Spider

When Maddy and I do school work I do my best to keep it fresh and somewhat fun.  Her learning ability is pretty much capped out, but we still do a lot of reviews and new concepts do sneak in once in a while.  To start this school year out I decided to try a word game with her.  I had a deck of scrabble cards which was basically scrabble tiles on cards.

I picked out 10 cards with a nice mix of vowels and consonants. I explained that I would set the timer for 5 minutes and she was to make as many words as she could.  She would write them on a piece of paper so she could use the cards more than once.  As I am explaining this to her she wanted to know if she could have a few more cards.  I told her that she could have 5 more, but she had to pick then.  She asked for an S, and I, and  a P.  I thought the S was a great choice the P confused me.

Once she had all the tiles lined out on the table I put the time on the timer and went in the other room to do some work.  I passed through once and saw the word spider on her list.  I thought WOW!  Later that day when on the phone with the husband I told him about how well she did, she thought it was fun and how impressed I was that she spelled spider.

That night at dinner I told Maddy that I was so impressed with her word spider that I had told Mark all about it.  She looks at Mark, and just cracks up laughing.  Through the laughter I hear her tell Mark that she had cheated!

When she was doing this exercise there was a Spiderman cup on the table and that is what she used to spell spider.  She was smart enough to not spell Spiderman because I would have caught on to what she had done.

After almost 18 years, that kid can still bamboozle me!

Not enough hours in the day

It seems that lately I have been treating my blog just like I treated my diary when I had one.  Keep up for a while, drop off the face of the earth and then reappear again.

I think about writing and I intend to blog a whole lot more than I actually get around to doing it.  There just are not enough hours in the day.

Short version of recent life:

Mom- She is doing much better, moving around better and starting to go out once in a while.  She is still in her "turtle" but in 4 weeks we hope that she gets to be out of it for a while during the day.  One of the side effects of this adventure is that she has had so much lab work and so many x-rays, MRI's and Cat Scans that doctors keep finding things.  In the long run I suppose it will be good, but right now it seems like set backs.  Hopefully this will all be behind her and she can get back to her busy social life full time.

Maddy:  Wow!!  She won a ton of medals including a gold at her last swim meet.  She is done with competition for the year, but is still going to practice to improve.  Her and the boy friend are taking a break right now and we will see if they decide to give it a go again or decide to move on.  On Oct. 1st she will be 18 and we have everything in place to hopefully go to court that week to retain Guardianship of her.  It was a long process mentally and financially but we know it is the right thing to do for her.

Mark:  He is working about 28 hours a day.  It seems like that most days.  He is still trying to keep up with all his writing deadlines and get his name and talent out and about in Hollywood.  He is working full time at Save on Brew in addition to his full time day job that puts food on our table. 

Me:  I have taken over the Save on Brew Database and as I get that more under control we are working on expanding my job responsibilities.  Maddy and I have started school again for her Senior Year and it seems to be going well.

Will do my best to make more time to share funny Maddy stories.  They seem to be endless.  I have to remember to tell the "spider" story soon.