I miss you today, Big B.  I miss you every day.

(Pictured is my brother at the spot where my uncle died)

Another week in! I've been trying to fiddle with my schedule (we don't really have a daily schedule--we don't do spelling from 8 to 9 or anything, instead we have a rhythm that works better for us) to make sure that my "priority" subjects--Latin, math, spelling, and writing--get done. 

Still, I had some failures.  I'll get into that below.

(I'll put Alex and London's together and then add Holden's below)

Reading:

London eventually refused to finish the book on Isaac Newton that I'd assigned her.  For a kid who loves to read to say that must mean something, right? Instead she told me all about Newton so we'll just return it to the library.  Friday we started reading Dickens' Oliver Twist aloud on my Kindle.  The language is a bit difficult for her but she's really excited to be able to touch the Kindle so it evens out.  Alex and I are halfway through The Door in the Wall. 

Writing:

Ah, Classical Writing.  Alex did a great job with "The Princess and the Pea".  Because we got behind he needs to edit his rough draft (I printed it out for easier editing) and write the final draft, but he worked hard.  We just ran short on time.

London did well on her summary but we got stuck on grammar.  This was completely my fault--I obviously need to look ahead on the grammar portion since I couldn't remember what IV and TV stood for.  We still have a couple of things to do to finish up but this was our best week so far for CW.

Spelling:

We actually got around to SWR this week.  They are really loving the part when we analyze the spelling.

Latin:

We did Latin EVERY day this week! Go me.  We finished the introduction to Lively Latin and then did lesson 1.1 and exercises 1.1-1.3 (I think--it's somewhat confusing to me).

Grammar:

London did lessons 33-37 and Alex did lessons 39-43 (we did grammar every day!)

Math:

We need to catch up on MEP this weekend.  London did it once and also worked on Life of Fred.  Alex did math twice.  This is unacceptable.

Science:

 Big fat nothing.  I'm committed to working on this over the weekend.

History:

London finished the age of Enlightenment and moved on to the Industrial Revolution.  Alex read a book about the bubonic plague.  I keep meaning to run into the library and get the History Channel program on the plague but they are doing major renovations on the library and parking is a nightmare.

Extras like art and music? Don't ask.  Russian? Nada.

As for Holden:

History:

We read "Alexander and Bucephalus" and "Diogenes" from Fifty Famous Stories Retold.

Spelling:

We did really well with spelling this week! He had a quiz, we worked on A-2 words, and wrote the words on index cards.  Then we put the cards into sentences.

Natural History/Science:

We read "Moses the Kitten" from James Herriot's Treasury for Children.  He loves cats so he enjoyed this story.  We still need to read a chapter in the Burgess Bird Book.  I did find this bird-call machine that we have and put new batteries in it so that we can try to identify bird calls.  Also my uncle gave London a bunch of greeting cards and some of them have beautiful photographs of birds on them so I snagged those for Natural History.

Phonics:

We did an OPG lesson on Monday and the rest of the week read Bob books.  He's at the point in OPG where he's doing consonant blends and the reading is ramped up, which is frustrating him.  I've decided to take a break on OPG for a week or so and instead focus on fluency.

Math:

We did lessons 34-36 in Rightstart math.

Poetry:

We read four poems from A Child's Garden of Verses.

Literature:

We're about halfway through Little House in the Big Woods.  We also read Aesop's "The Wolf and the Grapes" and "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse".

I began and finished Jodie Sweetin's (of Full House fame) book yesterday on my Kindle.  Tell-all books are rarely well written (and I'm such a sucker for salacious gossip that I end up reading them all) but I was surprised by this book.  She has a sense of humor and a touch of sarcasm in her writing (or her ghost writer does, as it goes with celebrity tell-alls).

My mom is feeling much better.  The antibiotics have made a huge difference and she moved from her bed, where she'd spent the last several days, to the living room yesterday.  She's still very weak but improving. 

