My last few remaining readers might wonder this. Or not. Regardless I’ll share, because this is my space after all and it’s all about me and what I want to remember and record, right?

My summer break is here. So no school, but still lots of studying.

One of my instructors for next Fall emailed the syllabus and the reading schedule will be the most rigorous I’ve had yet. She advised us to have these two books read and ready for discussion the first day of class:

Freedom From Fear
858 pages

and

Grand Expectations
790 pages

That class will remain challenging as required reading will include at least one book a week, and some weeks we will read two books. I’ll be writing two ten page papers and seven or eight book reviews (that I know of).

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some brainstorming and researching and I may have my thesis topic. I’m thinking possibly about exploring courtship and marriage in the post American Revolutionary era. However, I have to verify the availability and accessibility of primary sources. I may end up having to move the time period to post 1800.

So once, I have that hammered down I’ll be working on a paper this summer to complete the course I took last fall. It will serve as a chapter of the above thesis. Then this fall I have another research seminar and will use that class to write another chapter of the thesis.

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As for the kids’ school, the younger two are finished for the year as of today. The girl graduated from preschool where she apparently was quite popular. Her teachers predict the performing arts in her future:

Demolition Toddler will go back to that school for the next two years while our girl goes on to Prekindergarten. I hope she gets the same teacher our oldest had last year. (Hint Hint Mrs. K if you still read this.)

The five and half year old has two more days of school left this year. Today and Tuesday. Tuesday is a makeup day because of all the inclement weather days the school system closed for this winter. Next year he will return to Kindergarten with Mrs. L and hopefully he will finally take an interest in writing and developing those fine motor skills. His absolute lack of interest in writing and drawing and sitting to do table work combined with emotional immaturity are the reasons he will repeat Kindergarten next year. We’ve been told the last two years he was too young for the grade he is in. Third time is the charm, I’m not going to ignore the advice this year. He’s the youngest in his class this year and it shows. His teacher promises to keep him challenged because he is such an intelligent kid. Hopefully we will see the progress in emotional development and maturity, patience, and interest in writing that he needs to succeed in first grade the following year.

He’s been teaching himself to read this year. I’ll keep working with him on that.

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Because I am out of my school for the summer and have less structured demands on my time, I’m helping my son’s elementary school with a fund raising project. Sadly, we are in the poorest school district in town and as a result we don’t have a great deal of money to draw upon for improvement projects. The 1st through 5th grade portion of the playground is extremely outdated, including equipment dating back to the 1960s. We are in the process of raising funds to update the playground with new equipment. I entered this process really late in the game and now that it’s crunch time I’m helping the committee by gathering contact information for other possible funding sources and writing letters. We need to order the new equipment in the next couple of weeks so that it arrives and is installed in time for the start of the school year in August. I’ll also be assisting the school with the location of grants and writing those grants for future phases of the project.

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Finally, we are still waiting to close on the house. The septic system finally went in this week–and just in time, because it started raining cats and dogs this morning. Now we have to finalize a few other details. We had to start over on the loans because the lenders have changed the rules several times since we started this process. Ours is a unique situation because Snoring Daddy is self-employed, so the loan programs are a little sparser for us–especially because of the abundance of foreclosures that have taken place over the last year or so. The lenders are extremely leery these days, so we are jumping through hoop after hoop.

Hopefully it’s just a matter of a couple more weeks at this point. That will put us just a few weeks shy of our fifth anniversary in this house. We closed here on this house on June 26, 2002. Snoring Daddy isn’t keen on being here to mark the fifth anniversary.

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Oh and in a bit of news that I find positively Karmalicious (MY word–feel free to use it but please attribute it to its rightful source–moi). It looks like our current house will be bought by a landlord and turned into a rent house. Justice will arrive for my not-so-lovely neighbor after all. I hope she gets the partyingest, most obnoxious, irresponsible college guys there are for neighbors. I hope she wishes we were back and that she hadn’t been such a B.I.T.C.H. to us all these years. Oh karma. How sweet she is.

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