Walter and Ollie are gone for the weekend. It's kind of a beautiful thing, for them as well as for us. I dealt with the loss by taking Frances to Build-A-Bear, since she was upset at not just staying here with me, but having to go to a dr's appointment on top of that. Turns out that we didn't really need to go in the first place and the doctor could just fill out the physical form for gymnastics and update some info with a current height and weight (42.5 inches, 37 pounds). It's worth noting here that after the flurry of emails about the "creepy guy" who seemed to be using a fluffy dog to lure children away from the pop-jet fountain there, there was mega-high and very obvious security in the fountain area, so much so that it would be a brave little soul who would feel confident playing with an enormous uniformed and armed man standing so menacingly three feet away. I even found myself ruminating on what I might be doing at the moment that would warrant being carried off in shackles by this man. At any rate, it was too cold for anyone with a shred of sanity to be dancing around in what is always freezing cold water anyway. We picked up a Cub Scout styled bear shirt for the ubiquitous Husky and called it a wrap (okay, I just called it a warp before I corrected my spelling, but that's just me..).

I'm thinking seriously again about how I'm going to start writing seriously for money. Maybe I don't need to write seriously, but I do need to write for money. I also started looking into what I'd need to do to apply as an adjunct faculty member at one of the community colleges. Most daunting is getting 3 letters of recommendation; it's been 10 long years since I've taught at all, and I'm a long way from that era of my life and the people who were in it then. Having never finished my degree and kind of gone AWOL numerous times, I'm not in what I view as the best position to be grovelling, but this may be a moment to swallow my pride. I've talked a lot in my blog in the past about whether it is possible to be too poor to homeschool, but it's very clear as I'm planning next year that yes, it is possible, depending on your particular chosen route. And even more so if you are the parent of a miniscule Mary Lou Retton, whose kindergarten gymnastics career actually makes loud slurping noises as it sucks away your paycheck.

Am I nervous about adding in more to my is-my-head-above-water? life? You betcha. It would be the supreme irony if I started working part time to support my homescholing lifestyle and found that it made me so frazzled that I had to put my children in school so I could continue to work. But a little something has to be done. To that end, I have been reading the _Writer Mama_ book I picked up a few weeks ago at B&N, and it makes me both feel like I can do this (or at least an arrogant, hey, if these other people can do it, I can), but it is also scaring the pants off me. I just don't want to write for a newspaper. I don't want to be running around interviewing people on assignments all the time; I hate that kind of stuff. I'm a loner, a recluse, a misanthrope with awful social skills. That's why I want to sit home with my computer by myself and write and never have to actually make actual contact with a human being. I'm thinking about a lot of ideas I have for articles, some of which I'll include here totally unedited.

My old standard is that I haven't ever read anything about breastfeeding after infertility, specifically the angle of mothers who want to maintain their attachment parenting lifestyle and pursue further treatment for a next child. Others are the gritty reality of homeschooling with toddlers in the house, homeschooling twins, ping-pong homeschoolers (unschooling this week, collapsing under the weight of books from the used curriculum sale the next). If it wasn't so late, I'd probably be pulling up a bunch of my others from my list, but my eyes are glazing over yet again. I'm having a problem with this lately.

I need to set firm goals for myself--no more procrastinating. Something along the lines of I need an article written with a real plan for it by the end of this month, which I guess means about two weeks. I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I have two fewer children this weekend to spend some time in the bookstores perusing the magazine racks and narrowing down a loftier goal while also making some plans for a local publication.

At home, I'm pushing for a more clear delineation of budget items. I am drawing up a proposal that I believe will offer the kind of flexibility and generosity we need for activities next year while maintaining accountability with other budgetary areas. Translated, this means that I need a way to put my money where my mouth is and prove that I've tasted those filthy little dollar bills when I say that such-and-such means so much to me that I'm willing to stop eating to have it. Kerry is still pulling his sorry old, "Rules are made to be broken" as a reason why we shouldn't have some envelope system or vague mental plan for how to divide our resources. Frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating, the new cell phone that we won on eBay came yesterday, and it refuses to work. So it has to go back. Meanwhile, my lame, limping phone also refuses to be reactivated. What I'm left with is no working phone, and it is driving me positively crazy. I had not realized how much I depend on the thing to multitask while I'm waiting for children somewhere or driving in the car, and today I ended up spending the majority of my day at home, tethered to the phone, trying to sort out a variety of things going on in the many arenas of my life. I felt like there were fewer hours in the day. What's worth sayng, though, is that obviously four years ago, I was living a perfectly fulfilling life without one of these little devices, and now it is a crisis that I have to go 72 hours without it (actually, we're talking more like 2 weeks, but still...).

Tomorrow hopefully I will have pictures to post of a way improved new haircut.