My first baby boy...

...got his college acceptance to UCF today.  There is still plenty of discussion and decision making to come because he may very well continue at Lake Sumter next year, but options are good.  Also as a homeschooling mother who's been in uncharted (chartered?) territory for the last 18 years, this is a huge relief. HUGE!! Like really really really HUGE!  PHEW!!

Jonathan very likely has dyslexia.  He has amblyopia and strabismus, had eye surgery at 9 months old, and he only uses one eye at a time.  We've never really looked into getting a diagnosis, and truly never even thought about it until about a year ago.  With homeschooling that involved tons of talking sprinkled with read-alouds and audio books, this wasn't even a thought.  With a 4.0 in all his college classes so far, it still doesn't seem necessary.  Anyway it's still another hurdle for him in addition to the mom in uncharted territory thing.


I'm often doing (or at least thinking of) far too many things at one time.  Sometime in the last few days I heard (it was on TV, but I wasn't looking at it, I was doing something else) a Goodwill Industries commercial about a mother that was so thankful that Goodwill Industries was there to provide a job for her "son who had a stoke at 6 months old."  For some reason it took a while for this commercial to sink in, but... my son had a stoke at 3 days old.  I know the elasticity of the brain rewiring and all that is so much easier the earlier things like that happen, but I really hadn't thought about a lot of this in a while.  I mean I am thankful every single day that my kids are healthy because we have had too many close calls, but I hadn't thought it in the sense that a baby who had a stoke might have a goal of being able to work at Goodwill.  WOW! 

I have many more tangents that I could go off on, but lets just sit with that for a little while, ok?