HomeschoolShare.com just announced a BRAND NEW FREE unit study to celebrate this ocassion. If you have not visited this site for unit studies, lapbooks and more…YOU NEED TO!

Click HERE for the Ice Cream fun!

This is a wonderful site FULL of information on so many topics…ALL FOR FREE! They even have a special area dedicated to the FIAR unit studies.

I think before we start our new school year, we are going to have to have a mini unit study on Ice Cream and enjoy a trip to our local ice cream stores….hmm…how many different ice cream shops can we visit in a week?? I can think of Cold Stone, Baskin Robbins, Rite Aid, Sonic(? not sure if they qualify as an ice cream store)…I’m going to have to be creative…maybe even homemade ice cream, too!

{I guess more importantly, I need to get into a position to be able to drive without back pain first!}

Today has been a much better day for me. My back is still sore, but at least it wasn’t the step backward that I had been accomplishing. My brain isn’t clogged with thoughts of how can I move without inflicting pain.

I walked around today …slowly… and took inventory of all that I need to accomplish before we start our next school year. There is quite a bit of things that are lining up on the “to do” list.  It will take some time to work through this, but I am determined to inch along and slowly but surely accomplish the task.

The heat today was better for me and I think that made me feel a little more comfortable also. My husband was fairly exhausted yesterday from all the heat and went on a fan fetish this morning. He just HAD to have some BIG fans to try and help with the heat that our home just seems to retain…hehe! My girls were teasing him that he was a grumpy dad when he got hot. He found 2 powerful fans that have really made a difference. We put one in front of our room air conditioner and it generated a stronger more powerful air flow. I will be thrilled when this heat wave dissipates and I am already counting the months until FALL…but the days are just inching along like my body is allowing me to move around my house.

My blog is continuing to be hit from this same company.  It sends it’s spamming robots to overload the server by targeting mass pages of my blog.  It’s not compromising any of my files or privacy information, but instead targets the traffic/bandwidth thus WILL eventually cause my host to shut down my site.

I’ve been continually blocking this company with numerous IP addy’s that they keep using but they just start using a new one.  This is professional overloading.

Please pray with me that this system will give up or some how be totally shut down.  It’s not fair to be targeted because I have enough traffic on my site.  They can’t leave comments since robots can’t get through very easily when you have input a “word” to leave a comment.

If you see my blog get shut down, know that this is the reason.  I don’t have any control beyond monitoring it as I have time, but it only takes minutes for them to do this.  This morning alone, I’ve already blocked 3 IP’s with attempts to do this.  It’s ruining my blogging experience.  I might have to try going to a password protected blog but this is just another major ordeal for me and for everyone trying to read.

Thank you for the prayers.

Please click on image above to visit Peggy, and visit friends who share their daybooks!

FOR TODAY Monday, June 30th, 2008…

Outside My Window…I see yellow flowers growing on my squash

I am thinking...about how much longer I will be stuck on the couch

I am thankful for...for a wonderful marriage of 17 years!

From the kitchen...I can smell Italian food cooking.

I am wearing...a long denim skirt and a red short sleeve t-shirt

I am creating...lesson plans for the upcoming school year.

I am going...a bit stir crazy being on the couch!

I am reading...curricula, prayer updates and scriptures.

I am hoping...that tomorrow I will wake up pain free!

I am hearing...my 3 yr. old upset. She is having a hard time adjusting to mommy not being the primary caregiver.

Around the house...is many piles remaining from our recent home improvement projects.

One of my favorite things...to drink is Sonic’s Peach Iced Tea.

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week: Allow my back to heal.

Here is picture thought I am sharing…

We celebrated 17 years of marriage!

Wow…..7 full days of being couch ridden but I see light at the end of the tunnel. My back has shifted back into place and although the muscles all around the disc area are tender and sore, I am feeling relief.

Today I managed to get up and walk around. It felt soooo good! I even did some dishes….never thought I would enjoy washing dirty dishes, but it felt so wonderful to be back to some kind of normalcy. I was still lying down more than up and sitting up is still somewhat painful because it puts pressure on the damaged areas.

I am hopeful that tomorrow I can cook a healthier meal besides macaroni cheese…but I’m still very grateful that each of my daughters picked up the slack and helped. Speaking of macaroni and cheese, a friend sent me a unique way to serve hot dogs and macaroni and cheese SEAFOOD style.

