411 The Walters Bunch

              I have always loved change. I rearrange furniture on a consistent whim, I constantly go to new places, I have everything from a Bachelor's in Psychology to a valid real estate sales person license, and I have experimented with just about every color of hair dye that is out there. However, I do those things because I want to.  None of it has been a necessity, at least not up until this point. I am currently at the crossroads of my adult life.  Where is all this coming from? It originated from a single gray hair over a year ago. I had my inevitable realization of my own mortality after discovering it, but I have to be honest, I really did not see this as much of a problem, yet. I had my small heart attack, pulled it out with tweezers, and went on my way. However, pulling the hair apparently angered it and several more grew back in its place. So, I pulled more. This has gone and on. Now, over a year later, I am realizing I can't spend 10 minutes pulling gray hairs EV

We are FINALLY all getting over the month long illnesses. Everyone has taken their turn being sick in a methodical order. D was the last one to contract The Bunch Virus, as I refer to it. He actually had to call in sick on Saturday. You cannot be a very effective policeman when you have laryngitis and cannot talk on the radio or to people. I, however, throughly enjoyed his inability to object to my choice of movies for a coule of days. We spent the day yesterday at the beach at Lake Ray Roberts. It was so much fun. We will be investing in a sunshade before our next visit though. I do not want to turn into the NJ tanning mom. :)      For those who are keeping track, I am now one third of the way done with the driveway. It will be so great when I finish, but the getting there is definitely a workout! Today's field trip is to take the kids bowling. it should be lots of fun.

Our first week sans school was AWESOME! I love homeschooling, but it is VERY time consuming. The actual time the girls spend on their work each day is minimal when compared to those in a traditional setting, but lesson planning and paper/test grading are extremely time consuming and I am so happy to get a break for awhile.  Since everyone is still SLOWLY getting better from being sick, we stayed close to the house this week. We travel a lot so this felt a little like a punishment, but we did get some things done/started that we had wanted.       For instance, I have been griping about wanting a bigger driveway since we bought the house (side note: only 11 years left on mortgage. yeah!) so what better time for a lot of hard exhausting manual labor than while I have 3 kids who are perfectly content to rest and watch a movie. I have to be honest though, the project is way harder than I anticipated. In fact, 3 hours of D and I both working and we have only completed 50 sq ft of the 400 sq

Great day! I love my flowers! I want to wish ALL the mothers out there a Happy Mother's Day. I, personally, do not really agree with the holiday, but we celebrate it anyway on a very low level for the kids. It is not that I do not think we shouldn't recognize all that mothers do, it's just I think we should do nice things periodically for those who are important to us throughout the year. It is for this same reason that D and I generally do not celebrate our anniversary. We might do dinner, but that is it and that doesn't even happen every year. I in no way feel slighted or upset at this arrangement at all. In fact, I love it. It takes the stress out of the "holiday" and we just get to enjoy the day together, which in our case makes it just like every other day together. I am so blessed to have such a wonderful husband, who does have the uncanny ability to grate on my last nerve, but I cannot imagine that there is anyone more loving, devoted, and perf

        Despite the impending illness in our family, we actually had a pretty good weekend. The oldest came over for a few hours on Saturday to play with the younger kids and have dinner and on Sunday evening we did what all good parents do.....Loaded the sick ones up on ibuprophen and sent them to church to perform their year end songs.  They did very well.   A., along with the other children, has come along way on handbells in the past few months. We enjoyed the concert very much.       This week is the last week of school for girls, but thankfully not for T.  We are so ready to take sometime off and slow our pace down a little and prepare for our big camping excursion coming up. I have a lot of little things to finish getting together. Ready to sing and play bells!  C and L having fun on the Wii. 

     The past couple of weeks have passed in a blur at our house. We spent one week doing the IOWA testing for the older one and the littlest one had strep throat, which he has proceeded to pass around to everyone in a slow methodical order. Why is it that everyone can't just get sick at the same time? I would much rather spend one week with everyone sick and then resume our normal pace, but instead we will spend three weeks taking turns getting everyone well.         This is our last week of school before summer break and I am as excited about it as the kids are.  We have a lot of fun trips planned and we will try to get them all in before the relentless heat of summer sets in, though since it is only the beginning of May and we are already creeping close to the century that might not happen. I have greatly reduced my volunteer obligations so this summer should be particularly fun. I can't wait to get started on our summer!