A quick update

I may be giving brief updates for a few days to get back into the blogging routine. Having a baby sure can mess up regular blogging! I saw a woman at the zoo a couple days ago who had 7 children. I told her I was stopping at 4. She shrugged and said, "After 3, it's just noise." I said, "Yeah, that's why I'm stopping at 4." ;)

So my floors now look exactly like they do in the pictures below. No change. Why?? Well, the manufacturer of our floor has changed and it took a while to track them down. Also we've had to pick out colors and new vinyl (man is THAT a chore!) and we've decided to do the bathroom too while we're at it. So now we'll be replacing the entire first floor. The run-down is like this...they'll order the flooring, it'll take about a week to come in, then it has to sit in my house to acclimate to my humidity and temp for two days. I can't imagine how fun that will be - we're talking about a lot of wood here. Then a contractor will come out and pull out my kitchen cabinets and disconnect plumbing - I'm assuming 1-2 days though I haven't been told yet. And THEN they can start ripping up the floor and laying down the new one, which will take 4-5 days or more. Fun! With our current calendar, I don't think there's any way we can get this started until the end of June. So I'm stuck with the hole in my floors for a while.

I have figured out a work around for this month though. I'm so worried one of the kids will get a splinter (they're not little splinters and hey, when you have 4 kids, *every* doctor's co-pay counts!) but I pulled up a rug I had in the kids area of the basement. It's one of those large ones that has roads on it so you can run Hot Wheels on it, like this, (so it's very fashionable) but it almost completely covers the area and has solved my problem for the time being.

Meanwhile, Matthew is reading his way through Tolkien books. He read Roverandum yesterday and said, "Even though I'm not very interested in dogs, it was a good book." We're now anxiously awaiting Bone, which was recommended in the Relaxed Homeskool blog that I stumbled across yesterday. I guess we need to get The Book Of Three for him as well. I have fond memories of my brother reading that series to me when I was young.

Rose seems bored and she almost seems to be asking for some direction. She's doing very well with letters and writing but isn't quite there yet on reading. I'm in no rush but it does limit her somewhat. So at the library yesterday, she picked out some horse books and I picked out some cheetah books and we'll go through them and see if anything leads us out of boredom. We spent quite a bit of time yesterday cleaning and organizing her room, which she seemed to enjoy quite a bit. Maybe I'll suggest she work on the basement...teeheehee.

Jade pretty much follows the other two around. I can tell she's a people person already. She flirts with anyone - and I mean anyone. Elderly gentlemen are especially swayed by her charms. Her language skills are getting better every day. I'm sure she'd be more understandable if she wasn't a thumb sucker but, as with everything else, I'm in no rush. It will end some day on it's own.

Linnae is doing great. She's looking pretty chunky now and the reflux meds have helped her a *lot*. She's smiling at us now and it just melts all of our hearts each time.

It looks like we're getting a homeschooling group started and we're anxious to start meeting with them and making new friends.