It's been nearly a month since I returned home and made my last post on here. Since then we've spent a lot of time trying to settle in to a normal routine.. getting there slowly! The little guys & I have spent time in the garden planting new veggies (when it hasn't been pissing down rain anyway) and we had a great combination Frodos' birthday/Australia day bbq at the IL's house complete with sack races & egg & spoon races hehehe.

Jonathan is doing SO much better now. I've been updating HIS site, but have forgotten to update here (www.caringbridge.org/visit/jonathanbuckhalter ) He's moved to the best rehab hospital pretty much in the US, he's trache free, talking (able to answer his own phone now yay!) and walking a bit with therapy. The walking is painful for him though, they took the casts off both his legs in the last couple of days and he's really feeling it poor guy :( He wants OUT of that wheelchair though so he's soldiering on! I call & talk to him EVERY day... we sorta run out of things to say but I talk to him about anything & everything and he appreciates the company immensely. He's so bored and lonely and can't wait until he's able to go home.

Back here at home, we're attempting to get our year of homeschooling up and running. We're using a school of distance ed this year.. it's a bit different than typical ones though, as there is no prescribed curriculum. It uses an 'outcomes based' approach and basically we are free to choose whatever programs (or indeed even none at all!) to use as long as each term we can show that more objectives are being acheived. I'm thinking it won't be hard.. I had over half of Samwises' objectives for prep ticked off as already being met.. and Frodo is at least on track (grades 1-3 are grouped into one list that kids must meet before the end of grade 3/age 8) if not a little ahead of the game. I'm sure I'll have lots of interesting and amusing hs posts/pics through the year :D

And hopefully it won't even take me a month to post them lol.

Just a couple of days after I posted last on here, I got the phone call every mother has nightmares about. My 20yr old son, who lives in the US, was in a catastrophic car accident. His little Ford Ranger pick up truck did not stand a chance against the fuel tanker that we believe he never saw coming. Neither did his beautiful girlfriend, Susan... she died instantly.

As any mother would, I moved hell & earth to get on a plane to be there with him. He spent the better part of a month in a coma, with a few very diced moments where we weren't entirely sure he was going to make it through this. I was with him until Jan 2, and he had woken up, acted like he wanted to talk and was responding via giving a thumbs up or sticking out his tongue. It ripped me apart having to leave him... but at least I got to see his first steps towards recovery.

Now, he's said a few short words and is much more alert & aware during his waking hours (although true to form, he's still not much of a morning person ;) and, according to his neurologist, is going to make a good recovery. He has just moved in to Sheperd Center for spinal cord & brain injuries in Atlanta, which is just about the BEST rehab center in the US (they say top 10, but their stats and patient outcomes are second to none). So watch out Georgia... my boy is on the way back.

I did blog while away, but on a caringbridge site that I created to keep family & friends updated on his progress. I plan to TRY to keep both going because I need an outlet for my own ponderings as well as somewhere to talk about what has happened in our family and how it's going.

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!! Some of the local ferals (meant in the most affectionate way, as mine are also local ferals ;) have been released from their cells.. err... classrooms, for the year. So the beasties are everywhere.

Today was playgroup at the indoor playcenter with the homeschool group. Usually playgroups get free admission, because the centre knows that we'll all have to spend small fortunes feeding our little monsters while there. Well, the center, which shall remain nameless (but whose initials are wriggle it) decided at the last minute that since it was school holidays (only for private school kids though) they NEEDED to charge playgroups 5bucks per kid admission. Keep in mind the rate is usually 7.50 each for the age group our kids fall in.. so yeah.. 2.5o off as opposed to free... we are not impressed. We get there & grudgingly hand over the 15bucks to get in.. only to find there are people coming out of the woodwork. There was a huge birthday party as going on *insert cranky ass smilie* So there were balloons and facepainting that my kids couldn't have and the littlest guy was VERY unimpressed with this turn of events. After 3 meltdowns (one over balloons, one over a thomas the tank engine backpack that he wanted but was.not.ours, and one over the fact that he was just plain up at 515am and needed to go to sleep) I said F*ck this and we left. The kids had a couple of hours play, I had a couple of hours frustration and might have gotten to say 5 words to any of the other mums. And actually.. I may bow out of future events there because I'm shitty with the management. So there, take that.

However on the upside, we managed to find ONE of the xmas tree that we fell in love with a month or so at the shop... everytime I've been in there, there's been an empty bay where my beloved tree was to be *sigh* It was sheer dumb luck, or divine intervention, or I just plain manifested my dream tree (if so, go me!) I assembled it last night and hubby shall be putting lights on it (got flash new led lights too!) when he gets home and then later we shall deck the halls.

I also scored a cute advent calendar to count down to solstice. I have a short list of fun things (baking cookies, making paper chains, going for an xmas lights drive, watching classic holiday movies) that I need to put on little slips of paper to stick in the pockets so when the kids move the candy cane to the next day they get a little activity to do that day.

Tomorrow hubby & I are doing the unthinkable.. we are going to the biggest mall in the area shopping for presents. We must be crazy, at least we've managed to offload the hobbits onto their grandparents for the day so that we can do this in relative peace. We are planning to make a date of it and have sushi & fancy coffee for lunch.. and maybe even cheesecake. cuz there's always room for cheesecake!

And WTF is up with my photo showing up at the top no matter where in the blog I insert it?!?!? NM stuff the photo. Anyway, good luck to you surviving the silliness of the season, please wish me the same because as my dearest put it 'I don't want my wife psychotic this year' *scowl*