I’m so ridiculously excited! After manymany years of consideration, a lifetime of desire, months of planning and hunting, and a trip to a store that acted like they wanted our business, we finally bought DRUMS! Yay! They are so pretty. All sparkly blue and noisy and wonderful.  See?! [I have adjusted the positioning since the picture]

I wake up and stare at them until I feel it is polite enough an hour to practice. No, not really. I want to stare, but children hunger. I imagine myself playing drums all day, but, alas, children need more than an education on hearing protection. Put some Vic Firth sticks in Bambi’s hooves and you have something approaching my current skill level, but I’m having fun, and one day you’ll see a familiar-looking rockin’ granny video on YouTube.

Moving on to my wellness progress, now. I still avoid a lot of gluten, trying to be a good patient, but my sanity steps in occasionally for a solid cheat, mostly when out of the house. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty happy with the sprouted grain bread we’re trying. Nobody has complained about it. I can tell when too much cane sugar or maybe a hidden egg white, or perhaps a general imbalance of good solid nutrition gets in my system because I’ll feel absolutely knocked out tired the next day or two. I hate planning processes (my recent spiritual gifts test put “administration” at rock bottom), but I think I would like the convenience of having a meal plan in place, so I keep trying to work myself up to making one and giving it a try. I do like cooking when there is a plan in place, and I am anxious to try more vegetable- and bean-heavy recipes. I very much enjoy meat, but I feel drawn to putting more vegetarian dishes in my life (not the soy kind).

As for exercise, my pedometer is keeping me well-informed. I do love that. Some days I get great, fun exercise in playing Dance Dance Revolution on the Wii. Some day, I’ll be enough of a drummer to sweat, but otherwise it’s really hard to find the activity I can motivate myself to do every day, even for 5 minutes. Anything helps, Amy. Do something!  There’s definitely a break in the “just do it” circuit that needs repair. I want to be well. I want to eat well. I want to be fit. I want to feel great. Oh, why do I thwart myself?? I feel like I still need a mom to come around and say, OK, Amy, time to exercise, OK Amy, here are the fixin’s for your salad…and then, I whine and fuss, but then I go do it.

I also want to whine and fuss this week about coupons, toys and books.
Coupons: I feel compelled to use “free money.” I can’t find a place I can stick them that helps me remember to use them, when I can’t even remember them when they are sprawled out horribly visible on my counter. Perhaps I could free my mind from the entire concept.

Toys: Three small, closely-spaced boys have an embarrassing amount of toys. They will resent me forever and cling tighter to possessions if I forcibly get rid of toys. Many of the toys are parts of sets (Imaginext, trains, etc). The OCD part of me hates breaking up sets. I donate lots of stuff regularly. The “example” hasn’t caught on yet. The boys insist poor children should be bought new toys. They really do play with everything, when they can find it. I’ve occasionally put a ton of stuff in bins and stuffed them in closets. For one, toys in closets seems to be a waste of toy-having-ness. For another, the boys find the toys and pull them back out and my life doesn’t want to spend itself negotiating fair trades. I do think more vertical storage would help.

Books: A similar problem to toys. Books come in, but they rarely go out. We love books. We’re out of shelves.

These are great “problems” to have. How can I complain about abundance? I wish we were better at sharing it.

OK, on to school. Isaac is almost done with a piano book, and is feeling proud of his accomplishment. Ian is having a great time with his Dr. Who/History/Minecraft online class. He is also facing the lesson of persistence with his radio soldering project. He hits a boring part of a thing and wants to stop. We’re trying to grow through this and focus on the prize at the end: the pride of a tough job completed. Everyone in the house is having fun with the drums. Everyone is making great progress with his own stage of reading and writing (our major goals for this year). Ian got to join us at the range for Eat, Pray, Shoot, an occasional event we attend with friends, where we spend time enjoying a meal, some devotional thoughts and some target practice. Ian had a good time and is doing well learning projectile safety. Everything else is fairly same ol’, or I’ve forgotten, which happens a lot lately.

For now, I must go. There is an “urgent’ marker cap situation calling me.