I'm back! ready?

time once again to try to catch up last year's posts and start putting this year into the blog as well.

I think I'm at last Summer.
Erica was away from home for a majority of the Summer. She went to stay with my brother and sister in law to help with their kids while my sil was taking classes this summer. she is getting close to being done with school. if I remember correctly she is going to be interning starting at the end of this week and that's very exciting!
Erica felt as though she did a really horrible job being the baby sitter. things are very different from one family to the next, even when those families are related. many of her tactics she uses that work well with her siblings are not necessarily going to work with anyone else. so she felt very frustrated. If nothing else, she learned that she really should be ready to be a grown up before she has a family of her own. (not that I'm worried)

June~ birthdays. then Erica was gone. Timothy went to scout camp, Ronan's dentist told us that he needed extensive work done on his teeth so at the end of June he went to the hospital's out patient ward and had it all done. pictures and story found on this link

July~ from March throughout the spring and much of summer we had been reduced to one vehicle - Tim's car - that does not have enough room to fit 7 people in it, so our movements as a family were severely restricted. that's not usually a problem because if I must I can just walk to our local store and post office and get by with one shopping trip a week or two. we did that for several months and all was fine in the world.
we knew a family that was moving. they had a very old van that drives just fine, but they didn't want to have to tow it along, etc. anyway, we bought it from them for a reasonable price and we ran off to pick up Erica and love and hug her and spend the day with her. We went to our happy second home, the Landscaping Arboretum of the University of Minnesota. if you've never been, try to go. it's lovely! in fact, it's so lovely that on that day we didn't actually get to wander through many of our favorite gardens because there were weddings all over that place - 7 that we counted, but I'm sure there were more. I took loads of pictures, I posted them here but I didn't make any comments on them. I was really exhausted.
Emma was diagnosed with a condition in layman's terms is called 20 nail dystrophy. basically for some unknown reason her finger and toe nails are growing in very soft and then become quite brittle. she also has streaking in the lunula (the half moon at the base of the fingernail) which was what had me freaking out when we first discovered the problem earlier. my initial thoughts were of heart disease or liver disease. but then I made myself calm down enough to consider the fact that she was still active and had nothing else that would indicate a huge problem like that, so the next thing on my list was vitamin or iron deficiency. so we had the kids get back in the habit of taking their vitamins, but after 9 months her nails were not as improved as I would have liked to see, so off to the doctor. her pediatrician was completely baffled. she asked the same initial questions of heart issues and liver problems too (I could be a doctor) and it just didn't fit so on to the next thing... she called the pediatric dermatologist. then we went to see her to confirm the diagnosis and will be going back as a follow up in a couple weeks... she also ran a test on Emma's thyroid (which is healthy) just to be certain.
and that was our July.

August~ it was similar in that Erica was gone right away to girls camp. I had started collecting school supplies. and the rest of it was a bit emotionally depressing. the youngest kids contracted Hand Foot and Mouth and nothing to be done about it but let it run it's coarse. Not long after that Timothy was diagnosed with a Lyme Disease infection. he was on STRONG antibiotics for almost 3 weeks. he's all better now. but August was just harsh on my emotional state.

September~ starts school and the Craft Sale I was feverishly crafting to fill my inventory for.
I did pretty well at the craft sale considering it was 80 degrees and I'm trying to sell YARN. Erica had a table set up next to me in my booth area and she tried her luck. she sold a couple of things but she was very disappointed that no one was buying. :(
but she wanted to get right back on that horse and asked if we could do another craft sale. (so we did one in December)

and that's the first installment.

check back soon for more about October, November, and December....