April was one seriously awful month for me and my family. Sickness went around and around and around the four of us like you wouldn't believe. I mean, the illness bounced around from person to person like some kind of stomach virus rubber ball. When it was all said and done, I ended up using every bit of the sick time I had available to me and spent a good portion of the month at home, on my back.

We should have set up some kind of pool and each put in some money and the person in the house who ended up logging the most days sick could have taken the whole pot.

On top of that, at work there was a death that affected a lot of us. The father of a beloved employee passed away. It didn't come as a total shock because he had fallen ill some time ago, so she had warned us that his passing may come at any time. Still, no matter how prepared you think you are for something like that, it does hit you hard anyway. Needless to say, she was out for some time after her loss, and even though people had to work a little harder to cover, our thoughts were with her and the rest of the family who lost a very dear loved one.

I'm not sad to see April come and go, believe me.

Fitness is important. Here at eLearners we often talk about distance education, online degrees, and educational opportunities available to all via the internet. Obviously, in a round about way, we're all talking about a form of fitness. In this case, we're talking about mental fitness or educational fitness. Degrees are important. They're certainly important in the corporate culture where I work. They're not the end all and be all, but people care about degrees. But more important than the piece of paper is what you get out of the process of earning that degree.

Educational fitness.

But now I'm going to talk about physical fitness. As of today, I stepped on the scale and have found that, through diet and a little bit of exercise, I have managed to lose 23 pounds over the past months.

Physical fitness.

Hey, I've got a long way to go. When I started this diet thing, I weighed in at 302 pounds. That's nowhere near the most I've ever weighed, because at one point in my life years back, I was a very hefty 360 pounds. Then, I worked hard and lost 125 pounds and got down to a much sleeker 235. I'm a big guy with very broad shoulders, so at 235 I looked pretty darn good (if I do say so myself). So when I got back over 300 pounds again, that was a wake up call for me. I looked down at that scale and saw "302" and decided right then and there that enough was enough.

No more 300. Never again.

Physical fitness is important for educational fitness as well. You need good nutrition, good energy, good health in order to study effectively. You need good physical health in order to put forth the amount of effort it takes to maintain a "regular" life and then to maintain the "other" life that is your educational pursuits.

Don't sell your educational fitness short by ignoring or neglecting your physical fitness.

As you may know, my oldest daughter is now attending high school online via the Penn Foster High School. Well, you can add another student to the roster of high schoolers who have left regular, traditional brick-and-mortar high school and decided to turn themselves toward earning their diploma online. This time it's my youngest daughter who has decided to transfer out of the local high school and is now working for her diploma with Penn Foster. She saw the flexibility and other benefits that my oldest daughter is enjoying and she decided that this was the way for her to go as well.

My youngest daughter has a much more social personality than my oldest. So we made sure we sat down and talked with her about the consequences of making the move. The biggest thing both her mother and I are worried about is that she's very much involved in clubs and enjoys other after school functions like the carnivals, the dances, the plays and shows that the school puts on, not to mention football games.

She managed to convince us that, as long as she gets to spend time with her friends and take part in the activities we do as a family, she'll be happy in her online high school. So, based on her conviction about being fine with getting her social "fix" from her friends rather than her classmates, we went down to her high school this week and took her out of class. She has been officially transferred to private school. It just so happens that this private school is an online school located in Pennsylvania and she'll attend all of her classes via the internet.

Technology is a beautiful thing.

One of the biggest advantages to having both of my two daughters going to school online is that I can better monitor their studies and I can also help them when they get stuck. Personally, while her mother has doubts about pulling her out of "regular" high school, I think this is going to work out very, very well.

So there you have it, now all three of us in my household who are attending school are attending school online. I guess distance learning is "all in the family" at our house!