Transformers

We went to see the new Transformers movie, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", at the drive in theater last Friday.

We were so disappointed with this movie!

We foolishly thought that the PG-13 rating was for the action and things blowing up.  Were we ever wrong!  We thought being a Transformers movie that it would be a "safe" movie to take the grandkids too.  I learned that no matter how safe you think a movie is, look it up and see what made the rating what it is.

What ruined the movie for us is the language and the sophomoric/crude humor about male genitalia.

Our recommendation is to skip this movie.

Finally ! !

Well, the doctor's office finally called about grandson's arm yesterday morning. It is broken. We go in next week for follow up x-rays and hopefully a cast on the arm. Meantime grandson is to keep the compression sleeve on and keep the arm in the sling. I'm sure there are *some* kids that would follow those instructions, but not grandson!

Grandson has a high pain tolerance. So, although the arm hurts, he's got it out of the sling umpteen times a day. I can't let him go outside since I can't let him out of my sight. Just the simple act of getting everyone in the car to take the dogs and cat to the vet for their annual rabies vaccinations resulted in grandson hopping on his bike and taking off. He insists that he can ride the bike with the arm in the sling, but refuses to consider that he could take a spill on the bike and injure the arm further.

The doctor will have a couple of women (daughter and I) ready to shake him if he doesn't put a cast on this kid's arm. There is simply no way we can keep him from re-injuring the arm for the time the bone needs to heal. Also, his non-stop complaining about not being able to go outside is driving us nuts!

On the homeschooling front, I have pretty much finished choosing supplements to our core curriculum. We use Accelerated Achievement, aka A2, for our core.

This year we are trying another history program since the kids have been complaining about our living books history core being "boring." We will be using The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer. We will be starting with Volume 1. I decided on this history series because it is used as the core of many other history programs. The textbooks are very reasonable, I think the activity books are a little expensive, but all in all they are fairly priced for homeschool materials. Being an inherently frugal person, I am still shopping around to find the best price I can for the materials. Once I've saved the money for the history books, I'll make a final decision as to the place I buy them. Of course, there is always e-Bay.

We will be using Shurley English this year. The English program in the A2 curriculum is very rigorous and I think it's a good one. I thought the sentence diagramming would be just the think for visual learning granddaughter. It turned out that it just didn't work for her. She would go through the exercises, but just wasn't making the connections. I am hoping that Shurley English will be the program that speaks to her. Shurley English uses jingles as memory aids and to teach the rules of English Grammar. Music is a very effective learning tool with my grandchildren. It certain made their Latin lessons fun and more effective. So I have high hopes that Shurley English Level 7 will work for granddaughter and Level 5 will work for grandson.

I shopped around for a vendor for the English books. I finally decided to go with Smart Alec Books. She sells on e-Bay as " homeschoolerofthree ". Her mailing time is great! There was a little problem with my order (we are all human), but once she was aware of the problem she fixed it right away. I will likely purchase our Science books from her this summer. While I am frugal, once I find a vendor with good customer service and good prices I like to stay with them. If you are only talking $5 on a $80 to $100 order I think that it's better to go with the vendor known to have good customer service rather than a vendor that is unknown.

Science is a topic that my granchildren consider to be the candy of their education. They went trhough last year's science book in a little over 4 months. So this coming year we are going to go with Apologia Science. I'm hoping a more rigorous Science program will engage the grandkids more. Also, granddaughter will be doing 7th grade next year. Since she wants to be a veterinarian, she will need a very strong science background. Apologia appears to me to be a very good science program that should take the kids through high school complete with labs. Science is one subject where both kids are at the same level. Science, or at least the lab, involves a lot of pre-planning and involvement on my part. With my disabilities and fatigue issues, there's just no way I could run two different levels of science. I anticipate that we will be able to do the Science combined through high school levels.

Well, that's it for now. I need to go ride herd on the kids getting their Saturday chores done. They also need to help get the yard ready for their mom to use the push mower.

Some days are like that

I think it was something in the air yesterday.

Getting up in the morning went okay. Then daughter called from work about 8:30 a.m. on her first break at the nursing home and said the state inspectors were there. Every nursing home gets inspected on a yearly basis, but it's still nerve wracking for everyone who works there. It's kind of like being an excellent driver and taking an in vehicle driving test.

