Bein’ Franklin

Posted by mommyfranklin at June 4th, 2008

About a week before the end of school, Emily brought home a permission slip for her name to be put into a drawing to take home one of the class pets.  The class had 2 hamsters.  There were 21 kids in Emily’s class.  We signed the form thinking there was very little chance of "winning" a hamster.  We even prepared Emily so she wouldn’t be too disappointed if she didn’t win.

What we didn’t expect was only 2 of the 21 students to be in the drawing.  Emily called us from school on the last day of school to let us know that we would be taking a hamster home from school.  She was so excited that we couldn’t help being excited too.

Meet Sneakers.  He lives in his cage in Emily’s bedroom.  He seems to enjoy his new home a lot. 

Posted by mommyfranklin at April 29th, 2008

I am generally the type of person who doesn’t like to be fussed over. I go along in life doing what I need to do and try to remain behind the scenes. I focus on my kids and overall well being of my family.

Unfortunately, something came along about eight months ago that forced me focus on myself. At Emily’s 7th birthday party at the end of August, I noticed a lump about the size of a ping pong ball in my right groin. It didn’t hurt, but it was a little disconcerting. In the following weeks, I kept track of the lump. It changed size and would go away with no apparent reason. I mentioned it to my doctor at my annual checkup, but all she could do was guess what it could be since that was during a time when the lump was not there.

Fast forward to mid-February. The lump is still coming in going, and I decide it’s time to get it checked out. I actually made it in to the see the doctor at a time when the lump is there. My doctor didn’t know what it was. Whatever it was, she knew it would have to be removed so she referred me to a surgeon.

When I made it in to see the surgeon two weeks later, of course the lump was gone. The surgeon guessed it was a lymph node or a hernia, but couldn’t be sure with it not actually being there. Those guesses were based on the location. He gave me instructions to call him the next time it came back. That chance came just a couple weeks later. This time the doctor felt pretty sure it was a lymph node, so he scheduled an ultrasound and possible biopsy for the next day.

The ultrasound had surprising results. Instead of the expected lymph node, it was confirmed that I had a femoral hernia. Surgery was our only option. At that time, the question was when. The answer came the next week. The surgeon’s office called me while we gone to San Antonio to discuss the results of the ultrasound. I asked if we could wait until summer to get it repaired, and they really didn’t encourage that. The longer we waited, the greater the risk of strangulation. At that point, it would be emergency surgery. Scott and I talked about it and decided we would schedule it as soon as we could.

After we returned from our trip, I called the surgeon and scheduled the surgery for April 25th. They told me that it was an outpatient procedure with about three days recovery, which made April 25th ideal because it was during a four day weekend from work. I wouldn’t have to miss any work. That is why I really started to panic when I came down with a sinus infection on the 18th. I really didn’t want to have to reschedule.

Luckily, I was feeling mostly better by the 25th so off we went to the surgery center at 10:00 that morning. After a visit with my surgeon and the others who would be involved with the surgery, it was time for my nap. I had told the anesthesiologist about the sinus infection, so she added some steroid in with the anesthesia to help with that. The next thing I remember is being in recovery with Scott close by. Apparently, I woke up at the end of a conversation with the surgeon. As it turned out, I had two hernias in my right groin. They have both been repaired, and I am well on my way to being back to my old self.

This is not my first visit to a hospital / surgery center in recent years. But, this is the first time it is about something that centers on me. The three other times that I’ve had surgery in the last 7 years, the end result has been a baby. We were always surrounded by our very supportive family and had a wonderful Sunday School class in Plainview that was very good to provide a meal or two and to stock us up on diapers.

I have to say that the show of love around me over the last weekend has been very humbling. Our new Sunday School class, which we’ve only been in for about 4 months, provided meals for 3 days. The wonderful ladies that I work with sent food for another day. Another group I have joined since we moved here has called and promised to bring meals soon as well. Mom and Dad came for a week to help corral the children and to care for me while Scott had to work. There have been more emails and phone calls than I can count. I returned to work today and was really pampered. I almost feel like I shouldn’t be feeling as good as I do, but the truth is that I feel okay. I am tired and a little sore, but I am doing really well.

