Tired today... :P
My 3-year-old woke me up at 1 a.m. After cuddling with him for a couple of minutes, I sent him back to his bed. However, I never could truly fall back asleep. :P

My 6-year-old seemed like she was trying to find ways to stay home from school. While she still has a cold, and had a slight temperature, she wasn't pale anymore and she had an appetite (however, she refused to eat the bowl of Kix I gave her, claiming she didn't like it; I made her eat a bowl of Cheerios instead, because I wanted her to have something in her stomach before going to school).

Between being tired and feeling a little frustrated by my 6-year-old, my patience has been worn rather thin... :P

Not how I expected today to go...
Well, I'm having to keep my 6-year-old home from school today. She's been having some cold symtpoms (cough and sore throat), but she woke up this morning with a slightly elevated temperature and looked pale; she also complained about not being hungry. So I'm keeping her home today to rest, hydrate, and hopefully get the fever gone so she can go back to school tomorrow.

I'm a proud mom... :)
My 6-year-old daughter brought her Winter trimester report card home today, and it was a good report card. For the most part, the subject area grading didn't change much (the only real change came in her ability to recognize sight words in her reading; it went from "Meets Expectations" to "Exceeds Expectations").

Her teacher also gave my daughter same very good comments at the back of the report card. My 6-year-old is growing up... *happy tears*

WE GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Our tax refund arrived in the mail today! *happy dance* Some more money for the home buying fund. :)

I forgot to mention that Dan had his performance review at work the other day. He didn't get a raise this time, but he's getting a sizable one-time bonus. That'll be on the paycheck he gets on March 26... more money for the home buying fund! :)

Everything seems to be in place for us to go pre-qualify for a home loan on April 1... :)

I forgot to mention earlier that tomorrow, my 6-year-old brings home her next report card from school. For the kindergarteners, they don't give out letter grades... they are rated as "Meets Expectations," "Exceeds Expectations," or "Below Expectations." I'm pretty confident about how she'll rank in those categories in various areas, but I'm really curious as to the comments her teacher will leave at the end of the report card.

Frustration...
My 3-year-old has decided that he wants to test us to see where his limits are, and he's been using his meals and his naps to do that. After two days of refusing naps, he finally took one yesterday (but when he woke up, he was pretty grumpy). :P

But it's been a lot worse with his meals. It came to a head last night when he absolutely refused to eat his dinner. Dan made him sit at the table for two hours, until our 3-year-old had eaten a bit of his meal. This morning at breakfast, he started acting a little better about his meal. I hope he will continue improving... I've been getting a little worried because of this (since he's testing his limits and trying to control what's happening, he's not eating as much as he used to).

I referenced that my 6-year-old's school went into lockdown the other day, and that I didn't know what had happened in regards to the car and the bomb. From what I've since heard, it appears Enumclaw police didn't find a bomb, and they're now investigating the caller.

Ugh... I'm feeling extremely worn out and tired... :P Hopefully the caffeine from the Mountain Dew I'm drinking will kick in soon...

Forgot to mention...
I forgot to mention in my entry this morning that my 6-year-old's school had to be put under "lockdown" yesterday. Apparently, a driver on Highway 410 received a call that there was a bomb in their car. The driver pulled over and called Enumclaw Police. As a precaution, they put the nearby schools (including my daughter's) under lockdown. I don't know how it ended, but I'm assuming they didn't find anything.

This is the second time this year her school was put under lockdown. The first time was back in October, when a "person of interest" for Enumclaw police was roaming the woods around Enumclaw Middle School; they put the schools under lockdown as a precaution.

Wow... I'm posting two days in a row!
Maybe this should make Ripley's Believe It Or Not? *laugh*

I forgot to mention in my entry yesterday that we went out to Target on Friday and bought a new coffee table (the kind you put together yourself), because they were having a good sale on it, and our coffee table really needs to be replaced. The only problem we have now, though, is that we can't put the new one together until we find a way to get the old one to the dump (our old one is in such bad shape, it needs to be thrown away... it's not in good enough shape to give to anybody). In fact, we got the old coffee table used from someone at our church, and we've had it about 6 1/2 years. However, the style of this coffee table isn't very friendly for families with young children (and the fact that we had to move it several times since we got it didn't help, either; when we moved into this apartment, the shelf at the bottom of it broke, and it isn't the most stable of tables since that happened).

Be glad I didn't post earlier this morning, because I haven't had a very good morning; I've had some time to calm down. My 3-year-old has been fighting eating the past few days (only eating well at one meal, then fighting eating the rest of his meals), and he was resisting his cereal this morning. While this was going on, my nephew was dropped off and threw a temper tantrum when his mother left. Hopefully my day will go better...

