I saw this from Leslie
and here by Emily
I am going to try and do the first thing that comes to mind.  Of course at this time of night the brain goes into shutdown mode.  So here it goes:)


1. Where is your cell phone? purse

2. Your significant other? Jeff

3. Your hair? BLACK

4. Your mother? home

5. Your father? Grandpa

6. Your favorite thing? Family

7. Your dream last night? bad

8. Your favorite drink? pop

9. Your dream/goal? Heaven

10. The room you’re in? messy

11. Your church? far

12. Your fear? Fire

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Farm

14. Where were you last night? Home

15. What you’re not? sad

16. Muffins? chocolate

17. One of your wish list items? Maid

18. Where you grew up? Everywhere

19. The last thing you did? Facebook

20. What are you wearing? rings

21. Your TV? waste

22. Your pets? none

23. Your computer? necessary

24. Your life? Busy

25. Your mood? thinking

26. Missing someone? nope

27. Your car? tan

28. Something you’re not wearing? shoes

29. Favorite store? garages

30. Your summer? short

31. Like(love) someone? kids

32. Your favorite color? green

33. Last time you laughed? today.

34. Last time you cried? recently

35. Who will repost this? her

Ok , that was hard to do.  I always had at least 2 words to say.

Let me know if you  try.
:>Michelle

I have sorely neglected my poor little blog, and my DD14 has been reprimanding me. What can I say? The move, followed closely by a new school year caught up with me and my blog suffered. Anyway, I am back and will try to do better. I have sat down with a glass of iced tea and a fierce determination to write!

Summer is well under way and I have indulged, without remorse, in a full month of not even thinking about school. Ahhhh. That was so needed and so refreshing. Now I feel ready to begin planning for the new school year. I have ordered the majority of my curriculum, but need to still figure out my plan for history and science. I am excited about the new year now, and have some fun and inspiring ideas for teaching these two subjects. This year will be different in that a neighbor (who is also my pastor's wife) and I will be teaming up to teach math and history. She will be teaching our four (between us) ninth graders math, and I will be teaching the same group history. I am hoping it will motivate all of us and be a lot of fun!

In other news, last week we had a crazy but totally fun week of VBS. I worked in crafts and also as a leader for the 1st-5th grade kids. We had a ball! DD12 is at camp this week with two of his friends. I miss him! I know he will have a wonderful week and grow in his faith, but it's hard to have him gone. Even though he's almost a teenager, he's still my little guy. Thank God I have three more at home or I don't know what I'd do with myself.  Next week, my DD14 heads off to her camp for a week. Sigh. This time I was smart and invited my sweeet niece who just turned 19 to visit for her annual summer visit with us. That will definitely be fun.

That's it for now. Oh! Be sure and check out Cindy Rushton's Virtual Seminar this weekend called Let's Get Organized for the New Schoolyear! That sounds awesome! And, just what I need to get some inspiration! Cindy says: " Talk about a MUST! I will take you by the hand and have a mommy getaway to plan for your new school year. I think you will enjoy it!  BTW...the Membership Site already has some fun goodies loaded and ready for you to dig into. So, make your plans to join us."  Here's how to join in on the fun:

This Weekend--July 11-12

Let's Get Organized for the New School Year Virtual Seminar! 

Sign up today to join us live (just register with your name/email for us to send you the passwords and schedule updates) or grab a ticket for access to our

Membership Site AND free ebooks/audios!

Sign up here: http://www.CindyRushton.com/LGO2008.html 

Have a great day!!!

Despite the fact that I was minus a husband child last week went well.  It was family night at boy scout camp on Thursday night.  Friday we went to a parade and then a picnic with friends.  The kids had lots of fun and came home with a pink motor car to play with. 

I do have a lot of friends with health issues right now.  I know the Lord is in control, but it is hard to see so many friends suffering.  Especially the two I know with cancer.

The paper route went well today.  It was nice have my oldest ds back to help.  Especially since it is his route.

Hope you all are well.

Mish

This year, the weather on the 4th of July was sufficiently mild that we did not mind being out of doors for the afternoon.  We had our church picnic that day and everyone had a good time.  As far as I know, anyway.  Unless they were only being "Minnesota nice."  Sheesh, we "foreigners" could get really paranoid around here.  I can say with certainty that our family had a good time. 

Johanna helped me decorate a patriotic pan of brownies.

John (on the left) and Randy grilled up the burgers and hot dogs. 

Here was our lovely spot under the trees.  It was quite pleasant there until someone from another group started setting off huge (and probably illegal) firecrackers not far away.  But that was about the only thing to mar our idyllic setting.

Our group earned itself some strange looks with this "game."  Here's how it came about: somehow a foam ball got stuck in the tree, so someone threw a foam bat up to knock down the ball.  Of course the bat got stuck.  So, someone grabbed a set of bocce balls and everyone set to work, throwing the balls into the tree, attempting to dislodge the recalcitrant bat.  It took quite a while, but, finally one guy hit the bat loose, and William hit it down.  Sam really liked this game and insisted on standing right where the bocce balls usually came sliding down a branch.  Thankfully, he never got hit.  But his enthusiasm for the game led him to keep trying to throw bocce balls, and, in the process he hit little Caroline!  Thankfully, only tears resulted, no black eye, but we decided to try and redirect Sam's energies away from the bocce balls!

We knew that Sam wasn't going to make it there at the park until time for the fireworks, so we came home, did some sparklers in the back yard and watched the Washington D.C. and Boston fireworks on TV.  My poor deprived children never get to see live fireworks!  Someday, bedtime won't be so precious to us and we can let them stay up later.  In the meantime, sparklers in the back yard will have to do.   