In farm news Sylvia is now lamb chops (and leg of lamb and ground lamb and ribs and whatnot).  The pigs, too, have an execution date set (sadly, there are no openings at the processing plant until early December but we know a guy who processes pigs so we're going to see if he can do it sooner so we'll have sausage for Thanksgiving morning).  I bought a halter to put on the calf but the barnyard is terribly muddy so there's no catching him at this point--he's curious and friendly enough but stops short of letting you actually touch him, preferring instead to get just *this close* and then retreating to Roselle's side.

In other news, we spoke to Holden's neurologist again yesterday.  I don't remember if I've mentioned it here but we had to increase his dosage of Trileptal several times in October.  He just kept having breakthrough seizures.  Dr. H had told  me that sometimes Trileptal just stops working for someone after six months or so and we would try increasing his dosage before switching to a different medicine, which we are hoping to avoid since Trileptal has the least incidence of side effects. 

But then Friday night he had about 10 seizures throughout the night.  I called the office Saturday and was told to increase his dosage yet again, to the maximum amount.  If this doesn't work we have to switch meds.  The neurologist asked yesterday if we had done anything out of the ordinary Friday and we did--I'd taken the kids, after a day of errands, to a Halloween party at their dance school.  It had ran later than we are normally out (not *late*--we left a little after eight--but late for us).  She thinks he is very sensitive to sensory stimulation and that the excitement of the dance might have triggered the seizures.  Also she told us to give him his medicine exactly at the same times, to enter the times in my Blackberry.  We generally have it pretty close but probably closer to within a half hour.  We are to shelter him from too much stimuli in the evenings and have him in bed no later than nine.

Anyway, that's the scoop on Holden's meds.  He started OT this week and I really like his therapist.  She actually knew what the Feingold diet is--uses it with her daughter, even--so she didn't look at me like I was some kind of snake-handler when I mentioned it.  She's helping me pinpoint his sensory disorder issues.  For his part he loves having two therapies and if we drive by the clinic he begs to go have more therapy.

There's a fire blazing in the stove and the warm air is starting to circulate around the house.  It feels good.  We have a lot to do today and I love the earlyish mornings when I can cuddle on the couch feeling the fire and drink coffee.

I hate to do that.  I'm very nonconfrontational by nature but, you know, if I've learned anything this year it's how to speak up and tell people what I think.

When Mom was taken by ambulance to the ER last Thursday they didn't even examine her.  They said, "You have body aches? It's obviously H1N1."  She had no other symptoms of influenza, mind, but they explained that they were pretty much diagnosing everything outside of broken legs and car accidents as swine flu.  She mentioned to them that her legs were a particular pain spot but they gave her narcotics and sent her home with Lortab and Zofran.  They told her to remain in isolation for 5-7 days.  At least. 

This advice might well have killed her.

My cousin (she's really like a sister) and I took her home and got her put into bed.  I kept her on a steady dose of Lortab, as I'd been instructed to do, and went out and bought her popsicles and lots of 7-Up.  She kept saying that she was getting worse but they'd told us at the hospital to expect this so, I'm ashamed to say, I kind of blew her off.  "It's the flu, Mom," I told her.  "The flu sucks."

Friday Anthony was feeling down so I figured that the flu was making its rounds.  I took him to Mom's, put him in the spare bed, got both of them settled, and took the kids out for the day (an entirely other blog entry for an entirely other day but wow, I was tired). 

Yesterday I decided to go buy a bunch of cleaning supplies (the heavy duty, Clorox filled kind) to power clean both houses.  No sense taking any extra chances with the flu, right? While I was driving I called Mom to check on her.  She could barely speak and asked if I would call L, my cousin, to go and check on her.  Normally I have to bully my mom into being cared for so this was a tremendous red flag.  I tried to call L and she didn't answer.  I called several of Mom's brothers and sisters.  I couldn't get ahold of anyone. 

In tears, I brought home my new sponges and toilet cleaners and floor cleaner ('Kills the Flu Virus!' it stated triumphantly on the label) and heavy duty trash bags.  I threw them on the couch and exclaimed, "Damn my family! Why does everyone have to go to church at the SAME TIME?!"

"Sasha, it's Saturday," Anthony said gently.