Then around 12:30 p.m., while theoretically taking the trash to the complex dumpster, 12 y.o. granddaughter flips 9 y.o. grandson over her shoulder and he lands badly on his left arm. He came in crying so hard that his lips were turning blue. He's not a crier. He didn't cry much at all when he cracked his ribs jumping off a dresser when he was 6. He didn't cry much at all last November when his cornea was scratched by a neighbor boy, but was still crying almost blue lip hard half an hour after the injury to his arm.

His arm swelled quite a bit around the elbow, despite icing the area. It wasn't dislocated. I have experience with reducing dislocations. With the swelling and extreme pain I was concerned that it might be broken. So I called all over hither and yon trying to determine if there was a doctor in the clinic in our town (population approx. 1700) yesterday. After 3 transfers and a bit of time on hold I finally got a definitive answer that the doctors were not in the clinic. So I called the clinic in the town daughter works in and fortunately the doctors are there Mon-Fri. They could work him in after 3 p.m. which is the soonest daughter could get him there after she got off work at 2 p.m. So I had to call daughter at work and the receptionist had to go find her on the nursing floor so that I could let her know what was going on and to not let anyone delay her getting home.

Since I'm grandma, legally I can't take him to the doctor unless it's life threatening, even if I had found a ride. We are a one vehicle family.

The doctor thinks that the arm is only badly bruised, since he didn't see a break on the x-ray, but we are waiting to hear from the radiologist.

Meanwhile we had the Sister Missionaries coming for dinner, whom we needed to pick up at our branch building at 4 p.m., *and* we had rented a rug cleaner that we were due to return at 4 p.m. in the same town as our branch. Of course, both stops were in the opposite direction from the doctor. So while waiting for daughter to get home I had to call and cancel with the Sister Missionaries and explain to the grocery store that we wouldn't be able to return the rug doctor later in the evening. I felt bad canceling with the Sister Missionaries as they had moved into an apartment the day before and don't really have a kitchen set up yet.

Then as daughter is rounding the corner to home to get grandson and take him to the doctor, our landlord calls her on her cell phone. He's got a new accountant and according to the spreadsheet from his new accountant we hadn't paid all our deposit payments or this month's rent. So, while daughter and grandson were gone to the doctor's office I was researching 7 months of 3 different checking accounts for the check numbers we paid with and printing off copies of the canceled checks that I could still find on line.

Daughter had scored at the thrift store on a nice matching set of dishes on Monday. We had taken the dishes we had been using out of the cabinet and boxed them up for the Sister Missionaries to take what they needed and then offer what's left to Freecycle or a thrift store. Nearly all of the "new to us" dishes were still on the counter waiting to be washed. So dinner was served on the picnic dishes.

It's such a good thing to teach children to cook. Granddaughter had made the meatloaf (her first meatloaf) and gotten it into the oven. I took some bread dough out of the refrigerator and made a quickie focaccia. Daughter made instant mashed potatoes and granddaughter put the green beans into the microwave. We had birthday cake left over from granddaughter's Sunday birthday. The dinner wasn't a fancy, but it was pretty tasty.

We didn't manage to finish the rug cleaning, as we were all too tired and emotionally wrung out to do more than clean up the rug machine and return it. Only one load of laundry got done, since the afternoon was taken up by getting the injury treated. So today I've had the kids running back and forth moving clothes from the washer to the dryer and bringing the laundry from the dryer into the living room so I can supervise the folding.

My bed felt wonderful when I climbed into it last night. Since I have fibromyalgia, I'm not doing all that well today after a day of high stress levels. If the usual pattern follows, I won't do well for about a week.

Of course granddaughter has a Young Women's activity at church tonight. It's her first official activity as a Young Woman, so it's pretty special. She's been excited about it for the past few days. Unfortunately the rest of the world runs on a later schedule than our early shift family. So, I'll probably be dragging again tomorrow.

First Post

I don't know how well I will do about keeping this blog current, but I intend to give it a try. Due to fairly extreme Fibromyalgia, I have become disabled. I have lived with my daughter for 3 years this past May. I was unable to do my own housekeeping and she and my son decided that it would be best for mom to live with daughter. In the past year we have moved from Kentucky to South Dakota. The grandchildren and I came on ahead in June 2008 and daughter stayed behind in Kentucky to try to sell our mobile home. Talk about bad market timing! Daughter got up here in September 2008. We found our current rental home and moved in November 1, 2008.