Dear Prayer Warriors, I went up to the hospital last night to be with Sierra and her parents and I wanted to update you all.  First of all, she is going to be okay…a VERY tough little girl!  Her collarbone is broken.  The radiologists/doctors first said that she had “multiple broken ribs”, but the last update was that they may not be broken – but they have definitely been moved/pulled out of place, etc. One side of her lung was partially collapsed, but the doctors said, this too, should heal without surgery.  Sierra has a huge hoof print on her chest.  I saw it and it was incredible how such a little girl could withstand all of that weight.  It looks like a huge scar/brand on her chest.  She did have a cut on the back of her head, which they stitched up last night after they took the neck brace off…which brings me to the greatest “halleluia”…her neck is NOT broken.  There was some question about that for a while. When they finally took that neck brace off (after hours of her laying on a board. .with a cut open head) we all sighed /cried with relief.  Everything else will heal She may even be home by the end of the weekend.  Her parents thank you so much for their prayers.  Not having any family here, their friends are pretty important! Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow —

I got an update on Sierra’s condition this morning.  She is in the hospital in Houston right now — she suffered a cracked clavicle, possibly some cracked ribs, and a partially collapsed lung.  While these injuries are nothing to sneeze at, it could have been SO much worse.  Please continue to pray for her speedy recovery and also that she wouldn’t be afraid to “get back in the saddle” based on this experience.

Thanks again for all your prayers.

One of the little girls in our homeschool group was thrown from her horse and kicked in the chest earlier this evening.  They are en route to the ER.  She is conscious but having difficulty breathing.  Please keep Sierra in your fervent prayers — she is a precious little girl, about 9 years old.  Thanks.

This comes to you courtesy the inspiration of ChristianFrenzy . . .

FOUR JOBS I’VE HAD
1.  Pharmacy Tech
2.  Archivist/Rare Book Collections Assistant
3.  Legal Secretary
4.  Wife/Mom/Small Business Owner

FOUR MOVIES I CAN WATCH OVER & OVER
1.  Braveheart
2.  Titanic
3.  Armageddon
4.  Searching for Bobby Fisher

FOUR PLACES I’VE LIVED
1.  At home with Mom and Dad 
2.  St. Croix (U. S. Virgin Islands)
3.   Huntsville, Texas
4.   Currently on a .91 acre patch of land in a comfy little fixer upper with my honey and my girl and our two dogs

FOUR TV SHOWS I LOVE TO WATCH
1.  Alias (yeah, I know — it’s been canceled and most people complain about the current story lines, but I can’t help myself — gotta’ see the end)
2.  Extreme Makeover – Home Edition
3.  Dancing With the Stars (how much fun is that!?!?!)
4.  Grey’s Anatomy

FOUR PLACES I’VE BEEN ON VACATION
1.  Charlottesville, Virginia
2.  A three-week stay in Everett, Washington with side trips to Vancouver Island, B.C., followed by a cross-country trip in a Renegade Jeep from Everett to Houston, via Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico and on across Texas
3.  Cape Girardeau, Missouri
 4.  San Antonio, Texas

FOUR WEBSITES I VISIT DAILY
1.  Yahoo
2.  Xanga
3.  ???
4.  ???

FOUR OF MY FAVORITE FOODS
1.  Chocolate in any form
2.  A nice steak, medium rare
3.  Coconut shrimp from Joe’s Crab Shack
4.  Boiled crawfish from Benno’s in Galveston

FOUR PLACES I’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
1.  Cane Bay, St. Croix
2.  San Antonio, Texas
3.  A little bed & breakfast inn somewhere (anywhere!) in the Texas Hill Country
4.  Taking a little snooze on the deck of a sailboat somewhere in the Caribbean

Imagine my delight when a good friend stopped by a couple of days before Christmas to give me this:

The truly amazing thing is that my talented friend MADE this for me.  How sweet is that???  My photo doesn’t do it justice — she is so talented, and of course, modest, too.  I would never have splurged on something like this in a shop — I’m so glad that she made it for me, because carrying it puts a smile on my face.   

Whew.  Busy day.  Spent most of the afternoon helping my honey install some drapery brackets for a gentleman in a nearby community.  It wasn’t that difficult, except that the builders in our area utilize TONS of hurricane strapping and flashing around the windows . . . so it requires self-tapping metal screws, a construction-grade DeWalt power drill, and my honey’s brute strength!  Got the job done, but by then it was too late to head to Foley’s to check out the mattress sale.

So we did what I’d planned on doing from the beginning until I got that paranoid “oh, I’d better check around and make sure I’m not missing out on better quality or a better deal somewhere else” attack.  We went to a locally owned furniture store and purchased a perfectly fine mattress set for our daughter.  Most exciting of all — for $30 it will be delivered tomorrow AND they will haul off the old mattress set.  That alone is thrilling!  Usually my man would throw something like that in the burn pile back of the house, but with the burn ban in effect and it being so dry — no way, Jose.

By the way, on the off chance that any of you reading this smoke — please, please, PLEASE don’t ever lay in bed smoking a cigarette.  On the off chance you drift off and drop the ciggie — it is absolutely amazing and terrifying all at the same time how quickly a mattress burns.  We burned one a few years ago for a neighbor (never know when “large trash day” is and hauling it to the dump (and paying to dump it) is inconvenient, too) — anyway, we burned one for a neighbor and I’ve never seen anything burn so quickly, unless it’s an old Christmas tree.

So, ideally, quit smoking altogether — but in the case that’s not possible, please, please, PLEASE don’t smoke in bed.

