Week 14 - Ready for the new year...

Here are a few highlights from our week...

Week 14 actually took us 2 weeks to get through, but it felt longer than that :/ We had our church choir/drama production (which took up a lot of time the first 2 weeks of December), a few mild cases of the flu, a few doctor and ER visits, AND the normal holiday craziness...I was ready to go crazy! Too much stuff going on...we ended up splitting the school week up and completed a few days of school one week and a few days of school the next week.

I learned from that though. It was crazy trying to do a little bit of school here and there with so much going on, so around New Year's week, we are going to take the entire week off, regroup, get our school room and supplies in order, and just relax a little.

We finished up Twice Freed. It was a great book. All of the books so far this year have been really good. We are looking forward to the next book :)

We skipped art this week. It was about mosaics and we did a lot of that earlier on in the year so we didn't feel a refresher was needed yet.

History

We watched a few videos to go along with MFW Week 14. Don't know that the kids learned much from them, but they were somewhat entertaining. Here is one about the Byzantine Empire and another on Theodora.


Science

We completed a really light week in science. We added the lungs and diaphragm to our paper people, the kids played a lung game, and watched a video about lungs and breathing.

I don't know about you guys, but I am ready to begin a new year. I've never really been much of a New Year's resolution type of person, but LOTS of changes are in store. I am bad about overloading my schedule and pushing to get school in on any spare day we may have regardless of doctor visits, illness, or other unexpected things during the week. What I should be doing is slowing down, taking it easy during those times, being selective with the things I put on my plate, and just enjoying everything more.

There's just something about a New Year that gives you that extra motivation to reevaluate everything and try to make things better.

I hope you all have a wonderful New Year's Day and a better 2014 :)

No school and one CrAZy week!!!

Last week was supposed to be our first week back to school after taking a much needed week off.

However, our daughter came down with a very mild case of the flu on Monday and Tuesday. She actually handled that part really well. The only things she experienced from the flu were sleepiness and a fever. Even then, her fever never made it past 102.5. She had no sore throat, no muscle pains, no achiness, etc...  

I debated on giving her Tamiflu. The pediatrician's office really pushed it. I even filled the prescription and everything. They also gave me an earful about getting the flu shot in the future. I gave them an earful myself. My children have not received the flu shot on over 7 years. This was one of my children's first time to ever get the flu (and a mild case of it at that!). I told them the odds against NOT getting it again in the near future seemed to be in my favor.  Anyway, upon doing research when we arrived home, Tamiflu has been known to cause nausea and vomiting, and since our daughter has had her fair share of that in the past already, we decided against it thinking she may be one of the ones to experience these side effects. Plus, Tamiflu only claims to lessen the days of the flu by 24-36 hours. That's it?!? Doesn't really seem worth it to me. AND, there is no research to even back up those claims!!! Anyway, since her flu only lasted 2 days, I was so glad we opted not to give it to her.  

Starting on Monday, her tummy also began to hurt in that same area as always at the same time she had the flu. By Tuesday, she had her full fledged back pain and nausea too...no vomiting this time around though. Wednesday morning, she woke up fever free, just exhausted from her stomach/back pain. She remained fever free through Thursday, but her appetite was still not back to normal. 

I should note, that on Wednesday morning, we received a phone call from her gastrologist letting us know her ultrasound we had done earlier in the month showed she had a UPJ osbtruction. On Friday, her fever came back and so did her sever back pain and nausea. Although her fever was gone again, she was not well by Saturday, and knowing what we knew about UPJ now, we were afraid she had a kidney infection.

We spent all day Saturday in the Texas Children's ER. No kidney infection tho, just another episode of UPJ. She usually doesn't have them this close together. All her blood work and urinalysis came back ok. They said the fever on Friday must have been some little virus she picked up due to her immune system being weak.

Poor gal missed every chance to perform in our church play and she had worked so hard for and had been faithfully attending every practice since we started. Everyone felt so bad for her. Good news is, once all this is taken care of, hopefully, she'll never miss another thing again due to UPJ :)

It's Monday again. Needless to say, we didn't do a lick of school last week. This week won't be much better. Now I don't feel well. I have felt a cold coming on for quite some time, and now that things are calm, it all hit me this morning. We will manage to get in a full day of school today and hopefully another tomorrow. After that though, we plan to take the rest of the week off to visit Granny, finish up Christmas shopping, and go to our daughter's urology appointment. I hope I get to feeling better or I will be missing out on every bit of it :(

So, here's to another CrAZy week!