just one cup a day with only a special treat of an extra cup once in a while. Maybe the bigger miracle is that I have really cut back on my Diet Coke intake. Some days I do not even drink a drop of Diet Coke and when I do dri...

Thursday's have turned into my laundry at the laundromat day. I am not sure who is wearing all of these clothes :), but each week seems to be more and more clothes to wash! I am also not quite sure what was up with me this morning, but I woke up at 6:00 this morning ready to go. The alarm clocks start going off each morning at 5:00 because Jeremy has to leave so early to get to school, but it usually doesn't wake me up enough where I cannot go back to sleep. I woke up and decided to do one load of laundry downstairs so I would not have to drag as much to the laundromat. Jeremy couldn't understand why I was up doing housework and Chloe got up at 6:45 asking me why I am awake in the middle of the night :). I took the kids the school and then headed to do laundry. After laundry I went to Target to get a few things, but I always get so distracted in that store and I ended up buying more than a few things. I just got home a few minutes ago and plan on spending the rest of the da...

There is not a lot going on around here this week. We are just trying to get through these next 8 (almost 7) days of school before Christmas break. Since there is not much to write about I thought I would share another one of the ornaments that hold a very special place in my heart. Some will totally get this post and others will think that I am being way too emotional. Jeremy and I had been married a little over a year when we decided that we wanted a puppy. I grew up with several beagles and they were my favorite dog, so we looked in the area for a place that sold beagle puppies. We found a family that bred beagles in Murfreesboro, TN. We drove the 45 minutes to go check out the puppies. We knew we wanted a female and this place only had two females but it actually made it easier to pick a puppy. We walked back to the fenced in area where the puppies were being kept. All of the puppies were yapping and jumping by the fence to get our attention. That is when I noticed that not al...

We had a great weekend! It was kind of busy, but that was okay. I keep getting confused to what day it is because since Friday my routine has been off. Yesterday felt like Friday because of the field trip and today feels like Monday since I ran all of my errands today. My plans for Friday did not go exactly as planned and I ended up being home most of the day. It worked out that I was home because Jeremy lost an important set of keys so I spend most of Friday cleaning every square inch of our apartment trying to find them. He eventually found them at school. I however, did find lots of other missing items, so it was still worth the extreme cleaning. One important item found was Chloe's DSI. It has been missing for months! We were really hoping to find it before our trip to TN, so it was great to finally find it. On Saturday Emma had a birthday party for one of her friends at the bowling alley. Before we left Samuel's friend that moved away a few weeks called and asked if he...

I came to the conclusion over Thanksgiving break that my kids spend way too much time on electronic devices. It really has gotten out of control! The first thing they say each morning is, "Can I play on the Ipad?" Not "good morning" or "hello", they ask to play something electronic or watch TV. Over Thanksgiving they went from the TV to the Ipad to their DSI's to my mom's Kindle and they acted like they were dying when we made them turn all of those things off. They all love to play board games with us and I have to admit the ones we have are not necessarily my favorite, so a few weeks (probably months now) I bought my favorite childhood game, Clue! The kids loved playing and they caught on quickly. Yesterday I was at Wal-Mart and I saw that they had one of my other favorite games on sale, Rummikub. I know it is kind of close to Christmas to be giving them gifts, but I thought it would help with our electronic addiction. After homework and supper l...

The last three mornings getting the kids out of the door for school have been rough and I am hoping this is not going to be the norm for the remainder of these next few weeks. All three do not want to get out of bed and once I do get them up they are just dragging. We have pushed their bedtime up a half hour but that doesn't seem to be making a difference. Emma, my sweet Emma, usually has at least once a week some kind of issue with not being able to find something or forgetting something in the house. Every few weeks we will get to the car and she will remember that she left her backpack inside. I get so frustrated because before we leave I do a check to make sure they have everything, so somewhere between me seeing that she has her backpack she sets it down and walks out of the door! The frustrating part is that I cannot just give her a key and go get it. With the possibility of getting locked out by two different doors I cannot take that chance. Living in Chicago I never leave t...

One of my favorite parts about decorating for Christmas is hanging our ornaments on the tree. Most of the ornaments have some kind of memory attached to that ornament and I love thinking about and remembering all the wonderful people and circumstances around each specific ornament. I thought I would take the next few weeks and post an ornament each post and tell its story. I am not sure how old I was when my mom had these ornaments made, but I was probably a teenager. Each person in our family got an ornament to describe them. I don't remember every one's ornament, but my dad was a preacher and my sister was a cheerleader. I was pictured as a girl talking on the phone,  rotary phone at that! It definitely described  who I was in my teenage years. I was on the phone all the time! If I was at home I was probably on the phone. For a long time we only had a phone in the dining room, but it had this amazing long cord that would stretch all the way to my room :). As I got old...

I cannot believe I just wrote the word "December" for the month! We had a great Thanksgiving, but it is kind of sad how quickly our break went by. I know in a blink of an eye Christmas break will be here and gone, so I am really trying to enjoy these next few weeks and try not to wish them to go by faster. We went to my parent's house on Thursday and came back home on Saturday. We had a yummy meal for Thanksgiving and I love that when we are at my parent's house for a holiday we eat on plates that my dad got my mom when he was in Korea. I love that my mom always makes me my favorite chocolate fudge and this time found a cute owl container to put it in. I love that my mom always makes me a cherry pie knowing that it is my favorite. I love just being lazy on the couch after the meal and shopping on Friday. My mom and I went shopping Friday but did not go early in the morning. Chloe went with us and the other two stayed with Jeremy. We drug her from store to store and sh...