Day 309: Busy weekend ahead.

I'm hiding out in my room, despite the kids not being in bed yet because I've been with people all day long.  It was another day of Bible Bowl competition.  Jared stayed home with Keturah and Abishai and had a grand time with them, including eating cheesecake, and only cheesecake, for lunch!  Abishai almost ate his entire piece by himself!  Yes, we are the Johnsons and we LOVE cheesecake!  I told Justin that they were eating cheesecake for lunch and he said, "That's MY cheesecake!  I hope they don't eat all MY cheesecake!"  We had bought it for our guests yesterday, but Justin did pick it out and choose it over mint chocolate chip ice cream (which I still bought because well, I could).  

Jared also said that Abishai starting giving kisses today!  He already gives great hugs, and now he kisses, too!  Combine that with his loud noises and evil laughs and you've got a great sidekick.

Back to Bible Bowl.  The boys' team did fine.  They both buzzed in and Justin was able to single handedly answer a bonus question on a memory verse.  He didn't do as well on the written test though, so we'll have to work on how to take tests and know the material better.  Benaiah increased his score by 1/3, so we were really pleased with it.  They pray before each round and when it was Justin's turn, he thanked God for the "infamous" test.  Actually, he and I had a disagreement about what "infamous" means.  It's a game he plays, and I wasn't sure he knew what it meant.  He said, "famous for being evil."  I said, "No, it's just means very famous."  So I looked it up and he was right!  Awesome!

And I got to spend time with my cross stitching piece.  I seem to only work on it during Bible Bowl competitions and I had several people ask me about it.  Handicrafts are becoming a lost art, and I'm glad I can introduce young kids to it.

We came home and within an hour we were back out the door for church.  When we took Abishai to his class, he couldn't wait to go in!  He had been hesitant when we first introduced it to him this summer.  Now he looks forward to playing with his friends!  Sweet!

Then we came home, moved the clocks back 1 hr (and discovered a nice flying insect behind the one near the patio door), had some snacks, some TV time and bedtime at normal time.  We'll see how early little man wakes up tomorrow, lol.  It usually isn't too hard for us to get on the new time.  Tomorrow is a full day as well, but I'm hoping to work on stuff for co op and take a nap.  I'm wiped!

I play this game on my phone where you have to figure out where colors go on a pixelated picture based on certain numbers.  I find some the results quite cool like this one of Scooby Doo.

First, a sample of Benaiah's handwriting.  Second, he scored over 100 points!  A perfect score is 150.  The top 20 kids usually tie with 148 and 149 points.  But it is an improvement over last month's score!

Keturah actually got our her Barbies for once!  I've been getting quite frustrated lately with the amount of toys we have in boxes.  I would love to have a large playroom and a nicer way to store them.  I do need to get rid of some as well.  But it's very hard because I try to make sure the kids have various kinds of  things to play with.  And certain things, like my Barbies, I don't want to part with.  Unfortunately, this is how I had to play with my Barbies as well.  I had just this amount of floor space and I would have to clean it up before bedtime so my sisters could walk through the room.  Someday I'll figure out a better way .to handle all of this

No matter how messy the house is, or how many toys are left out, this is what it's all about.  Loving siblings.

The cross stitch I'm working on.  It's actually pretty complicated with so many colors in various places.  But I enjoy it.

Abishai played cars on the bed while Jared listened to an audiobook.  Vroom!

Abishai did some reading as well.

A little gift a friend sent me.  The Tardis and a Van Gogh painting bookmark.

There was a ton of fog this morning AND I had to scrape my car for the first time today!  I wish I could have stopped to get some pictures of it!  There's nothing like fog on farm fields! Normally I would have had my first scraping about mid September on PEI.  The scraper was in the garage where I could get it easily and it didn't take very long to take care of it.  But this picture is of the sunset from Indian Creek's parking lot after church tonight.  Very beautiful!