We hustled to do the milking and got on the road.  While we were on our way L called and said that they were going to the ER, to meet them there.  The triage nurse was terribly rude to her (I've known the security guard there since childhood and he confirmed that this guy is a dick).  I dropped London off at dance class and everyone else at Mom's and headed to the hospital.  She had been seen, very briefly, by a doctor.  The doctor hadn't examined her and had literally been called away in mid-sentence.  She would be back, she said, although we never saw her again.  She did say that Mom would be admitted and had ordered an ultrasound to check for a blood clot in Mom's leg (by now it looked scalded all over and was swollen).  They gave her a shot of narcotics and an antibiotic drip and then...

we never saw them again. 

For over six hours we sat in the room in the ER.  My mom was in torturous pain and L went out several times (I had been sent out to run errands) to the nurses station to get someone.  She was always told that someone would be in momentarily and nobody ever came.

Finally, after I had finished all of my errands and snuck in some KFC to entice her to eat (she hadn't eaten in three days and they had offered her no food), someone came in to tell us that the floor doctor from upstairs wanted to see her in the ER before she was brought upstairs.  Several minutes later someone else came to get her to take her upstairs.  "The doctor wanted to see her down here," we said.  "Oh, it's okay," was the reply, "the doctor will see her upstairs."

She was moved to a room (private, I always appreciate that) and the nurse made both L and I put on what seemed like HazMat outfits.  Yellow surgical gowns and masks.  "We've been around her for days," I mentioned, but it's policy because of the dreaded pig flu, which I was now doubting that she even had.  The culture for the flu, they kept saying, was between 30-40% accurate so they weren't even giving it.  As the nurse started the intake questions (promising my mom that, after the questions, she would get her some pain medicine as hers had long since worn off) someone peeked in the door holding a mask to her face and said that they were moving Mom--again--to a room on a floor with H1N1 patients.  That way she wasn't contaminating their floor.

"Wait a minute," I said.  "She has no symptoms of flu other than body aches.  If she has DVT or a blood clot that can cause systemic infection with flu-like symptoms.  Chances are she doesn't have H1N1.  Why expose her to it if she doesn't have it when she's obviously immunocompromised?"

"Oh, they are very careful down there to keep patients separated."

Whatever.  Just whatever.  The surgical mask was itching me (I know where Holden gets some of his SPD tendencies from) and I was quickly moving from annoyed to Annoyed.  It seemed ridiculous that they were more worried about making sure that all of these precautions were taken and procedure followed than making sure the patient was being treated.

(Like I told L later, I know that it's flu season.  I know that if I'm going to a hospital that I am taking a calculated risk of running into some kind of nasty.)

So, promising Mom her long-awaited pain medicine when she'd gotten moved--again--she was moved to another floor.  By now my blood pressure was rising.  The nurse there came to ask the intake questions but cautioned that it was fifteen minutes to shift change so the new nurse would be giving her the medicines.  By now Mom was really deteriorating and, as I watched her, it struck me for the first time that if something didn't improve I might not take her home.  That didn't matter as the nurse wondered when she'd had her last bowel movement and whether or not she'd had a tetanus shot in the last few years.

Then she left and there we sat.  I had planned, once we got Mom settled in her room, to take the kids trick or treating.  The kids had picked out their costumes Very Carefully and were, needless to say, raring to go gather candy and Anthony was still not up to power.  But as we sat and nobody came I called Anthony and convinced him to walk the kids around Mom's neighborhood. 

I pushed her nurse call light and the voice from the wall promised to be right there.  I watch the clock on the wall.  Ten minutes later L pushed the call light.  A half an hour later we were still waiting and Mom was in tears.

Furious, I called the other area hospital and talked to them about signing my mom out AMA and taking her to their hospital.  If she had felt even a bit better I would have done it but it seemed insurmountable.  Who else could I call? I mused as I gnashed my teeth in anger. 

The patient advocate.

I called her and explained that I was absolutely disgusted with the level of care Mom had received (or rather, the care she had not received).  I told her about our entire day and stressed that we are not unreasonable people.  We don't have unreasonable demands.  I'm not an ogre but was quickly becoming one and I was about to pop a vein in my forehead.