I'm a little frustrated with Tripod's Blog services. I've been having quite a few problems logging in to the Blog menu to post changes. I'm starting to consider maybe finding Blog services elsewhere, then at the new Blog, have a link back here. I haven't made up my mind about that yet, though. It's just something I'm pondering.

But I need to get going, though. It's going to be time to take my 6-year-old to her bus stop soon.

I'm still alive...
Again, it's taken me a week to post! :P

We got a letter from the IRS on Friday, saying that when we did our tax forms, we forgot to take out the advance child tax credit that we got last summer. Oops. *embarrassed* Ah well. While the tax refund won't be as big as we were initially anticipating, it'll still be a pretty good amount of money to go to the house fund. So we're still waiting for our check from Uncle Sam... maybe soon...

Friday afternoon, my kids told me what they wanted to be when they grow up. My 6-year-old daughter wants to be a doctor, and my 3-year-old son wants to be a baseball player. We'll see how long those ambitions last. :)

Saturday night was pretty good when it came to our internet radio station and personal chart website. Our website received its 1,000th hit that night, and we also set a record on Saturday for the most hits to the site in one day (17; the previous record was 14, which was set last Monday). Also, our "sneak preview" chart broadcast got its highest listener total ever since the show started back in early February. :)

I've got my nephew over again. My brother-in-law has got some employment with the Army National Guard, which will last for about a year. While the pay may not be as good as what he'd get if he had a "regular" job, he says it beats what he'd get if he were collecting unemployment. I really hope that either he or his wife can get some kind of full-time employment with benefits soon. They've been in the situation they're in for about a year-and-a-half. :(

Well, I think that's all for now. I'll try to post again this week if I can find some time (been pretty busy with cleaning the apartment up and maintaining the personal chart website and the internet radio station).

You probably thought I forgot...
... that this Blog even existed. :P

I apologize for the fact that it's been well over a week since I last posted, but I've been extremely busy with a lot of relatively mundane things. :P

Probably the most exciting thing going on is that I got paperwork today to have my 6-year-old be tested for her school's gifted program. They'll be testing the weeks of March 15 and March 22. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

And we're still waiting for our tax refund from Uncle Sam. Probably the earliest we'll see that will be within the next 1-2 weeks. I've been busy doing some cleaning around here while waiting for the refund check (which is a big part of what's kept me so busy for the past 9-10 days that I was prevented from posting here).

Our internet radio station & chart website are also growing. We've added a "New Music Showcase" to our station's lineup (with two airings every Wednesday). Listenership has been going up, as has views to the website. This was all made possible by the fact that my online subscription to Variety.com (a source for some of my Digital Media FX stories) was going to be doubling its subscription price on March 15. Since dFx is still showing no signs of coming back on-line anytime in the near future, I decided that paying double the price for the subscription just wasn't worth it. So, we are able to divert the money we were paying into Variety toward a better package at Live365.com for our internet radio station. We now have a "broadcast scheduler," so we can do several specialty shows, and we can set them to air whenever we want (provided that we have a playlist on the server for it to work from). We also get advanced listener statistics (my favorite of these is the "Geo Stats," to see where listeners are coming from). The U.S. is the country that comes in first place; currently in second place is Japan, and in third place is Singapore.

We've gotten a big package of music this week, and we have another one waiting for us at the post office. Should be able to pick up the second package tomorrow.

Hmmm... not much more that I think I need to mention right now. I'll try to post again... well, sometime (hopefully it won't take me another 9-10 days!)

Just Some Updates...
I apologize for taking a week to post here again. This week, my 6-year-old is off from school on "mid-winter break" (with her around, I have less free time than usual). I'm still getting used to this "mid-winter break" business... when I was a kid, the only time you got off in February was one day from President's Day, and then you went right back to school. Around here, not only do the kids get President's Day off, they get the whole week off.

Not a whole lot to report at the moment, other than the fact I'm starting to go crazy with my 6-year-old being home so much... it's making me dread summer vacation. :P

Just got some more info on the upcoming Jem DVD release... special features and cover art. This site has the info.

Also, my internet radio station is doing its next "sneak preview" chart broadcast tomorrow night at 8 p.m. EST/5 p.m. PST. If you can, please tune in... more info can be found at the chart & station website.

For what it's worth, last week's countdown extras were:

Great Big Sea - "Fast As I Can"
Boy Meets Girl - "Waiting For A Star To Fall"
Darren Hayes - "In Your Eyes"