Oh my goodness how time has flown. Its been almost a full year since I last wrote on our blog. Life certainly got very busy for us and I feel bad that I've neglected our homeschool blog. It had been one constant in our life.

I guess I will fast forward our life a little bit and recap what I've missed blogging so far. 
First in March of this year  , 2013, we moved. After living where we lived , in an apartment for 11 yrs , we upgraded and finally have a home of our own. We had lots of ' fun' moving in. Of course thinking the end of March would be safe we actually ended up moving in a snow storm. I guess it made it a lot more interesting to move in sub zero temperatures with slippery snow.

 We love our new home, and wouldn't trade that for anything in the world.  While getting comfortable we also added a cat. Her name is Sara. The girls named her Sara. I'm not sure if she likes her new name but she adopted us and she is now happily living wi
th us. Yes, Sara is a girl cat, and yes, daddy is now outnumbered 6 to 1 in our house. Poor Dad.   We aren't sure where the cat came from. We did ask around making sure she didn't belong to anyone so we think she was maybe thrown out onto the street. I will say she is plumping up nicely because when we found her she was all skin and bones.

Then after finally getting settled in we were , yet, again , dealing with another surgery. Last year Maggie had a big surgery to fix some issues she was having and we were gone for two months in the summer. This time we had to wait until September for this surgery. She had a bladder augmentation and we were prepared to stay a while only to find Miss Maggie did super fantastic and we weren't gone as long as we thought we were going to be.  Which was awesome. Though we did come away with a new diagnosis with Maggie's heart of Left Ventricular Non Compression ( say that three times fast! ) . Its where the muscle fibers of the heart did not compress down like they should have during development in the womb. With this we have to trek back to Cincinnati in the summer to have the whole family checked out as it can be a hereditary thing. We're praying its not and no one else has this other than just Maggie.

I'll of course be posting more about Left Ventricular Non Compression as we learn more about it. As for now Maggie's heart is pumping well and is still strong. Which is good. She just has a Still's Murmur which was picked up before her PICC line placement which we didn't know she still had. It just was more pronounced when she laid down and that's why it hasn't been picked up in quite some time. Everytime she's gone for a physical she has always been sitting up. When she sits up they can barely detect it.

So while we are finishing our journey with the bladder stuff , we are beginning a new journey with heart issues.

In the meantime we've been trudging along with school. Sounds rough but its so.  We decided to go ahead and go back with Pacyber for this year due to the fact Maggie was going to have surgery and Daddy was going to be the main person doing the education. Not to mention the fact that we had like zero dollars to spend on curriculum  for the  girls because we've had to use it on medical travel.  To say its going well is an understatement.  Hannah is doing well with the virtual but she isn't loving it.  Marilyn decided to take on Chemistry and Algebra 1 this year and these are two very tough classes in our book. Either I've gotten dumber or school has gotten a lot harder.  Even I have a tough time with the work. Katie is struggling mightly with the virtual and self paced .  And Maggie likes it , me not so much because some of the curriculum is working for her and some not so much,, like the math.  She really needs something like Saxon math to make it sink in.  But we are getting through the year.  I figured it would be helpful for Marilyn because she is in high school this year and the subjects are getting tougher and we just didn't have the money to shell out on our own for private virtual or DVDS to get her through it. But its proving to be very frustrating because of how the tests are worded and how they test them on things that were never discussed in the virtual class or can't find in the book.   But we have to do what we have to do to comply with state law and the fact I don't have time to make my own curriculum for four children in four different grades.

Fast forward to today: October 31, 2013, Halloween Day. Our favorite time of the year. I know there are those out there that wonder. but we don't celebrate Halloween but we celebrate dressing up , having fun and getting some candy.  I can't wait to follow up with some pictures of the girls. They've all decided what they want to be and we're hoping the weather holds up. Its not supposed to be very good weather wise tonight. Which is a bummer because we rarely ever have nice weather for Halloween. Granted it is warm outside , its grey, windy and its going to be raining soon.