Year 2, Day 33: The Smile Has Diminished

Being out for the good part of two days on Monday and Tuesday, then hitting the books hard on Wednesday, and then needing to go out at midday today and again tomorrow, we're all very tired and on edge.  The boys have a Bible Bowl competition on Saturday.  And Leah is in Michigan with her parents and brother because Grandpa Cook, her Dad, is well, very close to going Home to Heaven.  We knew it would come eventually, but it's definitely still hard to process.  Please pray for her, her siblings, and Grandma Cook.  Sigh. The circle/cycle of life I suppose (thinking of the Lion King movie here, what can I say, I grew up in the 80's and 90's).  From watching the 2 year old take delight in marbles running down a track to watching your loved one struggling to breathe.  Wow, makes you think about all those moments in between, or in the dash between your birth and your death.  We've been studying Genesis again in our History studies and have now gotten through the tower of Babel.  Of course we study how long people lived back then, especially before the Great Flood.  Sons weren't born to Noah until he was 500 years old and then he got on the Ark at age 600.  Wow!  By the way, we learned that at the maximum, it took Noah and his sons 75 years to build the Ark.  Why?  God told Noah to build the Ark after all his sons were born and married.  So, for the youngest to born and old enough to marry at age 15 or so, it would be close to when Noah was 525.  Hm,...fun facts, indeed!

Meanwhile, yes, very full days.  I also am down in the mouth because I found out how much this wonderful Classical Conversations program is going to cost and it's much cheaper than a private school or private tutors but ouch, it's not free or relatively cheap.  It's definitely something to pray about and think about some more.  I still think it's the perfect match of what I want to teach the kids, but don't have the skills to do it alone.  But we have other things to focus on for now.

Oh, speaking of the Bible (see above), Jared and I watched 2/3 of the newest "Exodus" movie that came out a couple of years ago.  Wow, does it ever stray from the Biblical account!  Yikes!  I'm not pleased with it at all.  It spends way too much time between when Moses is fully grown to getting married and having a child who is 8 or 9 years old.  Then they breeze through the plagues without the details of Moses and Aaron going back and forth to Pharoah.  Oh, and there's no mention of Moses taking off his sandals because he is standing on holy ground in front of the burning bush.  And God is made out to be a young boy and says weird things like, "I need a general."  Not impressed at all.  I did show some of it to the kids today because we were talking about Stonehenge and I wanted to show them how hard it was for men to pull big blocks of stone around.  We also quickly discussed what they did wrong in the movie as I fast forwarded to the bits I wanted them to see for the current history lesson.  Keturah and Justin both recognized the differences between the Biblical account and the movie.  I need to rewatch the Noah movie and see if I still like it or not, because if I remember correctly, there's some very iffy stuff in there, too.  I loved seeing it on the big screen, but I think I might change my mind the second time around.

Ok, a couple of pictures from today.

Brushing teeth is more fun sitting on the toilet, banging on the back of the toilet.

We introduced Abishai to marbles when he was barely sitting up.  And now he can play with them by himself!  One of us does watch him though so he doesn't accidentally eat one of course.

He's been doing this since he was a year old or so.  He was so happy to see this toy come out of "storage" aka under Keturah's bed.

He knew this piece needed to be on top of the toy so he tried to put it on while he was sitting in it!

My new dilemma: how to deal with all the toddler toys.  I just have no clue what to get rid of since Abishai plays with all of it!  The two buckets in this picture is about 80% of his cars/trucks alone.

Kitchen and a bit of Little People.

Bright colored toys, stuffed animals, infant toys and one box of duplos (we have another box that side, too.)

Cloth books and misc. box of toys to sort later.

A couple of big toys and some stuffed animals.  I have another box bigger than this that has more preschool toys.

Another box of stuffed animals.

Huge box of Geotrax trains and Little People stuff.  So, what am I to do with all of this?  I just don't know!  But at least it's a bit more organized/separated by kind at the moment.  Sigh.

The flower IS starting to open! Cool!