Just a quick update

Welcome to the house of sick! We'd gladly welcome you in, but we're running out of tissue and Advil is in short supply. Actually, we're doing much better. C came down with it first on Tuesday, and she was finally her active self heading into evening last night. Today she still has a horrible hacking cough, but she's bubbly and much less emotional. That's always a good thing! I'm mobile as of today, which is a big improvement. We were able to have a great little quiet Thanksgiving. Only our oldest girls were able to make it over. I think this was the first year in our marriage that we didn't have to run to at least one other house. It was nice, but I missed seeing everyone. We had a very quiet day puttering around and cooking till the girls came over after making their own rounds. It was a very good day. (Well, except for C's high fever and illess! I could really do away with that part!)

Since it didn't start to hit me till late Thursday I was able to make it out at the crack of dark Friday morning for some Black Friday shopping. (Yes, the deals were worth it. I'm half way finished already, and I didn't start till Friday!) We were astounded by horrible behavior. I just don't understand how people can act that awful when they are buying presents for a holiday all about love and peace. I wanted to ask people if they knew who they were celebrating and if they thought He'd be at all pleased. Yep... I was a victim of a cart smashing. People are not always the nicest. But, after several trips to several stores I FINALLY found what I was looking for and then some. I can't post because I'm not quite sure which family members keep up with the blog. ;)

I do have to put in a plug for my little one. We're really trying to put the meaning behind the holiday as the focus not the gifts and the commercial side of it that always seems to get the attention.This year I told her that she could only list 10 things on her Christmas list, that she couldn't add and remove at random to keep it at 10 (once on stays on), and not to expect everything on the list to be under the tree. We kept to the "3 main items" rule last year though I did attach things together... such as the gps and all of the miscellaneous things that went with it counted as one gift. Well, she's got about 7 items on her final list. One is a gift for my mother that she wanted to give her, one is that my grandfather would be able to come down for Christmas, and one is that I would do a spa kit night for her (in other words we'd play dress up and do our hair and nails, mud masks, etc.) I was pretty impressed that out of 7 gifts on her wish list only 3 are what I would consider requests for gifts. Maybe, just maybe, we're getting through to her. :) Now if we could just tell our oldest! Needless to say, her list is L O N G.

We did manage to do lessons between my coughs and sputters. We continued to work on her first ever research paper. Today's language arts lesson centered around learning how to plan and pre write, how to organize her notes as she is reading, and what kinds of things she'd like to learn. We discussed the tone and voice of her paper, what would be appropriate, and what her readers would like to hear. History brought lessons on cuneiform. Her history scrapbook is still a major bit of excitement in her day. Today she actually did her own searches (on preapproved sites - more like finding what she wanted to print on a site I set her up on!) and printed, cut, and arranged everything on her paper on her own today. Math saw the conclusion of our fraction unit. Finally! Tomorrow we start decimals.

More details tomorrow. I'm too pooped to post. :) Off to try and stop coughing....