A funny thing happened...

Maybe you've noticed that lately I have not blogged regularly.

Our connection to the internet has been severely limited. Please allow me to explain.

We have two rather old laptops that the kids use; my homeschooler likes to download games when we are not looking (I don't think she fully understands what "download" means when we tell her not to download games) and, even though she is in the kitchen on the laptop, she sometimes sneaks something on when we are not looking. Between the age of the laptop and the games she's managed to get on there, the laptop is slow and I refer to it as "limping along". It is slow slow slow and even her beloved games freeze and stall on her to the point where she can't play them. My son managed to mess up the other ancient laptop.

So what did we do? We purchased a new one, for *me*, and, for limited use by the kids, for schoolwork *only*.

Guess what happened? The new laptop quit working. I took it to a local repair shop. Diagnosis: hard drive crash. Yes, in the brand new laptop. The repair shop returned it to the company on our behalf. And we waited.

And while we waited, guess what happened?

I was given three new reviews to do that involve an efficiently working computer. Except we didn't have one for a good chunk of the review time. And when we did receive the repaired laptop, we refused to allow the homeschooler to use it, at all, because we don't want her to have an opportunity to mess up the one the school-building schoolers use for schoolwork and the one I use for blogging.

An additional wrinkle is that we have begun limiting our homeschooler's electronic time to ONE hour a day, to include laptop and Wii. She has become so addicted (think "crack"!) to her electronics that her transitioning out of them and functioning outside electronics has become impaired, and our autism consultant put her on a one-hour chart. (We flew our autism consultant to us for three days in February.) Even an educational game triggers the addiction in her brain for more electronic time, and the solution is to take it away or severely limit it while working away from electronics to grow her experience in other areas. And that's what we've been doing. The detox has been bumpy. :(

I have three reviews coming up that will be purely informational. I don't like to do informational reviews. I apologize in advance for informational reviews. It wasn't my intent to have to write informational reviews. But sometimes, stuff happens.

Reading Eggs, K5 Learning, and Action Alert will be informational. I have received one review since those that will be a use-and-review, I am happy to report.

Thank you for understanding,