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Kaelyn is going to her first horse show, and one of the events is Showmanship.  This is where they judge how the horse looks and how well you handle them on the ground with a halter and lead rope.  Kaelyn will be scrubbing Shinanigan until she shines, and she wanted something to put over her to keep the dust off of her while she traveled to the arena.  So Kaelyn started hunting, and found this old blue sheet.

 We bought some double stick interfacing to stick the letters to the fabric, so Kaelyn could sew some decorative stitches without them sliding all around.

 When this girl sets her mind to something, look out!  She will make it happen!

 It was a fun project.  I’ll be sure to get a picture of it actually on the horse!!   
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I took these pictures for the Woodman, because he was away working, and I didn’t want him to miss the beauty of his Irises.  He and his mother truly enjoy this flower, and I will admit, they are a beautitful flower!  We’re still trying to decide where their permanent home will be in the garden, but for now, they line a part of one side of the garden fence.  I think the deer do stick their little noses through and nibble on them just a bit, so we may end up moving them away from the fence.  I’m loading these photos after the Woodman has been home for the weekend, so I’m too late, but everyone else can still enjoy them.

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The garden seems to be hibernating.  The weather has been cold, cloudy, and drizzly.  When these pictures were taken, this was the ONLY sunny day, sandwiched between gloomy and cool weather.  Since we had put plants into the ground, and especially the warm weather loving plants, like the tomatoes and peppers, nothing had grown a bit.  For 3 weeks, things just sat, looked ill, cold, and very unhappy.  It’s warm now, so I’m really hoping there is still time for things to ripen up before the first frost in late September or early October.

 Kids are weeding the corn.  Tomatos are on the left, path of lettuce volunteers, elephant garlic, and the regular lettuce patch on the right.  Beyond the kids is one patch of beans.

 Lettuce, peppers, a bed that our neighbor is using, and more garlic beyond that.

 Potato patch is coming along nicely.  I think we have 4 x 92 ft of potatoes planted this year.

 Peas are fairly happy despite the cold weather.

 We never harvested the garlic last year, so it’s a very full patch this year.  I’m not sure what to expect when we dig it up.  And don’t ask me what we’re going to do with all that garlic.  I don’t know.

 Raspberries almost ready to blossom.  Hoping the wasps won’t be too bad this year.  We always have to compete with them for the berries.  Normally, we win, but it’s much nicer when there aren’t so many of them!

 First Strawberries.  I need to go up there again and soon.  This picture was taken a week ago, so there must be enough for a small breakfast bowl by now.

 Strawberry patch is scary big…4 x 46 ft, times 5 rows.  Once they start, we’ll have berries all summer.  I”m looking forward to having a freezer full of frozen strawberries and jars of strawberry jam in my pantry! Now that the sun is shining, we will have to really begin to battle with the weeds.  It’s a daunting task, that’s for sure.  
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I finally came into the house and the kitchen was clean, the kids had followed through with their assignments AND had made supper, which I hadn’t asked them to do.  I immediately felt better.  After supper we enjoyed some music together, and then I did 2 math lessons with Darien.  He lost the paper, but we did more math than necessary today, to meet our August 3rd deadline, so maybe we didn’t lose ground. 

I plan to help him with his math everyday, to try and pull his grade up.  He has failed 2 units, and if we have time, I’ll request that he be able to re-take those two tests in hopes that we can get his grade up for each unit.  I think a kid has to be pretty “mathy” to be able to read it in a book and “get it”, without additional explanation.  This kid is not “mathy”, so I will lend my help where I can.  I’m decent at Algebra, so I’ve been able to explain things in this pre-algebra course.

I finally got the pictures to load on my blog from my iPhone.  Garden pictures coming…

I want a new life. I want to run away and hide from my reality. I just spent the last 2 1/2 hours at a friend’s house using their Internet because ours is so painfully slow due to over usage on our bandwidth, and Darien needed to do his online schoolwork. I left my other kids to take care of the one kid. In all that time, he got one computer lesson done and he wrote 2 paragraphs of an essay. It was getting late, and we needed to let our friends have the privacy of their home back. I told Darien to back up his paragraph, copy and paste it to a new document, whatever it took to save it, before shutting down his computer. INSTEAD, he tried to just save the work online, but the Internet connection was giving him issues, and he ended up losing everything he wrote.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t take this child an hour to write a paragraph. I’m so angry right now I can hardly see straight, and at the same time I just want to give up. He is NOT going to finish these classes in time. He has until august 3rd that is the deadline and the last day he can submit any work Maybe I should just accept that he will not finish. He needs 60 units to be considered a sophomore next year. He will have 54. If he could finish the computer class, he’d have 59, and that could get by. The problem is that I AM THE ONLY ONE STRESSING ABOUT THIS.

Sorry, rant coming…

I don’t want to be the only one that cares about his education.
I don’t want to be the only one home raising the children.
I don’t want to be the only one taking care of the dog business this summer.
I don’t want to be the only one taking care of the garden this summer.
I don’t want to be the only referee overseeing my children so they will help with all these things this summer.
I don’t want to be the only driver this summer.
I don’t want to be the only house keeper this summer.
I don’t want to be the only one noticing that the lawn needs to be mowed this summer.
I don’t want to be the only one noticing everything that needs to be done this summer.

I’m still sitting in my car writing this blog post. If I just sit here, I don’t have to face my reality I don’t want to go into my messy house. I don’t want to face my messy kitchen. I gave the other two children instructions to clean the kitchen while I was gone with Darien. I don’t want to have to come into the house and find that they didn’t do it, and listen to their excuses of “he/she didn’t do thus/such, and so I couldn’t do my part of the job.” I don’t want to have to be the only one thinking of consequences for lack of follow through.

I’m tired of having everything resting on my shoulders.

Maybe I’m too intense about everything. Maybe I need to “chill”. I just want my kid to get through high school, and then I want him to be able to get a job and support himself. That’s all. I don’t think it’s really very much to ask.

Thank you for listening.

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