Waterfall Side Braid

Another of our adventures in braiding...

These pictures were taken after wearing the braid to school all day.  That's why it's a little wispy.  But overall I think it held up well.

(Once again, idea by Princess Hairstyles.)

Crazy Hair Night

In our Awana clubs we have a Crazy Hair Night every year.  Kids donate $0.50 to our Nicaragua mission fund and in return we give them a fabulous new hair style, complete with colored hair spray and sno-cone cups.  This year we raised almost $75!!

Since I am the leader of Awana at our church, I had to show my support too.

For some reason Julie did not want her hair taken down.  She just wanted the color.  It's hard to see the color but it was green and blue.

David was all about the craziness.

And, of course, when you spray tons of hairspray in your hair, no matter the color, there is craziness after you take it down too.

Embrace the craziness!

August Reading List

I'm reading 24 books this year- books that I already had in my house.  See the whole list here.

My fiction book for the month is Betrayal in Paris by Doris Elaine Fell.

(from the back cover) A double betrayal decades apart leaves a family at odds and siblings in rivalry.  In the favorite son's quest to restore his father's honor, he is left behind on foreign soil - the victim of a different war, the victim of the same betrayer.  Twenty-seven-year-old Adrienne Winters, daughter and sister to the men betrayed, steps into a game of intrigue involving a terrorist cell in Paris, a perilous captivity in Kuwait, her brother's deception, and her country's cover-up.

All the books I'm reading this year are books that I already owned.  I get my books from a variety of places, usually not full price at a retail store.  This particular book I got at a local used book store.  After reading it, I understand why it was there.

It was not good.  There was nothing morally bad with it or anything.  But it just wasn't good writing.  Minor characters were suddenly made into major characters in the middle of the book.  The story line just rambled on and on without any clear direction.  Big "twists" were so easy to figure out ahead of time that when they were revealed, it was the definition of anticlimactic.

I finished the book just because I haven't finished many recently, but it was tedious reading 400 pages of book that I really just didn't like.  If you see this book on the shelf, leave it there.

My nonfiction book was supposed to be Too Busy Not to Pray by Hybels, but instead I chose to go back and read June's selection (that I didn't get around to reading), Bringing Up Boys by James Dobson.

(from Amazon) Sensible advice and caring encouragement on raising boys from the nation's most trusted parenting expert, Dr.James Dobson. With so much confusion about the role of men in our society, it's no wonder so many parents and teachers are at a loss about how to bring up boys. Our culture has vilified masculinity and, as a result, boys are suffering. Parents, teachers, and others involved in shaping the character of boys have lots of questions. Dr. Dobson tackles these questions and offers advice and encouragement based on a firm foundation of biblical principles.

(my thoughts)  I'm still in the middle of this book, but it is just wonderful so far.  I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  No only does it help me better understand my son, it helps me better understand my husband.  Things like, why can they both walk into a room and step over the same junk on the floor and never notice it.  Because boys are genetically wired to be focused on one thing at a time, such as whatever reason they had for coming into that room, to the exclusion of all else, including the junk on the floor.

There will be some hard sections of this book for some people to take.  Dr. Dobson has strong opinions about homosexuality and single parents families.  What I love about this book, including those sections, are all the statistics that Dobson uses to back up every conclusion he has in the book.  He mentions that this book took the longest to write out of every book he's written, simply because he was doing so much research for it.

Some amazing, eye-opening stats that he mentions...70% of all African American babies are born out of wedlock; 33% of all children are born to unwed mothers; boys that are raised in a home without a father present (including those with a stepfather, but not a biological father present) are 3 times more likely to be incarcerated.  It all boils down to the fact that it is vitally important to have a father in a boy's life, even more important than a mother.  But for those who are already raising a boy without a father, Dr. Dobson offers encouragement and advice as well.

I highly recommend this book to everyone raising a boy and even to those who want to better understand their husband.

No More Tubes

Theses things were in David's ears for almost 3 years!

As I mentioned in my last post, David had his tubes taken out of his ears last Monday morning.  We had his hearing tested last month and found out he has mild hearing loss.  However, since he is only 7, they said that mild hearing loss is significant.

Ever since David was a baby, he has had ear infection after ear infection.  He got his first set of tubes at 10 months.  The set above is his 4th set.  Each time they would put tubes in around Christmas, then they would fall out about 10 months later.  Then the ear infections would start again and would be constant until we put tubes in again...at Christmas again.  After doing that cycle 3 times, our ear doc suggested putting in the T-tubes seen in the picture above.

"Regular" tubes look just like tiny pieces of a straw that they stick through the ear drum.  Your ear drum is essentially a piece of skin that is stretched across your inner ear that vibrates when sound waves hit it.  That's how you hear.  When you get sick - a cold, the flu, respiratory infection, etc. - fluid can build up behind your ear drum.  Most people have bodies that reabsorb the fluid when you start to get better.  If your body doesn't do that, the fluid remains back there and gets infected.  When a doctor puts tubes through the ear drum, they allow the fluid to drain out from behind the ear drum into the ear canal and out of the body.

"Regular" tubes are made to fall out within a year.  The hope is that little bodies will learn to get that fluid out on their own and they will outgrow the ear infections and the need for more tubes.

That wasn't the case for David.

T-tubes, as pictured above, are like a little straw with a flexible "T" on them.  That "T" goes behind the ear drum and keeps the tubes in the ear.  Since it is flexible, when it's time to take them out, the doctor just pulls on them a bit with a special pair of tweezers and they just pop right out of the ear.

I won't say it was completely painless to get them out because David's left ear hurt for about 15 minutes, but it wasn't too bad.  Now, it's a waiting game...wait for those holes in his ear drums to heal up, pray that they heal up on their own and don't need help, and retest his hearing to see if taking the tubes out helped.

Unfortunately, both ear infections and tubes can create scar tissue in the ear and can affect hearing.  The more scarred and thick the ear drum is the less it can vibrate.

Our prayer is that letting his ear drum heal up will allow his hearing to be restored.  But for now, he is very excited to show off his tubes to everyone who will listen.

Stay in the car week

I have truly had a "stay in the car mom" week. Tim was in California all week for work. It's hard when we're separated by 3000 miles and a 3 hour time difference.  On top of that it was the busiest week we've had since school started.  It looked something like this:

• Monday - Take kids to school, go get David an hour later to get his tubes taken out of his ears, take him to lunch at Chick-fil-a because he missed his lunch at school, come home for 2 hours, go pick up kids from school, piano lessons til 4:15, home for 1.5 hours during which we did homework and ate dinner, then take Julie (and an unwilling David) to swim practice, then home for showers and bed.

And that was just day 1. Shew!

The rest of the week the details were different but the crazy schedule was the same.

Thankfully Tim is home now and we have absolutely no weekend plans, so we can relax and recover from life.

I feel for single moms out there. After just 5 days of  being a single mom, I'm exhausted.