I was up before five this morning. This is my favorite time of the day and it thrills me to be up before everyone else. Yes, I'm odd. I've never required as much sleep, it seems, as a lot of folks. So I'm up with my coffee and oatmeal, sitting in the dark living room in a quiet house. I love it!

Ever since I had a breakdown (or whatever it was) last October and went through depression and such, I've sorely neglected school. Not that we've stopped doing school work altogether, but I've stopped doing any planning, stopped trying to come up with creative things for us to do, stopped keeping record of anything. We just do a math lesson and a grammar lesson every day and read. We read a lot. But lately I've started feel that my lack of planning and throwing myself into schooling has verged on sin. I've just become lazy towards homeschooling. I've take on the attitude that "I'm only doing this because there isn't another option", and so we just float along, no real goals, no organization, not much discipline.

So after feeling what I believe is the conviction of the Holy Spirit, I have turned a corner and we're (hopefully) headed in a better direction. Every morning this week after we drop Margaret and Samuel off to ride the bus, I've taken the boys out to walk the two and a quarter mile loop. It's been bitter,y cold with the super high winds, but after the first day, they didn't grumble. We've come home and done school work. We've collected wildflower specimens and identified them. We've listened to audio books (Swiss Family Robinson) and read aloud in 101 Dalmatians. We've listened to lots of Scripture reading, and continued memorizing James 1. We worked in our math books and our grammar books, and we even did Mad Libs as part of grammar, just for fun. We had a picnic in the back yard and cooked hot dogs in the chiminea. We made homemade bread, each of the boys making their own loaf from start to finish. So it's been a good week. I feel like I'm being a more responsible parent than I've been in months, and though the boys have enjoyed the laid back days and being able to get on the wii or computer every afternoon for a couple of hours, they seem so happy to have more structure to our days again.

I've been reading Explicit Gospel, which was a Christmas gift from Brian's sister and her husband. Amazing book! I also started reading Band of Brothers. I like to read while I'm on the elliptical at the Y and was able to get in a lot of reading yesterday.

I guess I never blogged about running the Austin marathon a week and a half ago. So glad to have that over with. It was the hardest thing I've struggled through. I was getting over being sick, had I injured my back the week of the race, AND I was dealing with a really bad bout of colitis. I felt miserable. I still can't believe I finished. It seemed like every mile I was just about to call Brian to pick me up. I cried a little when I crossed the finish line.

I went to the gastrointerologist last week and got on some meds which seem to be working. Praise The Lord! I should have gone to see him a long time ago, but I'm really bad about putting things like doctor's appointment off.

We are getting really close to putting the house on the market. Next week, maybe? I'm going to look at houses out in Steiner Ranch tomorrow with our realtor. We've boxed up all our extra stuff so that all we have out are the essentials, which will hopefully make the moving process a little less painful. It's great how roomy and clean the house feels!

Time to get my chicks off to school.