When we get bogged down with all the awful stories that we hear on the news, it’s hard to feel like there is any good left in the world. But there is. I have seen it this week.

Posted by mommyfranklin at April 4th, 2008

At Dairy Queen today, an older gentlemen asked me if the boys were twins. I’ve gotten used to people telling me that the boys look exactly alike (which I really don’t think they do, but have stopped arguing about it), but this is the first time I’ve been asked if they were twins. I told the man that they are not twins, but are actually a year and a half apart.

People may think they look alike, but I think if they spent even a little bit of time with them that they would know that their personalities are quite different. Maybe that’s what I see when I look at them, so I don’t notice them looking alike.

Posted by mommyfranklin at March 7th, 2008

The end of day 2 is approaching. It’s been a good day. Emily and Timothy had a good time at school, and Zachary and I enjoyed our day off. I’ve been fairly productive today. I guess going to bed the same time as the kids was good for me. If I continue like this for the rest of the weekend, Scott may decided that going to the conferences should occur more often.

1. Let’s see, when I left off the previous post I was about to get the boys dressed so Timothy could get to school. He has been learning the letter V this week, so he wanted to wear a vest to school. Actually, he wanted to wear a violet vest. He doesn’t own a violet vest, so he had to settle for his gray one with blue diamonds. He wore it over his Varsity Throwback t-shirt, so he was all set to show his teacher all the V’s in his outfit.

2. While we were dropping Timothy off, Zachary made his weekly visit to the director’s candy jar. Much to his dismay, it was empty. I managed to pull him away, and off we went to United to pick up some things that we hadn’t gotten at Wal-Mart the night before. Because we were only picking up a couple things, I let Zachary push one of the kid-sized carts. We were in the cereal aisle when Zachary exclaimed that he had found suckers and he needed to take them to school for Mrs. Tiffiany. He was holding a small bag of Easter dum-dums. I was touched that he was actually thinking of someone else, so I let him put the bag in the cart. He’s a sweet kid, but sweets are generally not something that he gives up very easily. I realize he probably wanted them so he could get lollipops when he wanted them, but it was still very sweet. Tiffiany was delighted that he had brought them to her, and he was duly rewarded with the first pick out of the bag before she put them in her candy dish.

3. By the time we got the lollipops delivered, it was time to get Timothy. He got his report card today. He’s following in the steps of his sister and is doing a great job in school.
His teacher said he’s right where he needs to be. I couldn’t agree more. It’s funny, as his class of 11 children has only 3 boys in it. One of the other boys moved to Dallas a couple weeks ago and the other one has been out every day this week. Apparently, Timothy has won the heart of most of the girls in the class. He always comes home telling us all about his girlfriends, and today was no different. He told me that he wished the other boy in his class would move away too. HAHAHA! I managed to keep a straight face as I told him not to say things like that.

4. Our afternoon was much like any other week. The boys watched cartoons and I continued cleaning. At 3:00, it was time to go get Emily from school. Zachary had fallen asleep on the couch by this point, so it took a few moments to get him up and coherent enough to go get her. I had invited a friend from Plainview to come help us go through all our pizza, so we headed home to tidy things up a bit. Then we found out that our friends weren’t coming, so we went back to our plan to rent movies and eat the TV dinners they had picked out last night at Wal-Mart. So, we went to Hasting’s. The kids chose “Dora Undercover” and “Barbie Mariposa,” and I chose “No Reservations” to watch after they go to bed. We’ve already watched Dora and are watching Barbie now as I type this. The kids are really enjoying themselves. Every five minutes or so, Emily exclaims that she LOVES this movie! It’s another in the series of the Fairytopia when Elina the fairy saves the day.

5. Scott is really enjoying his conference, as he mentioned in his blog. He has called just about every two hours during his breaks between sessions, and tells me how much he is enjoying himself. The only complaint he has is about the hotel he is staying in. He said he wished he had used priceline.com to get a room this weekend like we’ve done for our Spring Break trip. We’ll be staying at a La Quinta Inn for very little more than what he’s paying for at the Econolodge. At least the conference has been good, so he hasn’t been spending too much time in his hotel anyway.