Sorry that ya’ll weren’t able to see the pics.  They were such a comfort . . . basically all “beeeyoutiful” celebs pre-makeup artist and post-makeup artist.  It’s a comfort to me to know that the likes of Christina Applegate, Cameron Diaz, Pamela Sue Anderson, Alicia Silverstone, etc. don’t look a whole lot different from me from the neck up until some Max Factor type works his magic . . . Seriously!  If I had a movie star makeup artist and Jose Eber work their wonders, I could do the red carpet stroll, too! 

Anyway, hope you all are having a great week — things are well here and so it goes . . .

I am so relieved.  We’ve done our lessons every day and my girl seems to be enjoying them.  I decided to simplify our schedule in that Latin is going to be a summer elective.  And my man, God bless him, has agreed to take over the mathematical instruction.  A recent change that made this “doable” occurred earlier this week.  He went back on Monday to find that beginning on Tuesday his day would run from 4:45 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.  He is home from work by 11:30 a.m.  Incredibly awesome.  Granted, he turns in for the night at 8:30 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. (at the latest).  But he was usually heading in that direction by 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. before the shift change, anyway.  And he used to get up at 5:00 a.m., now he gets up at 4:00 a.m.  So it’s really not a HUGE change in that regard — but now he has a good six or seven hours after work to do other things.  (His old schedule was 7:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m., because he had a lunch break and conference period smack dab in the middle of it all.  Now he has a 20 minute break between his two classes and then, as long as there are no staff meetings, he can leave when his second class dismisses.  Yeah, baby!)

So knowing how much I dislike math, and how crappy of a math teacher I am, he agreed to take this part of Jami’s education over.  Hallelujah!  (And I say that with the utmost sincerity . . . )  So our days go like this, now:

• Bible (5 days a week)
  
• Penmanship (5 days a week)
  
• Spelling (5 days a week)
  
• Grammar (5 days a week)
  
• History (3 days a week)
  
• Science (2 days a week)
  
• Art (1 day a week)

When my guy gets home from work, he has lunch and takes a little break while we finish a lesson and then he does her math lesson with her.  Once a week I take her to ballet and also to recorder band classes.

With his new work schedule and the math thing off my plate, I am feeling soooooo much better about all this.  I’d felt like I was drowning and now I feel like I can do it.  (Doing the dance of joy, I am!)

The other thing I did was to move the “schoolroom”.  Before we started in the fall, we fixed up the room where the computer is, but it just wasn’t working  very well.  The lighting is not so great and her desk was against one wall and my desk against another and when she needed help she had to come over to me or I had to go over to her.  And because all my business stuff is in that room, I’d try to multi-task working and teaching and neither was getting done very well.  So I moved all her schoolbooks into the dining area.  There is a cabinet with open-backed shelving separating the living and dining areas.  I displayed my Fiesta ware serving pieces on the shelves and her schoolbooks are neatly arranged on the cabinet top beneath.  Then on the opposite wall of the dining area I’ve placed her baby dresser with hutch.  Before you go, HUH?, the dresser is kind of a white pickled finish with a stained cherry top and a matching two-shelved hutch with stained cherry top — it doesn’t look babyish at all.  I have table linens and sewing stuff in the drawers.  Cookbooks are on the uppermost shelves and more school stuff is neatly arranged on the dresser top below the hutch shelves.

We hung a calendar and some posters on one wall and it looks very nice, bright, and cheery.  The lighting is better there, we can sit side-by-side at the kitchen table to do her work — it just works better all the way around.  We put our stuff away when we’re done and the table is available for meals or whatever else we may need to do there.  My guy has been teasing me about moving the schoolroom and my “office” around so many times — he said the only room I haven’t set the computer up in is the bathroom — smart aleck.  I’m feeling good about the current set-up for school.  Now I seriously do need to get the former schoolroom arranged for business and possibly crafts and then, shock of all shocks, I may actually turn the back bedroom back into a GASP!  bedroom.  But we’ll just have to see.  There’s a lot of contemplation regarding furniture arrangement, storage, etc.  This is an old house with little bitty closets (you know the kind where you open the door and, whoops!  There’s the closet . . . ALL OF IT?) so I have to really think this through.  Once I get it all organized, I don’t want to turn around in a few weeks and think, “You know, this just isn’t really working that well.”

It’s almost 11:30 p.m. and we have a vertical blind installation in the a.m., so I’d best turn in for the night.  Have a great Saturday and maybe I’ll be back before the weekend’s up.  We do have a nifty science thing we’re going to do tomorrow — we’re going to dig a hole, put a glass jar in it with a cover kind of propped over the opening so things get in, but don’t get out.  Then the next day we’ll go check the jar and see what kind of critters we may have caught!  I’m hoping for interesting without being too gross.  I don’t care for bugs much, but it’s in the name of education, so I’ll get over it.

Ciao!

Getting the lesson plans done so we can go back to enriching our minds after a season of jolly fun.  However, the wonderful thing about homeschooling is that we can still have jolly fun WHILE enriching our minds . . .

I’m going to check into the Princess Di exhibit that is being held in Houston right now — I can’t remember which museum is displaying it, but I’m sure I’ll find out.  I think Jami might enjoy seeing all that “royal” stuff.  It will also be an opportunity to talk about how “stuff” is no guarantee for happiness.

Well, gotta’ get back to work — in two hours I also have an appointment to measure some windows for a blind quote.  Looks like 2006 is coming in with a BANG!