Good news x4! And a layout. :-)

1 • First an update on the truck-meets-house incident: We got the estimate back from the contractor, and it came to a bit more than he’d originally guessed, so we went ahead and had the insurance adjuster come out today. He was very thorough and very generous, so we can afford to have the contractor do all the work (the majority of the cost of which was the interior stuff anyway). Woo hoo! That’s a huge weight lifted, especially since this was a bit of a financial crunch time for us already. I’m feeling so much better about my little moment of imperfection. :-b

2 • We had Matthew’s parent-teacher-student conference on Tuesday. He’s doing great. He’s improved so much over the course of the year. He’s still not quite at what our district considers a “grade 1” reading level, but he’s very close, and will most likely be caught up before school starts back up in August if we keep working with him over the summer. His comprehension is already great, he just needs to get a bit faster. He’s been working really hard to stay more focused and keep his hands to himself, etc., and has been doing super with that the past couple of weeks too. His math test scores were so good that the teacher didn’t even bother to go through all the individual tests with us. And there has been no mention of the words “summer school”. Ahhh, freedom. And sleeping in!!! :-)

3 • Matthew was really upset when he got home from school yesterday, because he’d gotten in trouble on the bus on the way home for accidentally bonking his friend (a girl) on the nose, and he had gotten moved to a different seat. He was devastated that he wouldn’t get to sit by her and her sister anymore. Well, today he got off the bus just bursting with happiness. Not only had he made some new friends on the bus due to the seat change, but he had aced his math test. This was his final “math facts” test. It’s a timed test, and they have to get 100% on it to pass. He’d been stuck on this one for several weeks, either not being able to get through it quickly enough, or making a few errors. When we practiced at home yesterday, he got through the test perfectly with time to spare, so I knew he could do it. I think it was just a matter of him not panicking. I was so happy for him today!

4 • In the other child department: I got a call from the mom of one of the girls in Kaylee’s class. Apparently her daughter talks non-stop about Kaylee, and only Kaylee. They were right behind us in carpool a couple of days ago, which was the first time she’d actually gotten to see who Kaylee was, and she’d ended up behind us driving home and realized we don’t live too far apart, so she called this afternoon and invited us to have a playdate at their house next week. I made the mistake of telling Kaylee. She is completely over-the-moon excited. I’ve taken her to some playdates with my mom’s group, but a lot of them don’t work with our schedule, and when we do go, it’s always different kids there, and there is a wide age range, so she hasn’t really gotten to be friends with any of them. The reason it was a mistake to tell her is, again, the time thing. She has no concept of what next week is. Even if I tell her x-number of sleeps until then, she still just doesn’t get it. It’s going to be a loooooong eight days until that playdate. And this right on the heels of those long days of pre-birthday excitement. The poor girl is going to have to learn some patience or she’s going to implode! LOL

And, finally, at the risk of being triply redundant, I think I’m going to try posting my layouts here on my blog as well as at RAKScraps and then in batches on my website. I takes me so very long to get them up on my website, since I post those chronologically but don’t scrap chronologically (still haven’t done Christmas), and the RAKScraps gallery has just gotten so big that they sometimes get lost over there. As I was driving Kaylee to school this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that my sponsor layouts are due in a week, and I hadn’t even started them. So I pulled out some new pics I took on Monday, and put together the first two layouts. I like them both, but this one doesn’t look as good itty-bitty (like it has to be in the newsletter) as the other one does, so I’m posting this one now, and the other after the newsletter comes out mid-month. So after that unnecessarily rambly introduction, here it is:


Credits: “Over The Rainbow” by Eve Recinella. (In case you can’t figure out the odd angle of the photo, Kaylee was actually lying across my lap, and I held the camera down near the floor, shooting up towards the ceiling. And, no, our ceiling isn't green; it just looks that way in the photo. LOL)

That’s it for now! Happy Wednesday! :-)