Nice Day

Nice, quiet day at home today. Lots of gardening, I took out enough weeds that I can actually find my vegetables again ;-) Took a long morning walk with the three little ones, a nice evening hike with a friend. We went to the beaver pond, so I could show her where Sylvia could have been born. The mosquitoes convinced me that it might not have been the optimal location though :-) It still was fun to visualize a beaver pond birth :-) It would have been kind of inconvenient to birth there, having no birthing supplies at all, but it also would have been even cooler than the front yard birth. Maybe the next baby :-)

Today I was thinking that even if I did get post partum depression again, that I have lived through it before, and that I can come out the other side and be ok. It won't be fun, but I know that it's something that will last for a limited time only. I still hope that I won't get it though. It's summer now, so I can garden and be outside a lot. That sure should help against depression. It was much harder with Erik, who was born in the middle of the winter.

I had a friend come over today to give Jane an evaluation for our homeschooling 'end of year testing'. I usually let them do a standardized test on the computer, but because she isn't reading yet, the numbers weren't high enough. The achievement part has to be at least 40th percentile, otherwise you are in trouble. Which never made sense to me, why do homeschool kids have to be better than 4 out of 10 public school kids? Would they hold back 40 % of each school class because they are less than 40th perc. in their achievement? I am not worried about her reading at all, she is only 6yo, and will read some day, she is close. But it screwed up the achievement numbers, so we had to do the evaluation by certified teacher instead, we have an awesome evaluator, who spent quite some time with her figuring out what she did this year, what she accomplished and learned and how we could put that in academic learning terms. It just bothers me to have to jump through all those stupid hoops to prove that she is totally ok and is learning just fine.

I am sitting here now, holding Sylvia, and being happy about how blessed I am that she finally joined us. She is just such a perfect baby, she really enjoyed all the walking and hiking today. She even was awake for part of the hike through the woods, the bad thing is that she got her first mosquito bite. Poor little one! Mosquitoes shouldn't be allowed to bite babies!