Robert Gone On Business, End of AR, Alex Lund

As of April 1, 2009 I could count on one hand the times Robert has been away from home without me over the course of our thirteen years of marriage. So having him gone for a week in mid-April was a shock to my system. This was amplified by the fact that the day after he returned home, I was expecting 11 of his relatives coming to stay with us for Matthew's baptism, plus his parents who would be staying at my parent's home since there wasn't enough room for them here.

Robert left on Monday, April 20 to go to Cinncinatti, Ohio for work. That day I had a meeting with the principal, Garth Anderson. The point of the meeting was to give my final report on the Accelerated Reader program at Sprucewood which I have co-chaired for the past two years.

It is a bitter sweet thing to be at the end of running the program. I would so love to continue on with it, but I cannot justify the time it is taking away from my family and especially the time I could be spending volunteering in my children's individual classes.

In short, the program needs to be updated and run in a more efficient way. If I could implement the changes that need to be made, I could see putting more of my time into the project, but as things stand now, I have to move on. There are upgrades to the system that would allow it to run on the Internet and give great feedback to parents from their home computer plus allow students to take the tests from any computer in the school. However, these upgrades would require a lot more money and someone would have to chase after grant money to do it. Plus the fact that the school has to decide it really wants to invest the time, money, and energy to take advantage of the updated program. Enough of my soap box. Back to my new mantra: I can't own every problem there ever was, I have to let go, it's not my battle . . .

The next two days, I did my best to get the house in order for company. I did a lot of reorganizing--getting the guest bedroom in shape (I hadn't even changed the sheets since November when Shannon and Diego had come to stay). I reorganized my pantry and my storage room in the basement, too. I cleaned bathrooms, floors, and caught up on laundry. See all these things have gone severely neglected due to being at the school every waking moment as I try to be Super Volunteer Mom!

Robert's sister Caroline, came in to town Wednesday afternoon bringing her cutie pie, Alex (4 months old) with her. It was really nice to have her here before everyone else arrived so we could enjoy the two of them in relative peace and quiet.

I had a really hard time sleeping while Robert was gone. I have said for a while that I sleep on screensaver mode and it was really bad that week. Try as I may, even with Caroline here, I could not really rest. So, I was very glad when he came home. Of course, he happened to be wired the night he got home and decided to buy "Transformers" on DVD and watch it until 2:30 a.m. and silly me, I stayed up with him to watch. Crazy! But it was a darn good movie!