Been out of the groove...

It's been awhile. 

I've been waiting to blog until I felt inspired with some funny little quirk about my life but nothing's coming.  I decided that I better just write.

Today I was thinking about how great my life is --

I've got THE best husband and 7 wonderful kids.  Having a big family is a lot of work but I wouldn't trade any minute of it.  It helps that my kids are so great.  I know they aren't perfect, can be pretty silly, sometimes they talk back ( ... I know, hard to believe ;P), and they are messy but they are mine and I love them.

As I was sweeping the kitchen and thinking how unbelievable it is that there could be that much stuff on the floor, it crossed my mind that if I only had one or two kids it would be so easy to keep up with the mess.  Then I remembered that even as newlyweds I didn't really like to clean so the chances are that I would still have a large pile going into the dustpan, it would just take a lot longer to fill it up.

I am also grateful that (so far) my oldest is such a GREAT example to his younger siblings. (Except for the incessant teasing to his baby brother.)   We grounded him last week - can't even remember why - and I lifted the grounding today because he is just going out of his way to have a good attitude.  Even before I was married or had any kids I was so worried about raising teenagers.  I would look at the world around me and the constant barrage of evil influences and worry about how I could possibly help navigate children through this life.  I am officially the mom of a teenager and I am much less worried about it than I used to be.  Granted I still have the most pivotal years ahead of me but I think I can do this.  I know it will not be smooth sailing, there will most likely be arguments and disobedience possibly even heartache but I'm not doing this alone and that makes all the difference.  I'm not scared anymore!

Now I have to brag just a bit.  We pride ourselves in the fact that we are raising nerds and not athletes.  I have nothing against sports (in fact I think they're great!) but most people don't grow up and use a lot of those hours and hours spent in sports towards anything useful.  If one of my kids has a fierce love of sports, sure I'll let them play to their hearts content but so far none of my kids have much interest in anything.  They've tried out different things over the years but that is not our forte'.

Anyway ... Jacob is in the Gifted program at school and they have this thing called the Math bus.  I don't know everything about it but the jist (?spelling) of it is --- they have the kids that really excel or love math get on a bus once a month.  They take a math test, have a feast and go back to school.  Yesterday Jacob had the best score out of the entire valley.  Way to go!  Also when we had his parent/ teacher class, his teacher told him that he had some more advanced math books and that if Jacob wanted to --- he could go ahead of the class and learn on his own (remember that this is already the gifted class).

I will try to conjure up something more fun for my next post...