First Post

Hiya! I am starting a personal blog today and here's my first post:

Family: We are all healthy and happy today. We had a relatively quiet day. Rob got home at 4 and just left to take Jason for two or three Tae Kwon Do classes.

Jason is training for his black belt now, and will be testing for it in mid October. He is very excited about it. He will have to do 100 pushups, 100 situps, 50 squat-thrusts, make up and perform his own personal form, know his black belt form as well as the other 13 forms he has learned over the past four years, write an essay, break three boards, and run 30 miles in 30 days. I am confident that he will do well at the test and get his black belt. He really loves TKD and has never in four years of going a minimum of twice a week given me a hard time about going or saying he wants to quit or anything. On the contrary, he is always asking me to sign him up for every extra movie night and board breaking or form championship, etc. He loves it and, I think, is most talented in this sport out of all the sports he has done.

School: The boys are home educated and we began again last Wednesday. Up until now we had done year-round school, but now that they are older and have many friends in school, they want to be on the regular school calendar. We did do work over the summer because we had taken time off in April and May because of the new baby. We use a regular curriculum and do regular seatwork much like regular school, only it takes much less time to do so we have more time to spend as a family and do other things with our time. Jason tried a prepackaged curriculum this year and he likes it. It is Calvert School 3rd grade. I make up Nick's curriculum with many different materials, but he is pretty much doing regular first grade work now. The only difference with him is that he learns differently in that he learns much better visually and kinesthetically than auditorily. He also communicates nonverbally using signs, gestures, pictures, words, cues, etc. He is not a good listener, partially because he has a hearing loss and I suspect CAPD. He has Down syndrome, PDD, cleft lip and palate, apraxia, etc.

Business: I am a medical transcriptionist and I have my own business in my home. I do everything online. I have been doing this for about five years and I love it. Most of my work is done as a subcontractor for large companies, but I have a couple of my own accounts as well. I would like to get more of my own accounts, so I recently made a website. It is at http:www.consideritdonetranscription.com. Please check it out and let me know how you like it, and pass it on to anyone who might need some transcription done.

Hobbies: I love many hobbies, especially gardening, writing, fiber arts, and papercrafts. I have never had a really great garden at all, but I recently read books on Square Foot Gardening and Lasagna Gardening and was just reading about straw bale gardening online last night. I have a bunch of seed catalogs and am going to have a big garden next year. One huge reason I'm so excited over gardening lately is that I have become addicted to a website called Path To Freedom. It's this family in California who live in the city and grow all of their own food and have enough to sell and make a living off of, and they only own 1/5 of an acre! I find gardening and what they are doing with it so interesting. I've always dreamt of moving out to the country to live off the land, but they've completely inspired me to just use what we have right now instead of dreaming about it and it will be more than enough. Also, I am a tightwad and would love to save money gardening, and would love being less dependent on the food burocracy and all the pesticide, hormone, genetically engineered stuff at the stores now.