January Thoughts

One of the problems I have discovered with maintaining a blog is not the time or technology issues, but my past as an English teacher. Once people are aware that I formerly taught English there expectations of my grammatical abilities often become unrealistic. This situation causes me to have writer's block over the silliest things, particularly when one considers that my readership consists of mainly myself and my children (whom realistically are only checking to make sure that they are evenly represented in pictures). So if anyone else ever reads this and discovers my grammatical shortcomings, work thru it I have!

With that off my brain, we are deep in to the crazy days of January! The weather alternates between below zero with windchill and sunny almost pleasant winter days. We really need more snow but that seems not to be in the cards, instead bad air and ice are the order of the month. I always get restless in January and with homeschooling most of my running is on the treadmill so I need alternate outlets. Therefore we are rearranging furniture, cleaning out cupboards (again), and gearing up to repaint the princess' room. I am also measuring for curtains since Brenton got rid of the ones that came with the house and it has been five years since. I figure that if I get really good curtains that I can justify replacing the always nasty, dirty blinds with reflective film of some sort. I hat cleaning blinds!

Another reason for insufficent blog development is we played like crazy during the winter holidays. Our neighbors built an outdoor ice rink in their yard and we have been to skate several times with groups of neighbors. Liam taught himself to skate fairly well, Hugh decided that snowboots are much faster, and he convinced Moira to ditch the idea of skates to chase him and his friends that much better. Of course Cody was a natural and Brenton learned as a kid, I do not skate where I come from one puts ice in their glass they do not walk on it! The little kids really enjoy the big toy (Brenton) as he puts them on plastic sleds and hauls them all over the ice. The night Brenton decided to play hockey with the teenagers about put him under, getting up for work the next day was no picnic! We also spent New Year's Day at Uncle Jake's house helping with some wiring, and sledding on his hill. We also had fun watching Tivoed episodes of "So you think you can dance" with Rachel and Lily. Hugh showed some of his own moves when we turned on Irish dance videos from You Tube. There is also a 'midget' sledhill in our driveway so we have been busy not to mention the fact that the kids have been keeping up with school and trying out all the new gadgets they received over the holidays. Moira is already better at button holes than I am. Well I am off to work on verb tenses and persuade Hugh to practice writing a few more 't's. Off to the races we are....