I have been a little too tired to post recently. The past couple of days I needed to have coffee around
5:00 p.m. just to stay awake.  But I have accomplished withdrawing my daughter from school.  Researching to all hours of the night for lesson plans and information for teaching ESL (English). This is my 3rd day homeschooling.  I cover vocabulary, grammar, spelling and sentence structure.  Today I asked her if this is what she wanted to learn that she wasn't getting in Middle School.  She replied "Yes."  And so far she has really enjoyed all the lesson plans I have thrown together.  I even make her laugh a lot.  I believe that someone can learn a lot faster and better with humor.

I have also started teaching my deaf daughter.  We cover new signs every day, and now I test her on spelling, which in turn will help her to learn English and read.  I sign a sign, and she has to spell it.  She has balked at studying longer than 10 minutes at a time.  I think this tells me that no one ever forced her to work, or take responsibility for anything because she has shown this pattern in other instances.  She now knows I am s-e-r-i-o-u-s, and when I give her an assignment, she knows doing her cutesy stuff will not get her out of it.  Sigh, such a long way to go...

I made several strong phone calls yesterday demanding a PPT for my deaf daughter, and I got one for next Friday. Yeah! This is THE meeting that will let me know if they are going to fight me about busing her and paying tuition to the school, or they might insist that they can provide all the services for her. If they go that way, it will end up being a huge battle with possible litigation.  I do not want that, it would be so draining.

In the midst of this and the 16th b-day party, my twins had also gone to a sleep over b-day party. Well, one of the twins lost a tooth at that party. That was on Sunday, I forgot about it, I'm a bad Mommy.  And I forgot about it Monday night as well, bad Mommy - again.  Tuesday morning as I woke her for school, she reached under pillow and opened a box, and said, "Oh, she didn't come again."  Gulp, darn!  I said quietly, "I heard a crash last night."  But that was all I said.  The back story to this is, for all their losing teeth life, I have had the Tooth Fairy write notes in green calligraphy on special paper that has leaves, flowers and grasses pressed into it.  So as I was running around preparing breakfasts, lunches, and feeding rabbits, I tried to sneak into my room, dig out the paper, run downstairs, and quickly type up a note, print in before the girls come down, and of course the printer took forever.  I grabbed it and ran into the mud room and put it in her back pack.  Then, "Oh no", I thought,  I need a quarter.  I looked in my purse, no quarters.  I looked upstairs on dh's desk, nothing.  He always has has tons of change lying around.  I run down the hall, meanwhile the girls are heading downstairs.  I run down the hall, wake up dh and ask frantically, "Where are your quarters?"  He mumbled, I ran back down the hall through my deaf daughter's room, who was asleep.  I grabbed a quarter and ran down into the kitchen, the girls are there. "OK now what?" I thought.  As they were busy with morning things, I nonchalantly dropped the quarter on the couch, in between the the arm and cushion.

As she walked into the room I started adjusting the lamp shade on the lamp next to the couch, and asked, "Were you playing with this lamp, the shade is all crocked."  "It wasn't me." she replied.
"O.K., so", I asked, "what backpack are you taking today?" "The big blue one." she replied.  "Well, you better pack it up now before you eat because we're running a bit late."  She goes out, and I hear her yell. "She left me a note, look, she left me a note!"  ("YES!", I thought.)  "What?  Who left what?" I asked.  She goes into an explanation about the note, which read:

Ow!  My dear  (her name),

I am sorry to have missed you yesterday.  You see, I had a flying accident last week and my wings still hurt.  I knew you would be disappointed, so I tried to get to you last night.

I hope I did not wake you.  I am still not flying straight and I crashed into a lamp and dropped your quarter.  My fairy friend needed to help me fly home.  If you can’t find the quarter that I dropped, I will have my friend bring it tonight.

Love,

The Tooth Fairy

"That must have been the crash you heard last night!", she said to me.  "Probably, I said, "I just thought it was one of the rabbits."

"Let's look for the quarter!"  She started looking around trying to figure out which direction she was flying in to hit which side of the shade.  I didn't want to say maybe you should look on the couch, luckily the other twin said just that!  And she found the quarter!  

All that before my first cup of coffee, and it happened between 6:00 am and 6:20 am! If I have to keep thinking this fast on my feet until they all grow up, I'll never get dementia.  Talk about having my very own brain gym.