Year 2, Day 80: Busy or Not?

Three of us are trying to stay busy while the other 3 ARE very busy!  While Jared, Benaiah, and Justin are off doing the "Love Our City" mission week, Keturah, Abishai, and I have been trying to finish up projects at home, while having some fun, too.  The guys have painted, given away cookies, seen movies, painted fences, organized food supplies, and various other service projects from ministries in Indianapolis like F.A.M.E, Shepherd Community Center, the Midwest Food Bank, police stations and fire stations (giving way cookies), etc.  They have also had fun at Skyzone, Pacers game, ice skating, movie night, a church lock in for the high schoolers, and Rascals Fun Zone. Phew, that's a lot!  While we at home have worked on schoolwork, taxes, laundry, tickle fights, reading, paperwork, etc and have gone out to McDonald's for playtime and lunch, as well as played outside on bikes, and tomorrow we'll go to the library.  Then I'm off to the homeschool conference.

And I'm so excited for the conference!  I get to hang out in the mentoring booth AND I was asked to be on an alumni panel, which is where adults how were homeschooled get to answer questions from the audience.  Sounds like fun!  And a great break between getting those pesky taxes done, which, I did make significant progress today.  That was one of the goals for this "spring break" week.  Our co op starts up again on Monday, so tomorrow I'll start planning for that.

Photos from our days this week have been scarce, but I'll show you what I did take.  Oh, and I also purchased a nice hard, water resistant case for the SD cards, especially since I finally finished the 64gb one I had.  It took over a year to fill it, so I'm pretty impressed with that.

Someone doesn't want to get up for the day.  He's actually not sleeping, but hiding in his chair.

Favorite Mommy game: climb up behind her and get squsished when she sits back against the chair.

I caught up on all my podcasts last week!  Which is sometimes the case because no one posts on Sundays, but it's rare.

A peek into all the topics and podcasts I listen to.  I'll try to do a tally here.

3 health blogs, 8 homeschooling blogs....

5 parent/inspirational blogs.....

3 oddball blogs, one on photography, one church's sermons (that isn't the Creek's since I hear that one most weeks already), one on comic books for a grand total of 19 podcasts!  I don't listen to every single episode of each one though.  Some are weekly, some are 3-5 days a week.  Some are 15 minutes, some are 30 minutes, and some can be an hour.

Woot! Woot!  We are very blessed to live in a state that gives homeschooelers a lot of freedom!

No, he didn't do all that hard work of playing Tetris, I did!  But, he tried to help!

Yeah for games on Grandpa's birthday!

Abishai's turn!  And apparently pegs go on  top of cars when they aren't used in the game.  Or is it a new game?

Getting out to enjoy the weather yesterday!

Riding Abishai's big boy bike WITH inline skates on!

You can't see me, Daddy!

Keturah, Abishai and I discovered a "new to us" store: Hobby Lobby.  These are such cute signs!  We said we are definitely going back to pick up a couple of things for the new house, whichever one that is.

Yup, that's me!  But only some of the time.

We were going to go to an indoor playground at a church today, but it was closed.  So, we headed to the "fry store."  Yes, Abishai knows the golden arches as "fries!"  He said it numerous times!  Benaiah used to call it that too, the "fry store!"

Mother Hen being all protective of Baby Brother.  She was very concerned today that the other kids were pushing past Abishai in the climbing structure.  I went up there, and for once, the kids were all being super nice!  One was making sure only one person went down the slide at a time and yelled out, "watch out, baby coming!"  Others said "excuse me" as they went around the slow moving Abishai and were very careful about it so he wouldn't fall.  Not once did Abishai seem upset or get pushed around that I saw.  I think it helped that there were older siblings with younger siblings, who knew how to handle younger kids.

Do you want to come play with me?  Abishai goes up to just above every kid his size and younger and gets in their face asking them to play.  This was towards the end of our time there and he would peek out and smile and then run away because he didn't want to leave!

However, Mrs. Introvert couldn't stand the noise and chaos!

Today I had a very special voice on the audio Bible...... 

Keturah had to read 5 long chapters aloud to someone from Genesis today for Grandpa's class.  She did a great job except for some funny mispronunciations for Easu and Edom.  She had to do all 5 of them in a chunk because she has procrastinated all week on it.  She has more written homework tomorrow to do.

Are you comfy?  Abishai set himself up like this.

Someone was sleepy after playing at McDonald's today.

If I hide, Mom can't find me and put me to bed!

Here's a little bit of the graphics from the week for the student ministry mission week and a Pacers game ticket stub from the other night.

As part of their week, Justin's group went to see the new live action "Beauty and the Beast" which has been pretty controversial in Christian circles because of it's self proclaimed "openly gay character."  I won't comment with my opinions on that though.  Justin said it was great for a girl's movie and he liked seeing "Kong" with Grandpa a couple of weeks ago because of all the action.  Benaiah and Jared opted out of "Beauty and the Beast" and saw Lego Batman instead.  Jared said it was "such fun."

Another neat moment yesterday was when Abishai had a tough time waking up when we needed to leave quickly after naptime, so he was pretty fussy getting into the van.  So, Keturah brought "Cat in the Hat" along and sweetly read to him the entire trip!  It was much cheerier when we arrived at our destination.  Yeah for big helping sisters!