In our home we don’t eat any hot dogs, but I still found it a really cute way to serve them. I could imagine a child’s birthday BBQ or something with these being served. No matter how cute they look, I cannot choke down a bite of a hot dog nor can I even stand the smell of them cooking. It’s just one of those foods that set’s off the gag reflex. I was somewhat traumatized by hot dogs as a child. (I’m sure that my mom is laughing right now.)

While I’ve been flat on my back, I’ve enjoyed playing on the computer today. I couldn’t really enjoy it too much the other days because I was in so much pain, but today after the blog attack yesterday and the deletion of all my themes, I decided that I needed a facelift. I hope that you enjoy the new graphics.  I still need to do some spring summer cleaning on some of my pages but at least it was a start.

I’ve also been planning for our upcoming school year and feel a bit relieved to just move forward in our comfort zone with MFW. We will be using SOW - Student of the Word for a stronger Biblical approach but I need to stick with the planned out days for now. Our little one will be enjoying her school days with Before Five In A Row. I’ve been working on a quilt for her and each square represents a book as outlined in the curriculum. I was hoping to have it finished before we start but I am already a week behind. I thought about piecing each square 1 week at a time as we “rowed” along, but my personality type probably wouldn’t fit best with 24 weeks of waiting for it to be together. I like to start the project and complete and not have it lingering around. I’ll try to update with pictures of each square as I embellish them to represent each book.

Tomorrow is and I’m looking forward to a nice weekend — very carefully putting my home back in order and still allowing my back to heal.

Special Note: You MUST download AND install within the specified time TODAY. They are very strict on their giveaway downloads.

What is a watermarked picture? It’s basically adding “your mark” on your photos so that they can’t be easily taken…such as a copyright. Some peple will put the watermark directly across the entire photo while others will add it to the edges.

Here is a sample picture that I made using this software:

I actually have been watermarking my photos for a while now, but this nice software will watermark ALL my photos at the same time!!! I was actually doing it one photo at a time. This will save me a lot of time.

I noticed my site AGAIN being hit by a different IP but with the Who Is Database information.  I’m not sure “how” to solve this situation other than I’ve banned this IP also.    I cannot sit her babysitting my site and watching for the attacks.

Please pray that there will be some way to completely block this from happening.

Errr!!!  What a day, I have had!  Actually it started late last night but I figured it was some sort of error and figured I would handle in the morning.

If you’ve attempted visiting my site and saw the “suspended” error page, then you will know what  I am speaking of on this issue.  My site suddenly went down and I lost all access.  The “suspended” page seemed to indicate a billing issue that I figured was an obvious mistake because I pay for hosting by the year and had JUST paid this a month ago.  The billing date of the 24th of May sort made me think that maybe it was an oversite with June 24th being the day my site went down.

Oh, how I wish it were as simple as that.  ERRR!!!  After literally HOURS and HOURS working with my webhost and some computer genius’ who can’t speak any simple language, we finally fixed the problem.  I mean HOURS and HOURS of hunting, reading, searching error messages and total frustration finally yielded a very simple solution…banning an IP address.

I guess a  site somehow targeted my site and flooded it with MASS hits.  I can see over 2400+ in just a few hours on my tracking end, but it was exhausted and I couldn’t get a count beyond that.  Basically in less than 7 days my site had encountered over 7,575 hits.  My site is not set up for that kind of traffic.  Although flattering as it might be to engage a lot of traffic, it’s NOT a good thing when it shuts down your site.  We have banned two IP addy’s from my site and hope and pray that this will completely solve the issue.

So if you know someone  that suddenly can’t get on my site, this is the reason.  They would NOT unsuspend my site until the IP was banned.  It certainly would have been nice to just have a simple email in simple terms saying, “Your site is suspended because you have an IP address attacking your site that you need to ban!!”  That would have been the easiest solution but instead the jargon I received that I had to try and interpret was not fun.   My direct host was wonderful in working with me every step of the way to correct this issue.  PTL!!

I even DELETED all of my themes (except the main one and the Plain Jane) because they said it could be something to do with space and usuage.  UGH!!!!  What a sad headache!

I was seriously ready to just toss in the towel and close it out all together.

It’s amazing how the enemy will try to attack and how ironically after I took such a powerful heartfelt stand on issue just a week ago.  Makes you go hmmm.

The Lord WILL prevail!!!