It's July, and time for an update! MUCH has changed for us this year, and life has slowed down a little as well, so I may actually be able to write more often!
So, its been a crazy 6 months since I posted our holiday newsletter on here. In December, Mark was out of work and my freelance business was limping along with a few small projects here and there. I was also President of my Rotary Club and serving as a "founder" for a small Sudbury school in Apex. Serena was in Galveston and Cassie was working for Banana Republic in Durham. Sam was unemployed but still in Massachusetts, Danny was working hard on his final courses so he could graduate from high school in June, and Kennedy was attending the Sudbury school, playing classic soccer, taking hip hop dance classes, working on her silver award in Girl Scouts, and busy with theater projects. Whew!!
So, here we are in July, and Mark and I are both back to work (yay!). I fell into a great job by accident ~ I dropped by the Fuquay-Varina Chamber of Commerce to pick up a screen for a Rotary club speaker, and four days later I was their Director of Member Services!! It's wonderful to meet and work with people and plan events ~ all the things that I love to do but never got paid for before! :) I still have a few freelance projects, and the Indians have begun sending work to me again (which I fit in after hours), but I love getting regular paychecks and being busy during the day. Mark took a job in May working third shift hours, Saturdays-Tuesdays at NetApp in RTP as a call center engineer. It's horrible hours and grunt work, but there is a measure of gratitude for the fact that we're earning the money to pay the mortgage instead of paying it with our retirements funds. He is still actively job-hunting, tho, and we are hopeful that he'll find a job that he can enjoy before too long!
As for the big kids, Serena is still in Texas, but has a 4.0 average after her first semester! Cassie has moved back to Boone to be an associate manager at the Gap store there. She has applied for an assistant manager's position in Burlington, though, so if she gets it she'll be moving back to within 45 minutes of home in August or September, so we have our fingers crossed! Sam is finally working again ~ this time as an "activities assistant" and all-around handyman at a nursing home near Boston. He seems to really be enjoying it! Danny is officially a high school graduate, and is mulling over his future options. Right now, he's with us for the summer, playing video games and getting caught up on movies he missed all year. He will be returning to Florida at the end of the summer to work with his step-dad and start thinking about college options.
That brings us to Kennedy... :)
After a spring semester that almost killed us (dance, girl scouts, theater, school, classic soccer and more...), all activities ended by the first week of June and we have been enjoying a change in schedule and activity level since then. Kennedy has been to a couple of day camps and earned her PA (program aide) training for Girl Scouts. Other than that, it's been playdates with friends and chilling at home with Danny.
One notable event this spring for Kennedy was her decision to shave her head to raise money for children with cancer through an organization called St. Baldricks. She raised over $700 and shaved her head on April 14th at NC State University's Brickyard. I have included her Before and After shots and a recent photo here so you can see the full effect of the change. Her hair is now about an inch and a half long, and she calls it "her fuzz." :) She's a little tired of people calling her "sir," but she has bright pink flip flops to try to make it clear that she's a girl, and it seems to be working!
The other big news is that after 18 months of homeschooling, Kennedy has decided to go back to school. She enrolls at Holly Grove Middle School this coming Friday as a 7th grader! She has thought about it for a while now, and finally decided that ~ pending a tour of the facility today ~ she wants to go back to a more structured school environment that offers clubs and athletics in addition to electives. She also has realized that she learns better with other children and that learning alone is NOT working for her. We are hopeful that she has gained enough sense of self over the last 18 months, and seen so many other alternatives, that her decision is the right one for her at this time. She is very excited about it, and is even "okay" about the fact that she has to get caught up on her immunizations to go back, so it MUST be something she wants to do!!
So, there you have it! The Fowle Family saga in a nutshell! :)
I'll definitely post more fun stuff as the summer progresses, but we definitely needed to jump start things with a general update!
Talk with you soon!
