Tuesday, May 22, 2007

A Terrible Tragedy!!

A few weeks ago a friend of ours was critically injured in an accident. He works for the local minor league baseball team here and was setting up the fireworks for that night's display when one went off and critically injured him.

My husband got to know Rai through business. We trade out our bins for tickets to the Sky Sox games. We love going so it is a great trade for us. And through the years hubby has gotten to know Rai. What a great person he is! In a lot of ways he is one of the biggest forces behind the success of the team in the Springs. He is the one who is on the mike at every game, he is the one getting donations, he is the one at the different events, he is the one that every one in town recognizes.

And then this! The early word is that somehow static electricity caused the firework to ignite and it exploded in his face. Every time we get updates it is worse - it sounds like one side of his face is gone along with the eye on that side, they have had to rebuild his nasal passage, the part of his face that is still intact is severely burned. It happened on Military appreciation night and so there were military medical people on scene right away and they said that this accident was worse then anything they saw in Iraq. Now, I don't know what they saw there but I would imagine that this is really bad.

I just hurt for him and his family. He has three young kids - imagine their dad will never, never be the same. His wife is now living in a hotel in Denver to be closer to him and help him while his kids are living with their grandparents here. And I know from the time Peyton spent in NICU how hard that time separated from your family is. I think of them a dozen times a day and just say a little prayer for this man and his family and then I say a word of thanks for just how lucky I am!

Here is an article that was in our local paper:
http://www.gazette.com/articles/sky_22332___article.html/sox_team.html

Saturday, May 12, 2007

$900.00!!!

Imagine my surprise when Cathy, from my LSS called to tell me that I had $900.00 of store credit at her store!!!!! I did "earn" it but WOW! I never expected that much! They had, for the first time a garage sale. It was $10 to sign up but then you got a $10 gift certificate to the store. It ran for two days and you didn't have to be there - they gave me tags with my bar code and the people just paid the store and I got store credit for what I sold.

So, I spent about two weeks going through my scrapbook room and had quite a lot of stuff to sell. Lots of old patterned paper and about 5 years worth of Club Scrap kit. And TONS of old magazines and quite a few random bags of supplies. I tagged 200 things, I know because that is how many bar code stickers she gave me and I used them all.

A funny store - I knew I had soooo much stuff that I needed help getting it into the store so hubby and I both loaded the back of our Suburbans and went up to the store. As we were making trips in and unloaded stuff there was another lady there with her mom. She saw all the stuff I took in and looked at me with a sad looks and said, "Oh, are you stopping scrapbooking and selling all your stuff?" LOL! Uh, no, I just have a lot of stuff. LOL! So then I walk out and the next time I came in the lady and her mom were looking in all my boxes and oohing and awing about all my stuff. Then I heard them making plans to get to the store first thing Friday morning. LOL!

I stopped by the store at about 10:30 or 11:00 on Friday morning - the store had only been open about an hour and a half and already there was a HUGE chunk of my stuff gone. I had high hopes!

But I really never imagined - the call that I had $900.00 of store credit. LOL! Luckily she carries QK so I don't think I will have a problem using it. But the funny thing is that as I was at my book club on Wed with all this store credit - I had a hard time using it! I don't want to "waste" it. I did end up buying a new QK alphabet (Uptown Girl) and a few of the new Revolution flower dies. Cathy said that there is a new QK release on Tues so I will probably "need" something again. ;)

In the end I picked up one little box of stuff - everything else sold! But that has inspired me even more! I have been on a mission to clean out the scrapbook room. I have more stuff in there that I will never use and it is just getting out of control. So I am going through EVERYTHING! Amazing the stuff I have found - the first letter I got from Janelle about coming to a CM class. Where this whole obsession started (I saved that letter by the way - gotta scrap that!!). I also found a TON of old CM stuff, lots of old idea books and printed out page ideas and just lots of old stuff. Soooooo, after the success of that garage sale I have decided to have another garage sale here at my house! Tons of scrapping, stamping and cardmaking stuff for sale, plus books and magazines plus anything else that I can convince the kids to get rid of in their rooms. If I am lucky I can earn the spending money for our Disney vacation (if we can ever find a time to go).

And the other thing - in my process of cleaning I am determined to be a lot more smart about buying scrapping stuff. I mean really, $900.00 of credit is great but I shutter to think how much I spent on that stuff originally. So I am not going to let myself do that again. I have not purchased a lot of additional pp in the last 6 months. I really do love Felicia's kits at www.scrapaddict.com and they have all the latest and greatest papers so I don't need to buy that.

So that is my promise - clean and purge and then be smart about my future purchases!!!

Friday, May 11, 2007

HUGE sigh of relief!!!

Remi has struggled with reading since the start of school we have spent many hours and lots of dollars and tons of tears on trying to remedy his reading troubles. The kid works so hard and we kept thinking that light switch was going to go on and it would all come together. But after three years of trying it gets hard to believe in that light switch somewhere out there.

We saw progress and we knew how much he was learning but the *%*()^*% tests that they continually make the kids take just were not showing the progress that we knew he was making.

So we headed off for Remi's IEP conference and were expecting basically more of the same - Remi is a great kid and he can comprehend anything you put in front of him but he cannot read at grade level. And his writing skills are are poor.

BUT....... imagine our surprise when his teacher passes over the CSAP score and they say he is PROFICIENT!!!!! OMG!!! I about dropped my teeth! My boy scored at grade level on the CSAP! I leaned over and kisses him right there - much to his dismay. And Remi, he was so proud of himself! All that work is starting to pay off. He still has progress to make but I am so pleased that he is showing the growth that I knew he was making!