Thanksgiving

I am grateful for my wonderful kids, who are always a joy to be around. (OK, almost always :-) I am grateful for my precious deer totem baby, even although I am still in a bit of disbelief. I am grateful for my husband who has supported me and loved me and cherished me so much in the 12.5 years that we have been married. I am grateful for my family in the Netherlands, although I wish they lived closer. I am grateful for the wonderful community in which we live, with an amazing number of good friends living close to me. I am grateful for a my on line communities, where I have met many soulmates, I wish I could meet all of them in person some day. I am grateful for a perfect house (well, almost :-) and a debt annihilation schedule which should make it totally ours in about five years from now. I am grateful for a basement full of healthy food, including a freezer with tons of produce from my own garden. I am grateful for the sunny days, and am ignoring the snowy and rainy ones :-) I am grateful for the wildlife that surrounds our house, although I am hoping that the bear will leave our birdfeeders alone this year. I am grateful to live in a country where we can homeschool without being harrassed, unlike the Netherlands. I am grateful for a sublime homeschool support group, where both my kids and me have found good friends. And I am grateful once again to be pregnant with a keeper!!!

15.5 Weeks pregnant now and still waiting for the first kicks. I had another bad dream, this time involving a stillborn baby. I hope to have only positive dreams from now on!!!

We signed up for a membership at a local health club. Their walk-in rates are ridiculous, but the membership is very reasonable. If I want to go swimming with the kids, I would pay $30 for a day pass. But the family membership (one adult and all the kids) is only $32 per month, and then we can swim as often as we want. So we went swimming there yesterday, in the afternoon. The kids had a lot of fun, but I have learned that I need to send them all to the bathroom first before we go swimming!! It's amazing how often the little ones needed to go, and I had to go with them every time. And I couldn't leave the others in the water without supervision, so they weren't too happy about it :-)

At night, I went back all by myself! I haven't swum in ages (years and years and years), but really want to get back into the habit again. When I just started, I wasn't sure whether I was going to make it. And I did a lot more back crawl than I usually would have done, because it was easier to breathe faster that way :-) I had set myself the goal of swimming at least 20 lengths, and maybe 40 if I was up to it. I swam my 20 and still could go on, so I ended up swimming 40 lengths! A whole kilometer! I am proud of me :-) I was amazed that I still could do it and kind of bounced off the walls from the high it gave me. I am definitely going to do this again!

I made split pea soup in the crockpot today. It was extremely windy and then it started snowing too. You know things are bad outside when the snow goes past the window horizontally! The kids were happy about the snow, I was just visualizing having to shovel our challenging driveway. Luckily it didn't really stay on there, just on the grass, where I could almost ignore it :-)