School is officially out!

Okay, so it has been out for almost a week now but I am barely getting around to blogging about it (but then, I haven't blogged about anything for awhile).

Funny how I thought that once end-of-school activities were over I would have all this down time and things would slow down. We are not slow at all! It has been non-stop go all month and shows no signs of letting up. We have lots of fun Summer plans (lots of memories to be made!), and mingled with CPS plans (family visits, home visits, counseling appointments, etc) we are going to be busy, busy, busy!

This week we took a visit to spend some time with Hubby while he was working. He works out of town, so is only home off and on (roughly half the month), so a couple months ago we finally got him an apartment near his work. We (the kids and I) hadn't had the chance to visit and see the new place so we took a few days and went and stayed with him. It was nice because this would have been time we normally wouldn't have seen him for about a week. We swam, climbed a rock wall (so much scarier than I thought it would be!), and just hung out. It was good fun family bonding time. In the evenings Hubby came home and was equally delighted and overwhelmed by having the whole brood in his personal space (did I mention the new apartment is only a two-bedroom? NO ESCAPE!). Craziness and good times. A few drama moments. Some teen moments. But a pretty good time.

Then home again and we began/continued the process of getting Bee ready for the pioneer trek. Our church does a handcart pioneer trek for the youth that lasts four days and as soon as Bee heard about it she was enthusiastic about participating (Bella isn't old enough and Sunshine was not interested). We had to get the Dr. to sign off on her going due to medical issues and for a while we were doubtful about if it was going to happen. She was upset and angry. It is hard to be 14 with medical restrictions on your physical activities. I was happy we got the go ahead in the end, as this could give her the opportunity to show that she can do more than she has been allowed to do. Other than the Dr approval we had to gather all the necessary clothing and gear, as well as complete a four mile walk in under an hour (All participants were required to complete the walk to show they were fit enough for the physical demands of pushing a handcart up to 16 miles a day). Thursday we drive 45 minutes to counseling appointments for Bella and Bee, then Bee leaves for the Trek Friday and she is excited as can be.

I have also spent the last couple days cleaning a few neglected areas of the house (my bedroom and bathroom, the little girls bedroom oh, my!, mounds of laundry, etc.) so that we will be ready to go on our family vacation to a cabin in Colorado for five days. Everyone is excited about going! Hanging out, hiking, swimming, biking, maybe even fishing. We'll see what happens.

We will leave two days after Bee gets back from the trek.

This will also be two days after bio#2 starts summer school. She will miss a couple of days, and hopefully this will not cause too much of a fuss. She needs the Summer school, but she is already a mess about how "not fair" it is that she has to go to school when everyone else doesn't. If we were to postpone or cancel the trip due to school it will go very hard on all of us. The whole family is looking forward to this trip and so this is where we have a balancing act of what needs to happen with what may cause more problems. We already had a full on multiple melt down when we had to cancel one family get away with extended family due to extended family insensitivities to CPS regulations and refusal to acknowledge our foster girls as actual family members (still too miffed myself to write a post on that one, although it is very pertinent to foster care...its on my to do list...FYI, No, we can't won't "just get respite for them" because finding room for them is inconvenient).

When we get back we have a couple days before our scheduled CFT, then a home visit from the girl's caseworker as well as a visit with bio dad for the girls.

Then some sports clinics for Bee and Bella, and a couple pic-nics with our licensing agency to wrap up June.

We have a few things scheduled from there, but I just can't think that far ahead yet. We also have to fit a camping trip in somewhere this Summer (who was the crazy person who promised the kids camping!? Oh...me...sigh).