Ice Cream, The Flu and Other Early Morning Ramblings...

Want a cleaver idea for an exchange gift? This year my sisters family gave us an ice cream sunday party in a box. Hello! My kids thought it was the best thing ever. I might have to agree.

I've spent a fair portion of yesterday and today working on Ski School stuff. I've gone back and forth between completely resenting the whole program to feeling like I might actually have a handle on it.

It helps that I have gotten a few sweet emails from parents who recognize and appreciate my efforts. I'm certainly not doing all of this for the praise. I'm doing it so that my kids can learn to ski, but it's helpful to get some positive feedback from people once in a while. 

Mason hasn't been feeling great lately and I've kept him home from school for the last two days. I feel like when my kids start to get sick it's best to just keep them home and make them rest. When we try to power through and tough it out, they seem to end up worse than when we let them take a couple of days off. Mason hasn't gotten any worse, but he isn't feeling 100% quite yet. I've been really worried about our kids catching the flu that's going around, so I haven't hesitated to keep them home from school here and there. I haven't decided how I feel about the flu vaccine. Most years we don't get the vaccine and most years we don't get the flu.... but the years that we don't get the vaccine and we DO get the flu, I always wonder if we should have just gotten the dang shot. I'm not a huge medicine fan. Especially when it comes to my kids. I try to allow their bodies to fight off sickness on it's own so that their immune systems will be strong. Our pediatrician in PA was big on all of that. She didn't like to put kids on meds unless she felt it was totally necessary, which I really appreciated. Not that she wouldn't put them on antibiotics if they needed it, she just didn't automatically throw a script at us every time we walked through the door. 

That was random.

But it is 2 am after all.

A little randomness is probably understandable. 

Parent teacher conferences were today. I've been so happy with the teachers our kids have had this year. I'm sure that a big part of it is that Ryan is home, but this school year has gone so much better than last year. Brook, Mia and Bre are doing about the same as they were at the beginning of the year, but Mason (who was struggling at first) has really improved. I was pretty pleased when his teacher told me that and showed me his test scores. 

Brook and Mia have been working on some pretty ambitious reading goals for school (especially Brook) and I've been quite surprised at how much time they'll spend with their noses in a book. Brook just finished the 2nd Harry Potter book which she read entirely on her own and has now started the third. Her goal is to read 1.5 to 2 hours every day, which she does regularly. I don't remember spending that much time reading when I was in 3rd grade. They must get that trait from Ryan.

And on that note, I'm finally starting to feel like I could fall asleep. 

And so I'm going to.

Night.