The patient advocate apologized profusely and promised to call the charge nurse immediately.  Within five minutes there was a nurse! She had came to check Mom over (she gasped when she saw a raw spot on Mom's leg) and brought some heavy-duty medication to help manage her pain.  While she was looking at Mom there was a knock at the door and it was the patient advocate, bringing Mom a tray of hot food and a lot of apologies.  She said that it disturbed her when reasonable people were driven to such levels of frustration because, she said, that showed that the hospital was *really*dropping the ball. 

She made me feel a lot better.  It was nice to just be listened to (the nurse, who seemed wonderful, helped as well as she was gentle and attentive to Mom).  L and I stayed until Mom got comfortable and ate some of her food, then we headed home.

It has been a Hell of a few days.

We're in full-on preparations for winter.  We had two ricks of wood delivered yesterday (what's ironic about this is that a good portion of our property is wooded; unfortunately we don't have a way of hauling the wood that we could cut.  Perhaps by this time next year we'll have a beater farm truck for this purpose).  We'll be getting four more or so at the beginning of November.  We also have an order in for five more round bales (we're on the last bale from the last order, plus one as Mike dropped an extra in our cow pasture one day) but that won't be enough.  I need to call T to order a truckload of square bales.  I prefer dealing with round bales (more waste but it's right there for the cows to eat free choice) but I'm apprehensive about leaving so much hay out in the weather and we don't have a place to store it indoors.  We can stack square bales in the small barn.

Anyway, Anthony is going to fire up the woodstove for the first time this season here in a few minutes.

Sylvia the lamb has a slaughter date set, as do the pigs.  This means that only the llama will be in the paddock so we're going to put him with the cows and dismantle the paddock, using the cattle panels to create a small corral in the barnyard.  It's hard to explain but I'll post pictures when we're done (it'll be a few weeks).  This will make it easier to separate the cows, if needed, and has some other practical purposes.  If Anthony wishes we can get one or two meat lambs in the spring (I don't eat lamb so it matters not to me--I'm a beef and chicken kind of gal with some occasional pork thrown in) and that would be a good area to start them in.

Lucy is doing well.  She's milking 5-6 gallons a day.  We aren't getting any milk from Roselle, as she's feeding Bill the Bull.  Nothing really much to report there.

Here is Holden's homeschool schedule for the week.  In addition to homeschooling he starts his OT, continues with speech, and has creative movement dance class.  The below schedule is a prototype.  The last couple of weeks, as I might have mentioned, I've been playing around with AO yr 1and he has responded really well.  True to form, however, I must tweak.  For one thing, we'll remove the religious aspects.  The Bible, of course, but also Parables from Nature.  I've tried to read this book and just don't like it.  Also out is Trial and Triumph.  I also plan on substituting Our Island Story for Story of the World volume 1.  I don't really plan on doing anything extra with SOTW this year (we'll try HO again next year or, at least, at a later date) but the idea is just to read it and become acquainted with ancient history.

So, keeping in mind that it's a prototype, here is the homeschool schedule:

History:

• SOTW ch. 1 "The Earliest People"
• The American Story "First City"
• Fifty Famous Stories Retold "The Brave Three Hundred"

Geography:

• Paddle to the Sea ch. 3

Natural History/Science:

• Nature Walk

Phonics/Spelling:

• Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading
• www.Headsprout.com
• SWR A-1 (we didn't really do anything with SWR this week).  I found a website that generates bingo cards so I've been working on creating a phonogram bingo game.

Poetry:

• One poem per day from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses

Math:

• 3-5 lessons from Right Start Math

Literature:

• Aesop's "The Boy and the Filberts" and "Hercules and the Wagoner"
• The Blue Fairy Book "Beauty and the Beast"
• begin reading "Little House in the Big Woods" (I'm not scheduling a specific amount of pages because, although this is a wonderful story, the chapters are rather long.  I'll have to see how much Holden can balance a great story vs. sitting still and paying attention.
• picture books

Art and Music with the older kids (ARTistic Pursuits and Color the Classics, respectively).  Foreign language is Russian.