I'm still here

Okay, so once again it's been forever since I've written. School started last week and the days and weeks leading up to that were extremely busy. During the month of July, Doug and I were working on the house from sun up to sun down every day. We had to be out of our rental by July 31st so we knew we had to make at least some portion of the house live-able. We kind of succeeded. The upstairs of our house is mostly done. We refinished the hardwood floors ourselves, completely re-did the bathroom and painted everything. We also took out some walls and changed the floor plan. We're still missing doors, window trip and baseboards in most of the rooms, but at least we have a place to sleep and a bathroom.

What we really need in order to make it feel like a house is to finish the kitchen. We have the cabinet frames built and hung and the countertops installed and the refrigerator in place. We need to install the rest of the appliances, put together the insides of the cabinets, pantry etc and put on the doors. Oh, yeah and install the floor.

The addition is completely framed and under roof, but we're not really continuing to work on that until the inside of the existing house is done.

I spent some time in July being really depressed that the house wouldn't be done when we moved in as we had planned, but now I'm just glad we're here and am trying not to freak out about the lack of a kitchen, no washer and dryer, the fact the most of our belongings are in the basement etc.

In other news... I found out on Thursday that I had "graduated" out of physical therapy. After going at least twice a week all summer this was really exciting. I thought I was going to have to juggle that along with school and working on the house. I'm still going to the chiropractor, but I can handle one appointment at week.

The start of school wasn't quite as chaotic as normal because I have almost all the same kids as last year. There are a couple kids who have moved in to our district and a couple students with special needs that our special education teacher moved into my room because she thought that would be the best place for them. I'm still trying to figure these kids out, but I'm sure we'll come to an understanding soon.

The charter school is starting to feel more real as we work on finding a building and now have many families who are really excited about the prospect of sending their children there. I spent about an hour yesterday talking to a family who is paying to send their child to a private school right now because the public school flat out refused to make any accommodations for him saying they couldn't treat him any differently than any other child in the class because this wouldn't be fair. It's so nice to talk to people who are really excited about the school instead of angry or threatened by it.

I'm sad that I missed seeing all of you again this summer. I had had high hopes of returning at the end of July or beginning of August, but there was just no way we could leave with all the house stuff going on.

I love you and miss you!

Heather