Apologies to all...

We are still on the search for the right thyroid dose. In pursuit of that, I have been on a dose that tests "perfect" and leaves me utterly exhausted for several weeks now. I saw an endocrinologist this week and she has changed my dosage around again, so I have high hopes for feeling better soon.

But in the meanwhile, just getting through my day has been an utter nightmare. Getting the energy together to figure out what to blog about and then doping it has been harder still. (No one want to read whinging, after all.)

Things I'd be blogging about if I had the energy:

Jack has developed an obsession with dinosaurs. He owns several books about dinos and several more encyclopedias of dinosaurs and can tell you the habits, diets, eras, and prey or predators of more dinosaurs than I can count. I am happy to see him collecting information, I know that dinosaurs are a common obsession with little boys...and I wish it were a topic with which I could share his obsession. Oh well.

Jack recently got stuck in a bedtime reading rut -- he wanted to alternate one Bobbsey Twins novel then one Box Car Children novel and then again. At first that was ok with me because the books were interesting. (I started out with the original Bobbsey twins rather than the modern bowdlerizations.) As with all serials, though, they quickly got repetitive and began to strike me as twaddle. Rather than rule them out entirely, I have told Jack that he is welcome to read them for himself, but I am no longer including them in the bedtime routine.

That opened the door for us to discover an author, Thornton Burgess, whom we are enjoying very much! The stories are fairly simple, but they contain a great deal of information about animals that add a lot to our "noticing". Right now, we're reading The Burgess Animal Book for Children which is "school" for Peter Rabbit, Jumper the Hare, and their friends and neighbors, with Old Mother Nature (or Old Mother, when we read it) teaching them for a few minutes every morning all about themselves and their friends and relatives. The pace is just right, with a few facts about one or two related animals per chapter. We are pleased to be sitting in on 'old mother's' school for animals, and I am very pleased with the impression of school as something one does for a few minutes at a time every day. It's a good introduction for when we start "doing school" more in earnest in a year or two. I plan to add The Burgess Seashore Book for Children and The Burgess Bird Book for Children to our curriculum, and if Jack is interested, Burgess wrote dozens more books about specific animals.

On my own time, I have been reading Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think And What We Can Do About It by Jane M. Healy. It's a fascinating book, but i don't currently have the brainpower to summarize it, so I've lifted this summary from Amazon -- it sums it up nicely.

"Healy's basic premise in this book is that human minds undergo actual physical changes with external stimuli, with different kinds of learning and stimuli producing different effects. She also attempts to show that while the human mind is pretty plastic, it is not infinitely so in that some physical characteristics of the brain are more or less fixed by the time the child reaches adolescence."

I have also been making a concerted effort to do more crafting, since I feel a lot happier and more grounded when I do.

Oh, and my seeds and supplements have arrived and I am now officially "waiting for spring". ;)

I hope to actually be coherent sometime soon. Thanks for your patience, my friends.