Catching up

It's kind of funny to me how I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. How can I be a reasonable version of an adult when I have no clue? Everyone else seems to have a clue. Maybe I can buy one?

I have a vision in my head of how everything should look, and I tell myself I should start there and work backwards to where I am now and then I'll have a plan. Brilliant idea. Won't that be great! Except the sheet I use to make my plan looks like chaos and then I just end up throwing it away and thinking I'll start over soon and really get things straight next time.

I think there's a certain amount of acceptance I have to have that this is what my life looks like. I am living it now. Not later. Not in a year when I "get things under control" or when we have more time/money/whatever. I ignore the chaos and just try to focus on the important thing, which is my family and all their various working parts. And all that stuff is going pretty well. Miss V is 10 now. Can you believe that?! She just had her birthday last month. We're still homeschooling. She had to take an achievement test at the end of the last school year, per state requirements. She scored 99th percentile nationally in everything. I can't even, as the youngsters say today. For math we use Life of Fred. Love it (and more importantly - she loves it. She reads it for fun, even while telling you that she doesn't like math). I also like to buy "mathy" books for her, but we're not doing anything above and beyond that and Fred. I want to write about what we're doing for language arts this year, but I'll do that later. It's not a set curriculum; I'm basing it on a book I read for college in my education classes. I love it and can't wait to get more into it. I have a hard time finding science things for her. She's read a lot already and anything I've found that goes farther is too "old" for her. But I'm always on the look out. (know any good ones??)

Holden is good. He's 3.5. Soon he needs to see the orthopedic surgeon. I'm afraid he will need surgery on his foot. He has a really, really tight tendon on the bottom. I'm not sure what they can do about that. Something, I hope. He needs to see the hand surgeon. I can't tell if he needs surgery on his left wrist or not. I've been putting off finding out for a year, and it's time to go see what the doctor thinks. That could go either way. He needs to get back into PT/OT, ASAP. And he needs to see the allergist for blood tests, probably food challenges eventually, and we need to treat some environmental allergies (Dogs. They give him hives if they lick him. He wants a dog so badly.). But he himself is wonderful. He's bright and funny and we all just love him to pieces. He seems more drawn to numbers than words. He likes to read, but not in the way that V did. By this age, she was on the brink of reading. He's not. But that's cool. He loves dragons, dinosaurs, and pumpkin-headed skull men (?!).

R just got promoted at work. I'm so happy for and proud of him! It's pretty much his perfect job (as much as these things can be). He's just left the band he was in to write fiction. Sci-fi, actually. He's got some awesome ideas. He's writing the books and I'm doing all the other stuff like designing book covers, formatting the books, uploading them, editing them, marketing them, etc. This is the first thing we've really worked on together like this and it's bright and shiny and new. We've really just started, nothing published yet. It feels good already, though. Like we were meant to do this. I'm hoping that eventually this will be my only "extra" job. About the band - they're really good. You should check them out. Then you should read this review by some guy named Jeff Clark. Dude clearly needs to chill out. I read this review and just laughed because it sounds like he has it in for them. It's just a CD - no need to smash it up into tiny bits!

As for me, I have Pretty+Paper to work on. Part of the reason for Pretty+Paper is because I don't have to make and ship things, I make it on the front end by designing the printables. That works for me because, between homeschooling, regular home stuff, and a 3yo, there's not a lot of time for making and shipping. The only problem is, the shop isn't doing as well as I would like (if you like it, share it! Please? That would help me so much!). There are different ways to "get found" when you have a shop on Etsy - my particular business model is to have as many listings as possible. That worked for me with my art pendant shop, French Honey (which is on vacation at the moment). And I want to repeat that with Pretty+Paper. Only thing is that I haven't been so successful with getting tons of listings up. I need at least 800-1,000. Seriously. That sounds insane, doesn't it? But that's what I need. So, I'm going to work on it. I need 600 or so new listings ASAP. How am I going to do that? Batch processing. Sound like fun?!!! Well, I am developing a plan. And my piece of paper looks like chaos. So we'll see what happens next.