Tomorrow, we go to Plainview for a party and then come back here for another one. It’ll be a fun filled day I am feeling better than I did this morning. Hopefully that will continue!

Posted by mommyfranklin at February 15th, 2008

Scott’s cousin tagged me on this meme like a week ago. But, I haven’t been on my blog in quite sometime. I should blog about the reason in another post, but it seems I never get to those other posts. So, I will mention them here.

I teach an online class. This is the last week of it, so I have been trying to figure out final grades for my students.

I teach two year olds. It’s Valentine’s week and cold / flu season. And, I am trying to finish my required training hours without having to go to a training on my birthday. Nuff said?

Emily is ill. Poor thing has been out since Tuesday with strep. This has affected Scott more than me, as I’ve been busy with the aforementioned items.

The girl scout cookies have arrived. With the girl scout being ill, the duty of delivering the cookies has fallen to me. We’re getting there.

This one is fun. We have a new (to us ) vehicle. It’s a 2005 Chevy Trailblazer. It’s more fun to drive than to blog.

Timothy filled his chart with smiley faces, so we had a celebration at Chuck E. Cheese! Oh boy!

Zachary is 3. He needs constant supervision.

And, now to the meme.

Okay… here are the instructions:
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people. and post a comment here once you post it to your blog, so I can come see.

The closest book to me is “Activities for the Spark” Volume 2. It presented an interesting situation because it starts on page 286. So, I added 123 to 286 and came to page 409.

The three sentences are:
What the chiren will do: Make shapes out of spaghetti (or rice sticks) and decide how they are the same or different. Show how you can dip your piece of cooked pasta into paint, lay it on a paper plate, and move it around until it is in a curvy shape. Tell the children that in the art center they will dip spaghetti into paint the way you did and them make shapes out of it.

Yep, I’m a preschool teacher.

I tag anyone who wants to do this. It’s fun!

Posted by mommyfranklin at January 23rd, 2008

Fundraising has changed a lot in the last 20 years. I remember going door-to-door to all houses in our neighborhood asking people to help whatever organization I was in go to camp…

We generally avoid fundraising when the kids bring home flyers. Door-to-door selling is discouraged and we don’t know that many people. Generally, we’ll buy something so they can get a small prize, but that’s as far as we go. At the beginning of the school year, Emily brought home a fundraising form much like those that we had when we were younger. The big difference was that this one included a website that we could send to people so they could order what they wanted. I think we ended up forgetting about that one.

This past Saturday marked the beginning of Girl Scout Cookie pre-sale. Emily is in Brownie’s this year, so she’s been busy taking orders from friends and family. When I first saw that she had to sell at least 25 boxes to get patch, I was worried. That was before I knew that Girl Scout cookies are extremely easy to sell. It takes very little convincing to get people to hand over $3 for a box of cookies.

Emily’s sell has gone very well so far. We went to Granbury last weekend to celebrate Dad’s birthday, so Emily was able to hit up Grandmother & Granddaddy and Uncle LD. By the time we came home, she already had orders for 12 boxes.

On Monday, she took the order form to school so she could hit up her teachers and friends. Her teacher was out that day, but she came home with the names of two friends who said they wanted cookies. I told her not to write down her friends yet, because we needed to be sure it was okay with their parents. I told her to get their addresses and we would go to their house after school on Tuesday. That night, she called Grandmama & Granddad, Gran & Ol’ Granddad, and a friend from Plainview to get some more orders. She did a very good job making the calls all by herself.

On Tuesday, I took the order form to work with me and got orders from all the teachers there. After school, we went to two of Emily’s friends’ houses. I must say that she is better than I ever was at selling. By the end of the day, her box count was up to 48!

Today, Emily took the order form to school again and her teacher ordered some cookies. I took it to work again and talked to any of the teachers that hadn’t been there yesterday. As of right now, she’s up to 66 boxes.

She’s done so well in 5 days, and has 4 days left. Emily’s going to talk to some of her teachers are church this evening and Scott’s going to take the form to Wayland sometime. She may just make it to her personal goal of 150 boxes if things continue to go so well.