   We have been so busy having fun! We went to a parade Friday morning and then we had some friends over for lunch.  They were from a new church we have been visiting around here.  We have made some really great friends.  It's so neat how we all just clicked and our kids and their kids LOVE each other. We hang out a lot too. God is so good. Anyways that whole situation would take about 3 posts.lol  On Saturday we helped my brother pack and clean his house.  Saturday night we went to dinner with friends and then to fireworks. Sunday we went to church, out for ice cream and to the park with friends.  Tomorrow-nothing.
   My kids were actually in the parade on the new church float.  They had so much fun.
  
Can you see the adoration in her eyes? They are buddies.  He is 6 and is just the sweetest little guy.

Later on the kids went swimming and PLAYED.
My kids were in bed by 7:30 and asleep by 7:45.  That isn't too crazy or unusual around here, except it was the 4th of July. 
  We did go see fireworks on July 5th with many of the same friends. So I don't get the mean Mommy award. lol 
:>Michelle

I am reading the book, Talent is Never Enough by John Maxwell, and came across some statistics that will interest those of you who are homeschooling teenagers. On page 2, Maxwell states:

• More than 50 percent of all CEO's of Fortune 500 companies had C or C- averages in college.
• Sixty-five percent of all U.S. senators came from the bottom half of their school class.
• Seventy-five percent of U.S. presidents were in the Lower-Half Club in school.
• More than 50 percent of millionaire entrepreneurs never finished college!

So, next time you think your average child is never going to amount to anything, remember these statistics! And read this book!

We had to fill out a ton of paperwork for the homestudy. There were a ton of questions on the paperwork. All kinds of questions on all different subjects. I didn't think I was ever going to get done filling out paperwork and answering questions. I had to answer all kinds of questions like:

Were you ever in DHS?

Were any of your family ever in the system?

Was there any abuse in your family?

What do you think your parenting style is?

How do you think you will handle the foster children that will be coming into your care?

What do you think your reactions will be in such and such situations?

Do you and your spouse agree on this?

Etc. ,Etc., Etc.

Then when we thought we were all done with the questioning a person with an agency (not the foster care agency) set up an appointment with us to come into our house and ask us more questions.

She went over all the questions that we had answered already and asked new questions or asked the same questions in different forms.  She talked with me by myself and with hubby by hisself, then with both of us together.

At the same time she was observing how we were parenting our son at the time. (I was unaware she was doing this until she told us afterwards). She was observing how we were treating him and how we were interacting with him.

Then we had to show her all through the house (every room, nook and cranny) show her a working fire extinguiser, a escape plan for the house in case of fire or other emergencies, and checked to see that all the smoke detectors were in good working order with fresh batteries in them.

We passed the homestudy easily. It sounds more intense when I put it in words that it actually seemed at the time.

Next time I will expound on question three in the previous post a little bit.

So, until next time:

Have a Blessed Day!! 

Well, we got the time and date from Sharron of when the meetings were to start. We weren't sure what to expect since we had never foster parented before and neither had either of our parents. The only thing either one of us knew about foster parenting was when I was growing up a neighbor of ours had a foster son, that was it.

God had told us that he wanted us to do therapuetic foster parenting. He had also let us know that we were to foster parent older boys, not babies or toddlers.

The first things we had to do to get started was fill out tons of paper work but the agency was there to walk us through all that and explain anything we had a question on. I am going to list some of the things we had to do but if this is something you feel like God is putting on your heart to do then do not let this scare you off, it really is not that bad.

Here is a list of some of the things:

1. OSBI (Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation) background check. I had just started a new job and had already went through this check about a month before and let me tell you the agency questioned me up and down about why I had had a background check done so recently. They even called my employer to verify what I had said. They were satisfied when they called the employer and found out that it was a government agency that I had just recently went to work part time for.

2. Income verification. They mostly wanted to know that we were not doing this just because of the money that was involved. We had to show them our last thirty days pay check stubs. We had to show this at the beginning of the training course and then again at the end of the twelve weeks when the training was over because, as they said, a lot can happen in twelve weeks.

3. We had a list of question that we had to ask our families. Questions like were you ever involved with DHS (Department of Human Services) for any reason? I can't remember any more of the questions right now because the answer to this question from my family was surprising, but that will be another post.

4. We had to fill out paperwork to have a homestudy done. I will post more details about that in another post also.

5. We had to have a tb (tuberculosis) test done on every person in the family. (myself, Handsome and our very young son).

6. All the animals had to be up to date on their shots.

It is now a requirement, at least here in the state of Oklahoma, that you get fingerprinted when you are going to be doing anything like this. At that time it was not required so we did not have to have our fingerprints taken although we would have if needed.

I guess that is all for now as this is getting pretty long and I try to keep it fairly short so you do not get tired or reading before you get to the end.

Next post: The Unexpected DHS story from my Mom.

Until next time:

                  Have a Blessed Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Here goes: Talking To Sharron Handsome and I had determined to talk to Sharron just as soon as service was over for that Wed. night. God works in mysterious ways though and he has a plan for every thing. Just before our pastor dismissed us he said, "Sharron has an announcement to make before we leave." Then lo and behold Sharron got up and said, "As you all know we have been foster parenting for awhile. The foster care organization we belong to is going to start a 12 week foster parent training course so they are looking for volunteers. Also, they will be holding the training course in the fellowship hall of our church. Please talk with me before you go home if you are interested." Well, if that is not a confirmation of what God had been talking to us about and not the right timing then I don't know what is!! We had a lot of questions for Sharron. She was so tickled when we said God had been telling us that this was something we were to do. The training was to start in just a couple of weeks. Isn't God awesome!! Next installment: Starting The Training. Until next time:               Have a Blessed Day!!

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