Guess I better get to blogging before everyone thinks I dropped off the face of the earth. There is just no time lately, and when I do get time, I just want to sleep!
So what's going on in the Riley family? For the past 2 months, Mark and I have been faithfully attending Financial Peace classes which we whole-heartedly endorse. It has definitely made a difference in our spending habits. Because of these classes, we've had a babysitter every Monday night. Usually it's Alli, a girl from our church. About 2 weeks ago, when we got back from our classes, she told us how badly our kids scared her that night. She had gone into the kitchen to make the boys some mac 'n cheese. She noticed that it had gotten pretty quiet and looked around for the boys. She couldn't find them anywhere even though sometimes she would hear them. We forgot to tell her about the secret room! :) Here the boys were in there, and Alli was starting to get a bit panicked. Guess that's something to keep in mind to tell babysitters in the future!
I've had a cough for the last couple weeks. I finally went to the doctor because I was so sick of upchucking every time I coughed. Since I had this cough for awhile, he figured it must be bacterial and put me on an antibiotic. It seems to be helping, but the cough is still hanging out, it seems. Now, Mark and Nathan have it too. When Mark was gone on Thursday night, Nathan slept with me because he was "scared". He woke up during the middle of the night, started coughing and puked all over me. Oh, the joy!
We just watched Weston and Wyatt for Angie and Bill this weekend. (They got a much needed time out to Columbus to visit Jon.) Maybe an hour after they came, the boys went upstairs to play. I was in the kitchen cooking and mentioned to Mark that the boys seemed suspiciously quiet. Mark went up to check on them and came back down to inform me that the boys had dumped all the betta fish food and tank chemicals in the aquarium. To make it even worse, I had cleaned that darn tank maybe a week ago. Needless to say, I was NOT happy. The fish were freaking out (probably because of the chemicals), so I immediately took them out of the water. I had 30 minutes to clean the tank because I had a Tastefully Simple party I had committed to attend. The boys were all surrounding me as I cleaned the tank trying to check out what I was doing. I kept saying, "Aunt Drew is mad! You need to go to the living room." It was lost on them! :)
So, that should have been the end of it. The next day when Nathan and Weston wanted to go upstairs to play, I took them both, looked them in the eye and warned them that they were ABSOLUTELY NOT to go anywhere near the fish tank. They made their promises, but soon after, Wyatt ran down to let us know Nathan was feeding the fish. That little booger had dumped another canister of food in the aquarium. Luckily Mark was right behind me and prevented me from murdering our son. So, last night I got to clean out the fish tank once again. So here's the big question...does anyone want some fish???? I am so tired of them! :)
Yesterday we were getting a little stir crazy. I was cutting out some coupons and came across some for Chuck E. Cheese's. We had never been there, and I thought it would be fun to try it out. I called up Janine, and we went on our merry little way soon after. The kids really did have fun. What's nice is that each game is only one token. What's not so great is that we had around 200 tokens. They were not being spent fast enough! Then, we didn't think to tell the kids how the tickets worked. They all split apart all of their tickets. We had to feed each one individually into the machine with a huge line of people behind us. We were a bit stressed at the end, especially since those tickets bought maybe $3 worth of junk! I have to say though that it isn't too expensive of a place to go and keep kids busy. They really enjoyed having free rein on playing the games...especially the older kids.
We brought some very tired children home. Weston started crying on the way home for no apparant reason. Later, when it was time to go to bed, Weston was crying because, as he said it, "I want to wrestle with your daddy!" (He was talking about Mark.)
The rest of my week was spent working on my quarterly progress reports for the IEP's. We are trying to report fully with samples for each objective. When you have 20 some kids and a billion goals, it takes FOREVER! For example, a kid might have a goal that targets spacing of words. I have to take a sample, count how many words are spaced correctly, how many aren't and figure a percentage. That covers just one objective of the 10-15 on just that one child's IEP. I estimate that I have spent at least 10 hours at home on this, and who knows how many at school. I am almost done. What I have left involves getting some more testing in place for a couple objectives.
With everything that has been going on, you would think I'd have some pictures, but, nope, I haven't taken any! So my blog continues to be boring and plain! Have a good week everyone. Oh, and before I forget to mention it, sweatiepie appears to be alive again. I got a comment from him for the first time in many months. Keep commenting, sweatiepie. We need some excitement on these blogs!
