Topic: Family Business
Not much to say, took the last of the 
herbs out of my garden yesterday & spent a bunch of time with mr 7 while doing that, he found some interesting plants & was playing with the seed pods from them while I was bundling the sprigs of herbs together to hang up to dry & telling me a very imaginative story about the pods being planets & a big piece of quartz I found in the garden & brought back to the house being an asteroid coming to crush the planets, I thought it was very imaginative, 16 upon hearing it said it sounded suspiciously like something he watched on tv- who knows, I was entertained & that's the fun part. Mr7 is so absorbed in tv & his own stuff, running around, building with his magnetix or his fisher price castle pieces, he rarely just sits & talks to me, even about imaginary storys & even with a lot of encouragement from me. Part of the situation is that miss 16 is often monopolizing the conversation, yesterday she was home sick though & we'd 
had about enough of each other by 5 pm which is when I was out pulling the herbs & getting them bundled up, the chives I cut up with scissors & froze, the others are drying on my nice hutch I put together this summer. Note the cat sleeping in the Bowl.
Today miss 10 is home sick, mostly sick of going to school I think, that & sick of seeing her older sister stay home sick, I'm of the belief that the occasional Mental Health day at home is not a bad thing in the least- I especially like that it allows me to interact with just 1 kid at a time for awhile, Miss 10 & I had a nice talk in bed this morning, (she crawled into bed with me as soon as her siblings got on the bus) She's not like her sister, she's more like her father, a fatalistic attitude & the take on life that it sucks, oh well, get over it, that's tough to take at age 10 & I try to talk to her about trying not to be so hardcore & harsh about her take on life. Yesterday we wrote an email to her dad as he had emailed her, she'd started one as a reply to his most recent previous email back in september but she wrote 1 sentence & then put it away so when she told me she had a new email from her dad I offered to type & she could just dictate it to me, which is what we did & it worked out ok, Not too sure how her dad will like that though, I'm sure he'd prefer to hear from her direct with out my intervention, I'd prefer not to intervene but she's a procrastinator so to get something out to him I felt it was better for me to help & get it done than to have her keep putting it off. She gets especially funky about the whole dad thing, 7 was a baby & 16 was a stepchild who says she hated him & was glad to see him go when he left in 2000, Miss 10 was 4 & remembers good times from back when we did all live together & She definitley loves her dad still where 7 doesn't remember him & 16 rememb
ers him all too well, 10 idolizes him however.
Miss 10 & I went out today to the stores to get milk & a few other neccessities, bread, broccoli, forks from the dollar store, (when 12 forks stays 12 forks for 6 months then I will stop buying forks for 3 for a dollar) we did pretty well considering 10 is a compulsive shopper & has a really hard time not asking for everything in the store. I did get pop tarts & candy corn at her request but mostly because the kids needed something to snack on & I have these cute halloween bowls around the house & like to have something in them so we were in cahoots on getting the candy corn.
Back to work tommorow, a whopping 22 hours in 2 days, I'm dedicated to doing my overtime on Sunday & Fridays now so that I can be home to help with homework (the first report cards were released last week & were less than impressive!) 10 & 7 both need to buckle down if I can be here by 845 on Mondays & Thursdays then we
might be able to get their grades up Miss 16 did great she got 3 as & a b, her highschool does things differently, they only take 4 classes per semester, she's got English, History, Drawing & Sculpture for her 4 classes until the end of January & so while english & history are fairly hard classes the 2 art classes seem like they'd be a walk in the park. She doesn't think so though & thinks I'm mean for saying they are easy classes. I've loved my kids from babyhood on & enjoyed every minute of it but I will be glad just the same when they're all old enough to just do their homework with out argument, help or anything from me. There are too many holes in my own - homeschooled- education for me to be much help in many circumstances.
