Today in history:

1905 My grandmother was born. She died the week Tyler was born. That's my grandma holding me.

1983 Ashley was born. She's the bride in the picture below.

1992 Jessica walked alone just short of 13 mo old. This is Jessica with my sister, who helped me bribe Jessica (with Cheerios) to walk.

Book

I received a copy of my new book in the mail. It releases October 1. I hope girls 10-14 will find it as interesting to read as I found the writing. I read lots of books about Bible women while writing this and gained new insights and information.

Dance started yesterday. It shakes the schedule up a bit. I have to pick the twins up at school on Wed, because their bus comes so late now that we'd miss most of their tumbling class. While I drove them to class, Jessica picked Jasmine up. This left Rick biking to and from work! He volunteered though, so we took him up on it.

The tumbling teacher said the twins did great. Adam worked with them this summer so they'd be a little more ready. Jasmine had class after them, so Jessica drove the twins home after their class, while I stayed with Jasmine. She had jazz and then tap. The plan was to eat somewhere and then go on to church. But she had so much homework that we had to go home instead. We still had hot ham sandwiches at Hardees first.

Soccer goes to a regular schedule next week so our evenings will look like this (everyone has school during the day):
Monday: Adam cross country, Jessica night class
Tuesday: Adam cc, Jasmine band, Jessica night class, Jasmine soccer
Wednesday: Adam cc, twins tumbling, Jasmine jazz and tap, Jasmine choir and GAs, Jessica orchestra
Thursday: Adam cc, Jasmine tumbling, Jessica tumbling, Adam tumbling (different facility), Jasmine soccer, Jessica Explorers
Friday: Adam cc, Jessica work
Saturday: soccer games, cross country meets (not every weekend for either)
Sunday: Sunday school, church, TeamKid

And that's life as we know it!

More Storm Pictures

Click to enlarge the pictures to see the waves. This is where we were supposed to snorkel! We got stung by blowing sand.

Not a typical beach day for us.

Storm

The plan for Labor Day was for a couple of us to go get Ty Sunday and take him to Destin where the rest would meet Monday for snorkeling. We are in Destin but, unfortunately, so is the tropical storm. So much for a sunny day on the ocean. This is last night. Very windy.

Jessica demonstrates how windy it was!

That dark blob in the middle is her hat!

We decided to try something new and get Thai food. There is a Thai restaurant by the hotel.

Curry chicken with rice.

It might have been a bit spicy.

The egg noodle soup was a tad spicy too!

The others are still planning to meet us here today and we are hopefully going to see Spy Kids. Then we have to return Tyler to college. Not the weekend we'd planned but nothing to do about the storm.

Update: The storm got worse so we called Rick and told him not to come. We went back to Cordova mall and shopped a little and then took Ty back to college.

Jeff

Rick and Jessica went to Jeff's graduation at Fort Benning yesterday. They were the only two there to support him. That was sad. We thought people from Jacksonville would be there since he spent over four years in Jax.

Jeff had told us he didn't have time off before going to tech school, but it turns out he does. The guy from Jacksonville knew this and was planning on Jeff staying with him, but no arrangements were made for him to get there. So Rick and Jessica drove him to Jax which was about four hours and then they had another five hour drive to our house. If we had known he had time off, we would have made arrangements, but we plan to be gone this weekend. I don't know if it's going to happen now, though, because of the tropical storm moving in. He also arranged to leave out of Jacksonville and that can't be changed. But maybe he could have stayed a few days here and then a few days there.

Jeff heads to Texas in ten days and we'll find out more about what happens after that later and keep everyone posted. Here are a few pictures.

This & That

So, you might be wondering what this is. Unfortunately, this is Jasmine's foot. As you can see, some of the toes don't have all their bones. From the outside, you can see the large toe, which lays flat against her foot. The next two spots are empty, then there is sort of a double little toe. It was on the side of the foot. Most doctors just wanted to cut it off. I didn't let anyone touch it until I found a doctor who was willing to try and move the toe(s) to a more normal placement.



At the time she was a foster child and one doctor actually asked me, "What difference does it make (if we cut off the toes)? She's a black medicaid foster child." I seriously didn't know what to say to that. I couldn't believe he actually said it. I finally said, "So if this was your child you'd save the toes because she's worth more????" And then I grabbed all our junk and walked out. Never went back. Wouldn't have mattered. That doctor said he would have nothing more to do with our case. Wow. Showed me, huh? Like I'd ever let him near her with a scapel.

Thankfully we found a doctor who fixed her club foot, released the tendons on her fused toes on the left foot, split the fingers on her left hand and moved the toes on the right foot. He did not treat us any differently than any other patient. It was a different hospital, and there was a world of difference. The one who did the surgery was in Augusta, GA, and it's a wonderful hospital. Every child has a private room with a bed for the parent. No shoving four kids into one room with only chairs for the parents to sleep in like the other hospital (which is where she goes for cranio facial but it's a different doctor.)

This all happened when she was 18 months old, but I bring it up now because she's been having pain in her big toe. If you see the white band between the joints, that, unfortunately, is arthritis. So now we know. They may do something about it at a later time. For now, no more surgeries. She's had four in the past two years and many more earlier.

In other news, issues at school of course. Seems Kayla was eating her lunch on the bus, and then showing her teacher that she only had a bag of carrots for lunch! So she was given a hot lunch (which they expect us to pay for!). She did this again the next day. I wonder how long it would have gone on before someone checked with me if my neighbor, who works part time at the school, hadn't seen her in the lunch line and asked me if she was supposed to be getting hot lunch. Did the school REALLY think I'd only send carrots? And why would one twin have a full lunch box and the other not? And what happened to the no charge rule? Kids who don't have a lunch or lunch money are to be given a sandwhich and a piece of fruit not a full hot meal with dessert!

Rick and Jessica are at Fort Benning for Jeff's graduation tomorrow (Friday) morning.

Ty is learning hard lessons about the cost of college. He is living on poptarts, cereal and noodle cups. He seems to be adjusting well to campus life, though. He's gone to church at the Baptist Student Union, and has gone to some other activities. I am going to pick him up this weekend and take him to Destin where the others are going to meet us Monday for snorkeling. So he won't actually be coming home, but we'll all be together on Labor Day.

This is getting long so I'll update more on school later. And hopefully have some pictures from the weekend.

If You Can't Find it

It's probably somewhere on the fridge.