Anybody want some cookies?

Posted by mommyfranklin at December 31st, 2007

Posted by mommyfranklin at December 27th, 2007

We’re home! It was a great visit, but it is so nice to be home again. For a while, we weren’t sure we would be home tonight or not. After spending most of the morning figuring out how we would get all our things into the van, we headed out after lunch. We had checked the weather and found that it would be fairly slow going until we made it to Plainview when things should clear up. We didn’t want a repeat of Christmas 2000, when we had been stranded in Sweetwater because of an icy patch on I-20.

We had one planned stop in Amarillo. Visibility wasn’t great and the roads were slick (Thank God Scott was driving!), but we made it with no problem. After a nice visit, we had dinner and then made our way back to the road home. The snow had picked up considerably while we were eating, so we were going slow. About 10 miles south of Amarillo, we were considering turning around. Scott kept going though. Around Happy, TX, we were going around 15 mph. A phone call to friend in Plainview revealed that their was some slick spots in Plainview, but no snow. So, there was hope that things would improve. So, we trudged along. In Tulia, the boys announced that they needed a pit stop. It was time for a break from driving, so we pulled in to the closest gas station. We offerred the dogs a chance to get out for a break here also, but only one of the dogs actually took us up on the offer. Lucy took one look at the snow and headed back to her seat.

Soon, we were back on the road. We had considered staying in Plainview to wait out the storm, but decided we would keep going. We had made it past the worst of it. As the roads went from slick to wet to dry, we became even more secure in our decision.

I have to say that the kids were quite good during the trip. We had to remind them to keep the volume down during the more treacherous spots in the road, but they really didn’t do too bad. We made it home around 9:00, and got the kids in bed. Then, I went through the mail and have done some of the work I needed to do for my online course.

Posted by mommyfranklin at December 27th, 2007

My day started with Scott and Zachary very sweetly asking me if I was going to sleep all day. They had been kind enough to let me sleep until 11:00. I feel better today. Not 100%, but definitely more like myself. The stomach bug seems to have run it’s course and the cold seems to be on it’s way out (I hope).

It was a good day. Considering that I slept most of it, there really is not much to say about today. We are still in Canadian. It has been a great, relaxing visit. Zachary has gotten very good use out of his playdoh (he now knows what happens if you mix blue, yellow, and green playdoh), Timothy has gotten pretty good on his vSmile (which he calls dSmile and Zachary calls a tSmile — don’t ask!) and on his Leapster, and Emily has taken very good care of her new Webkin poodle, Princess Leah. Scott and I have each gotten new books which we have spent a good bit of time reading. And I haven’t even mentioned the food. It’s been great!

Weather permitting, we plan to go home tomorrow. Scott has work to do not only to prepare for his new/old job that starts in a few weeks and some things to tie up at the job he is leaving, and I have things I need to do for my online class.

Posted by mommyfranklin at October 14th, 2007

So, it’s been about 6 weeks since my last blog. It’s not from lack of activity to blog about. I’m just having a difficult time deciding what is appropriate to blog about.

The children that I teach have given me tons of blog topics, but I am just not real comfortable blogging about them. Even if I leave their names off, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Thinking as a parent, I don’t know how I would feel if I were to come across the blog of one of my own kids’ teachers and found entries about my kids. So, in the interest of safety, I think it best I grant the children some privacy and leave them off the blog.

Another good resource is the online class that I teach. In general, I don’t think it is a good idea to use a blog to dish about current students. I have 10 students, and think it would be pretty easy for them to figure out who I was talking about. This particular group has been relatively quiet and do a good job of getting their work done.

So, that leaves me to focus my blog entries on my family. They are my favorite topic anyway, so that’s okay.

To help get me jumpstarted, here’s a list of posts I hope to get to soon –
* We will have a new niece or nephew next May
* We’ve almost decided on a church
* Shopping for Halloween costumes
* Timothy and Zachary have a crush on the same girl
* Timothy at school
* Friday mornings with Zachary
* Emily has joined Brownies
* Our routine

Alright, that gives me a place to start. Hopefully I’ll actually get to the posts eventually.