Day 54: Life and (some) learning

This was our schedule for this week. Grey is travel time; Sunday is marked yellow to visually remind me that it is a "set apart" day; lilac-colored is appointments, and the orange section is when I go with the littlies to pick up my older children and visit our long time friends. (My husband and teenage son are staying at home; they work at home, so I'm not publicly identifying an empty house).

Next week will be much the same.

I'm rather proud that we still managed to fit the exams and games and everything around the corners of this. Usually I'm OK if mornings are free, but morning appointments are hard on our homeschooling. I get very car sick as do the children so trips into town play havoc with the rest of the day.

That is a drawback to living in the mountains. There are plenty of advantages to counter-balance that, though.

Aidan gets a flu shot because he is immunesuppressed and three years ago when he caught the flu, he had to go to the hospital for several days and hang out in an overflow ward with many other coughing, sneezing, throwing-ups kids separated only by curtains from each other. It was no fun. So he gets the flu shot every year.

Last week was his very first dental intervention EVER (he is eight). Long long story; the short version is that he had severe oral defensiveness and received nourishment from a G Tube till only a year and a half ago. I did not want his mouth to be messed with until I thought it would not set him back with his feeding. The other thing is that he is post liver transplant and needs to load up heavily with antibiotics before a routine dental visit.

But anyway, he had two cavities and that was it. They were filled on Tuesday. When you think of his poor nutritional status for so many years (while on IV nutrition, g tube feeding, drinking juice and sprite while recovering from surgeries, and the fact that I let him eat all sorts of "fun" food when he was trying to learn to eat, like froot loops and M&Ms) -- well, it's perfectly wonderful to me that he didn't have a mouthful of caries. (That is another secret reason I was procrastinating on the intervention -- because I was afraid there would be all sorts of work needing to be done.) So anyway, thank you, God.

I am counting our days of visiting these friends as "school" days because they are guaranteed to be very enriching days. So: Today is Day 54, tomorrow is Day 55... and that makes next week, Week 12 and the end of the term. Hooray!