The Fey Family

Today I spent 2 hours crawling around the swimming pool on my knees vacuuming up the dirt that had settled at the bottom. I didn’t want to deal with another sunburn, so I wore a long sleeve shirt and had Jori put sunscreen on my neck. I am guessing by tomorrow morning the pool will look just as dirty, but I gave it my best shot. I’ve managed 2 nights in a row sleeping with the bite guard in! Thanks for all the advice!! I am sure my quality of sleep will keep improving as I get more used to it and maybe I will also magically stop clenching my teeth in the day time! I did a lot of home school planning while the kids were gone. I have a lot of friends here who “un-school”, and while there are times that might be a lot easier, there are certain things I want the kids to learn and know how to do, not only for educational opportunities down the road, but also for life. I took time to go through all the assignments I have planned for the week to weed out “busy work”, which I am not ...

It’s Saturday morning; cool with a slight breeze after some rain last night. Darin has been gone for 2 weeks and we have one week to go until he is back home. We dealt with load shedding (power cuts) the first week he was gone and a car breaking down the second week, so hopefully this last week will be smooth sailing. I picked up my new bite guard on Wednesday. I have managed to sleep with it for one night. If anyone has tips on getting used to sleeping with plastic in your mouth, let me know! I tried to sleep with it in last night and after tossing and turning for a few hours I gave up. I have been trying to find the areas of stress in my life as a bite guard, even one that I keep in my mouth all night, is not the solution to my teeth grinding. I discovered something I need that is often hard to come by; I need time alone. Completely alone. The kids slept over at friends (thank you Oosthuizen family) the weekend Darin left and when I walked into our empty house after droppin...

It is already a week into February and just about time for Darin to head off on another adventure. Tomorrow night he is heading to Ghana for a week and Kenya for a bit longer than that. He has a lot of meetings and conferences and might even have to pack a suit coat for this trip! Tys and Jori have finished one month of home schooling. There are days that go really well, days that are pretty bad and days where I think "we did what we could". I'd say most days are like that. We have moved away from Easy Peasy in several subjects as they just weren't working for us for one reason or another. We are now doing Teaching Textbooks for Pre-Algebra, CK12 for Earth Science and I am throwing together a bit of this and that for US History as our kids do not have the groundwork that most US children get throughout elementary school and we've had to take time to figure out some of the historical figures and events that they *should* know about. Hanging out in the middle ...