Testing out email blogging

Just testing out the wonderful blogger function where you can email your posts directly to your blog! Pretty nifty.

After starting our day with a hearty breakfast at Cracker Barrel we are now on the road. We can't wait!
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Rough day yesterday

I am such a clutz. I wasn't feeling very well on Thursday, got a bit dizzy and managed to put my hand down on a hot plate turned way up! Doh. Burned it pretty badly and then woke up the next morning (after 3 hours sleep) to find I've got a stomach bug and can't keep any food down. Fun fun fun. Seems like I can't take a vacation without some medical emergency beforehand.

Feeling much much better today, thankfully and it's been POURING outside. Heavy rain and thunderstorms and the dark gloomy weather on a Saturday = the kids sleep in and we all have a lazy morning! Hooray!

So on the agenda for today is catching up with the house cleaning - one handed - that was supposed to be done yesterday and packing our suitcases - just four more days to Disney World!

Max had his interview at the school yesterday - I couldn't go unfortunately but attended via speaker phone (thanks babe!). At first I thought he wasn't in the room since he sat perfectly quietly while the adults talked for a while. But when the teacher spoke to him, he was his lovely, charming, happy self. Tim and I both had a little sniffle to ourselves as he breezed through the tasks she asked him to do and chatted away to her. He is really excited now that he's seen the school in person. We can't wait for him to start.

Yay Max!

In other family news..... Max has been accepted to a very good magnet school! You are assigned a school according to which school district you live in but Macon has three magnet elementary schools that anyone can apply to go to, then they have a lottery to pick the lucky students. We put in an application to the Science and the Art magnet schools. We aren't in a very good district so you can imagine our relief that he got a reply from the Art school telling him he'd been accepted!!

Each subject at his new school is taught by a teacher with a degree in art integration - meaning that they encourage learning through visual and auditory means rather than sitting at a desk reading from a text book. They have one extra class a day - with art, singing, music lessons or dancing to choose from. The atmosphere is very fun and their test results seem to show that their methods work. Max seems quite excited about it too and he will get to see the school for himself when he goes for his interview next Friday.

His teacher wrote him a beautiful letter of recommendation. Well done buddy, we're proud of you!

A little allergy warning!

Just a little post to let you know we haven't all disappeared. We've just been very, very busy. The kids are extremely excited about going to Disney World in two weeks' time and I think this weekend we'll start crossing the days off the calendar.

Yesterday we had a little scare with Lily. Someone had baked her some brownies and she was very eager to eat them. We were way out in the country and had a few hours before we were due to pick Max up so I told her she had to wait until then to eat them so that he could have one too. Thank goodness I did!

I picked Max up from school and gave them a brownie each to keep them happy in the car while I drove to the mall to find Lily a princess costume for Disney. I saw her scratching her face and thought nothing of it - she's got such sensitive skin that something is always making her itch.

Half way round Target and she'd developed red blotches around her mouth. I grabbed a costume and marched her straight to the pharmacy and by the time we got there her lips had swollen up, they had blisters on and she was starting to sound wheezy. I grabbed some Benadryl off the shelf and opened it right there in the allergy isle and gave her a dose. We paid for our things and drove straight to her doctor's office. By now she was looking a LOT better and they checked her out and declared her perfectly fine. The Dr. prescribed her an epi-pen just in case - apparently the next time could well be worse. She is also booked in for some allergy testing on Monday.

The only other allergic reaction she's had is to cats - and once it was quite severe, so I am beating myself up over not having her tested then. But since she'd been eating peanuts for a long time I thought she didn't have an allergy to nuts. Turns out there were walnuts in the brownies and tree nuts are in another family - what a way to learn that botanical nugget!

The mind boggles when I think about what would have happened had she eaten the brownie twenty minutes away from the nearest town or pharmacy. So please, never let your child eat a new food or something cooked by someone else unless you are near a store or hospital! And if your child has an allergic reaction to one thing, get them checked out - they could have a sensitivity to other things too!

But as it is we are relieved that she is fine, have given her lots of extra hugs and kisses and will now carry a little pink bag (decorated with Hello Kitty stickers) where ever we go to make sure she stays that way. Just in case.

Photo of the day

Lily fell in love with a random stranger's lawn ornaments today, she couldn't get enough of these trumpet playing frogs!

She is suddenly looking very grown up - it could be that her hair is finally growing or that she's using words like "frustrated" and "congregation." Should a 3 year old be using words that big?!

We had another beautiful sunny day today. Hope it lasts!

Sunday was a perfect day to fly a kite. Mid 80's windy, keep in mind last sunday we were throwing snow balls and sled riding.

Snow video

The kids are sick. Again. It's the cough and cold that just won't go away. I can't stop sneezing. I need to clean the house and go to the store but noone wants to go out. Tim is in Texas. Meh, it's just not the best day today.

But here's a little video we took of the kids playing on a sled with their uncle Devin!

Snow - in Georgia!!!

Last week we had very warm weather, on Saturday it turned nasty and we had torrential downpours complete with tornado warnings. My sister-in-law showed me a photo of the hail they got - it was HUGE, bigger than a grapefruit - and it did a lot of damage to their car, it looks like it's been beaten with a hammer.

If that wasn't strange enough weather for one week, on Sunday it started SNOWING. It's the first time in 7 years that we've had any sort of snow that lasted for more than 10 minutes.

It was raining all morning, around 3 pm it changed to snow and started sticking. Then at 5 pm we lost power at our house. So we packed up the kids and drove about an hour in the snow to my sister-in-law's house (where they have wood burning heat in case of more power outages!) to keep warm. The snow lasted overnight and the children had lots of fun playing in the snow this morning. We were able to drive home in time for lunch and find that our power was back on - hooray!

The river running through the city is overflowing and threatening to flood the roads from all the rain and snow. After looking at the weather forecast we are expecting a lovely weekend with a high in the 80's (Fahrenheit - that's about 26C)!!! The only word I can think of to describe the wacky weather this week is biblical. All we need to complete the effect is for the river to turn to blood and for us to turn back the sheets and find frogs in our beds! It's all very, very strange.