What mother hasn’t felt this way? With the past week (broken laptop, couldn’t find flu shots for my kids, now Will’s sick), I definitely would love to get away just for a weekend.  When Country Inn & Suites by Carlson asked if I’d like a woman’s weekend retreat, how could I say no?

Next weekend, I’ll be heading to a local Country Inn & Suites by Carlson for a night.  My goal is get away from it all — work, reviews, the internet (though I am going to bring the laptop with since I can’t completely walk away from my internet addiction), my blackberry, etc.  Due to my many obligations, I often forget to take care of me.  This is a great way to relax and enjoy myself.  My game plan is to head to a movie, eat a nice dinner (and not have to inhale my food or bring crayons), and maybe even get some shopping in!

If you could get away, where would you go?  What would you do?

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I question I seem to be getting a lot lately is how Early Intervention has been working for Will.  All I can say is that it is amazing.  I am so glad I pushed to get him into this program, because everyone has noticed a change with him.  Before, Will wasn’t even trying to talk.  Instead, he’d point and grunt, and if you couldn’t figure out what he wanted, he turned into a pile of screaming 2 year old.  It was frustrating for everyone involved.

Now, he talks.  Granted, we may not understand all of it.  However, we can make out a lot of it.  He is using phrases.  He is able to communicate.  Bill’s brother (who is I think 22 or 23) even noticed a change in Will.  That’s what is so wonderful about nipping this speech problem right away instead of waiting.  I had a lot of people tell me that he wasn’t behind, and he’d talk when he wanted too.  Well, he did talk when he wanted — he just had a little help.

Now, we still are no where near where he needs to be, but by adding just a few more words and getting him wanting to communicate has made a huge difference here.

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Since you all won’t be able to come to dinner with us tonight, I thought you’d like a piece of cake on me!  Now, if the kids would have actually slept in this morning, that would have made a great gift.  Needless to say, they didn’t (and Will was covered in pee, so not quite how I wanted to start my morning).

If you’d like to make my day a little better, I’d love to get 32 comments on this post since that’s how old I am today!

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I hate when your day starts off so well and then quickly goes downhill from there.  Sunday morning was one of those days.  Sunday started with the kids sleeping in till ten.  Yes, ten.  I was just as surprised.  I also decided that we were going to go to church.  I swear my husband is sometimes worse than the kids because he whined more than they did.  My kids have not gone to church very often which I know is my fault.  However, since Madison might go to Catholic school next year, I felt we should definitely go to mass.  Mass was at 11:30 AM, so we had plenty of time to get ready and go.  We made it to church with plenty of time to spare.  Will made it about three fourths of the way through the mass before I had to take him out.  Madison lasted till about five minutes left.  However, she had to go to the bathroom, so she had a good excuse.  we liked the church.  Madison told us she loved it and wanted to go back.  After that, Madison wanted to go to Denny’s and get alien pancakes.  That is her favorite food.  Since she was good in church, we decided to go there and eat dinner.  lunch took forever but it was good.  After that, we decided to go get Bill, Will, and Madison’s hair cut.  That also went well.  We came home, and Bill noticed that Madison seem to have gone to the bathroom quite a bit while we were out.  After being home for about 30 minutes, Madison was in the bathroom about four times.  I asked her if it hurt, and she told me she had “hot pee”.  as a woman, this definitely sounded like an urinary tract infection.  I personally have had a ton of them.  Now, it is Sunday afternoon, so there was not a whole lot of places we could go.  I first tried CVS minute clinic, but they would not treat her because she was under 12.  I took her to the local urgent care.  We got there one minute before they closed.  However, at CVS, Madison had went to the bathroom.  She did not have to go when we got to urgent care.  She also was refusing to drink any water.  While we were there she went four times, each time she only went about four drops.  the ended up giving us an antibiotic and sent us home.  However, Bill and I had a dinner downtown at Navy Pier for his work.  It started at six.  I got out of the doctor’s office at six.  Downtown is over a half hour for us to get there.  Seriously.  in my area, I went to the only Walgreen that was still open.  I hate that Walgreens, because they have horribly slow service.  They told me two hours, I told him I would be back in a half hour.  I went home and got ready in about 20 minutes.  While we were gone, Bill had packed the kids bags to spend the night at grandmas.  we packed the kids in the car and headed back to our brains.  Of course, her prescription was not built yet.  Also, while we were waiting in the car, Madison had to go to back them.  I then had to take both kids out of the car and go into Walgreens.  In the meantime, Bill had gotten her prescription and could not figure out where we went.  we finally caught up to him, and we were on our way.  Bill and I ended up being around an hour and a half wait for his dinner.  However, they had just sat down to dinner when we got there, so our timing was great.  The party was actually pretty fun.  All in all, I guess it was not that bad of a day — the afternoon just stunk.  Madison is doing well now.   I swear, my kids never get sick during the week — the only get sick after hours or on the weekends.

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Did you November is National Novel Writing Month (hence, NaNoWrimo). NaNoWrimo is an interesting approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1 and end November 30. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word).  This requires you to write a minimum of 1,667 words a day which can be very daunting.  This is why using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for NaNoWrimo would take some of the pressure off. I know my sister would love to write a novel one day.  It is honestly her lifelong dream.  She went to college and majored in English, so she could do it.  However, she is super busy (and this is before she even has kids!).  When I learned about Dragon Naturally Speaking, I knew this would be a perfect fit for her.  This can definitely help her blogging (of course, she is a blogger too!).  However, I personally don’t think she thinks she has the time for something of this magnitude.

If you want to see how this would help you, you have to take the Dragon’s typing speed test! I tried it with Will (my 16 month old) hanging on me (so I really do type faster, but this is what my life is like normally. That is why blogging usually takes me all day. LOL  Here’s my test results:

Let me tell you, I couldn’t believe how fast the speaker was compared to my typing.  Granted, I could have typed faster without Will, but I still couldn’t have kept up with the speaker.  There is no way.  I think I know what I am buying my sister for Christmas.  She has some big changes coming her way and this would allow her to both continue blogging and to write her novel.

I may not be writing a novel, but man, I can see so many uses for myself with this software.  Since I have five blogs and two little kids, I could definitely get more work done with this versus me typing out my blog posts (see score up above – lol).  This would make it much easier to write posts for my travel blog when we are on the road, and I could write my posts for my cooking blog while I am cooking the recipe I am going to write about.  I could take the time I save and spend it with my family instead of working.  It would be nice to be able to go to bed before midnight.  Do you want to see how easy this is to use?

As you can see, anyone can use this software. It is that easy.  Don’t believe me?  Read some of these Dragon Reviews. I actually know people who have this and they absolutely love it.  I am still working on getting my hands on one of these, so I can save some of my precious time.

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