It's Wednesday morning and I'm the only one up. I've had a bagel and I'm now enjoying my second cup of coffee. All is good. I had a fever and mastitis for a few days, but i seem to be on the upswing. In all my years of nursing I never had mastitis before. Wow, it's so painful! Flu-like symptoms, fever, headache, achy feeling, not to mention extremely sore breast! Thankful to be through the worst of it, so it seems.

School is coming along nicely. This year has been so much better than last year, and last year went pretty well. We've found our groove and are really enjoying learning together. Margaret and Samuel began taking a science and logic class for homeschoolers at our church, which was a big answer to prayer. I was really wanting to find a group to be involved in, but couldn't find one that seem to fit into our schedule. A mom from church offered to do this class since she was already going to be doing it with her son, and opened it up to other families in the church. They use Apologia General Science and Fallacy Detective for logic. I put aside what we had been using for science and we all use the Apologia book. We're also all working through Fallacy Detective together, and it has been so fun to hear the kids detect bad reasoning in each other's conversation. We also added a Latin and a Spanish program to our curriculum. Having all the kids working through the same books in many subjects makes it so much easier too add all the extra things we wanted to do last year but never could fit in.
I'm so much less stressed about school this year.

A lot of our activities have started up again. Samuel, Margaret, and William are playing soccer, so they have practices on Wednesday and games on Saturday. William is laying flag football and has practices on Monday's and games on Fridays. The boys jones a new boy scout pack and have meetings on tuesdays. We started going to sunday night church where Margaret goes to youth group, the boys go to choir, and Brian and i sit in on pastor Cassidy's teaching. I try to keep hazel with me, but she's pretty noisy and has ended up in the nursery most evenings.

I had a very sweet birthday last week and was treated like royalty. My mom came to town and took me shopping. John and hazel came along, but the others stayed home. That evening we met the rest of the family at Trudy's for dinner. I was showered with gifts, things that the kids had specially picked out for me when Brian had taken them shopping the day before:lots of candles, a bathroom rug, a pillow, earrings, lots of soaps, a back scratcher (from William, who loves to have his back scratched), and other things. Brian gave me a James Avery chain with a Texas pendant and a bottle of wine. It's humbling to know that you're loved so much!

I'm still running. Last Sunday I did a nine miler, but most days I just run four miles. The marathon is a month from today and I think I'll need to get in one more really long run before it.

Hazel will be 11 months in a couple of weeks. She still isn't walking, though she's taken a step or two on her own. She is such a funny little girl. She already demonstrates a sense of humor.

And she's finally eating! She still mostly nurses, but will try all kinds of foods from my plate now.

Well, I need to get out to run.