My Life

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would do an update post since I wasn’t really around here much last week.  As you can expect, life has been busy, but mainly it’s been full of homework.  Ruben and I both have important web projects to get done on top of all of our other work.  What this means for you is that you can expect some changes here at The Sensible Mom starting tomorrow!  I hope you like them.  While the kids and I grocery shopped yesterday (THAT was an adventure), Ruben was able to put together a mock up in Photoshop of some of the changes he’d like to make.  I checked it out when I got home, and it looks good!

My computer programming class has taken up a lot of my time as well.  Too much!  And it has been the cause of sin too, unfortunately.  I tend to get rather emotional when I’m doing my programming homework and can’t get the program to “run” after waaaayyyyy too much time spent on it.  Ugh.  It’s bad.  When I do get it to finally work, I feel relief, submit my assignment, and wonder what next week’s homework is going to be like. 🙁  I will never be a computer programmer.  My brother, on the other hand, will be.  He is all about programming and currently pursuing a degree in computer programming.  I saw his this weekend and told him how much I hate it.  He gets it, though, and I think I’ll probably ask him for help with this week’s homework if I can’t get it.  Especially since the teacher let us know that the next thing we are learning, something called “Arrays” is going to be hard.  I’m scared.  If she thinks arrays are going to be hard and everything else was easy, I need to be very afraid.  How many frustrating hours will be spent on this week’s homework?  Feel free to pray for me if you feel lead. 

And if you are wondering why I press on with this class eventhough I’m NOT going to be a computer programmer, it’s because of WordPress (and because I don’t want to quit).  WordPress runs off of PHP, a programming language.  And eventhough we aren’t learning PHP in my computer programming class (we are learning Qbasic), once I learn Qbasic, it will be MUCH easier to learn PHP.  I’ve already started trying to learn PHP on my own, and I could see right away how the programming class I’m in right now has benefited me.  Soooo, I’m going to try to make it to the end, especially because of all the time I’ve already put into this class.  If it becomes more than I can take, though, I can always drop before the end of next month…..I’ll press on for now.  Oh, and my teacher is great.  She knows programming.  It’s just REALLY hard to learn.

On the homefront, the kids are great.  Nathan and Breanna are doing great with school.  Isaac is enjoying a “Count with Me” class for preschoolers that Ruben takes him to on Saturday mornings, and David–he’s into pinching, biting, and scratching right now, but we’re working on that!  I clipped his nails yesterday which has helped. 

On the deal front, because of Jewel’s fabulous catalina deals lately, we won’t need any vegetable oil, syrup, or popcorn for the next year or so!  Plus I have some to give away.  Isaac LOVES pancakes (and it’s hard for me to resist his sweet little voice when he asks me to make him some whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner) so I’m sure we’ll have no problem going through a lot of the syrup. 

There are new catalina deals at Jewel for this week which I took three kids with me to get yesterday afternoon.  I took the three older kids while David was napping in an effort to give Ruben some time to work on websites.  It was an adventure!  I did five transactions at self-checkout and on my very first order, I forgot to swipe my “Preferred Card” to get the sale price!  I wondered why my total was higher than it should be and when I looked at my reciept, I knew why.  The good thing was that all I had to do was take my reciept to customer service to get credited, and they didn’t have to re-ring my order.  What made it more adventurous, though, was Isaac.  He likes to help you “ring” things up at self-checkout.  Fun! 🙂

That wraps up the past week!  Happy Monday!

Hi Everyone!

I know it’s been just over a week since I last posted so I thought I’d just do a random post on what’s been going on.  For starters, this past week has involved late NIGHTS which I am not fond of because those late nights result in me getting up around the same time as the kids in the morning instead of well before them.  When that happens, there isn’t much time to blog unless I want to do it with wildness going on in the background. 

The late nights have been as a result of either homework or kids who weren’t tired at bedtime because they’d had (late) naps earlier in the day.  I get a little impatient when kids are up past there bedtime so at least with one child (Isaac), whether he takes a nap or not, is going to have to lay in bed until sleep hits him.  David is another story.  When he naps past 3:00pm, it’s hard to get him to sleep by 9:00pm.  He’ll usually go to bed around 10:00pm and that’s okay with me.

We went to the zoo on Friday after Ruben got home from school to get in one last visit before the weather gets really cold.  It was a lot of fun except for the part where geese surrounded our table while we ate lunch and scared the kids.  We had purposely chosen a table far away from the geese who were hanging around everyone else trying to eat lunch, but they migrated over to us anyway!  Have you noticed how “healthy” looking those geese at the zoo look?  Or their thick necks?  They’re WELL fed so I’m sure they really didn’t need any of our scraps!

On the school front, we’ve had about the same amount of homework we’ve been having only it’s been more challenging.  We’ve been learning CSS (cascading style sheets) for web design, and the homework has been a little frustating for me.  If you miss one little character, that can throw your code completely off.  For example, for the homework I forgot to put an ending “ (quotation mark) on a word and that resulted in me getting a 50% because it caused two main parts of the homework assignment NOT to display.  No worries.  I was able to fix my mistake and resubmit my homework for full credit, but I’m going to start using a better version of Notepad (Notepad++) that will help me catch those small errors from now on.  In class, we use the plainest of plain text editors, which is Notepad.  The problem with that is when you make a mistake, nothing highlights to let you know to recheck your code because something is wrong.  I was having trouble in class getting something to display because I had written “test” instead of “text.”  That took about 7 minutes to find.

Ruben and I were able to take about 2 hours and go to a local coffee shop to work on an important web project.  The grandparents watched the kids while we tried to start writing some HTML and CSS for our individual projects.  It was very refreshing to get away!  We rarely go out alone without the kids, but this is an important project that will result in failure of the class if we don’t get it done so we made the effort to leave and think about what we are going to do and what it’s going to take to create our individual web sites.  The first draft is due at the end of the month so we are going to TRY to get away on Saturday afternoons until then.  I’m looking forward to it.  Next time, though, we are picking a different location.  We went to Starbucks this time and spent nearly $10 on two drinks and a donut!  That’s crazy.  I think we are going to try McDonalds next time for their free wifi and cheaper (better, in my opinion) frappes. 🙂

I’m off to get ready for church.  I hope you have a great day!