Year 2, Day 238: Chaos rules!

Catch up blog for Saturday/Sunday/Monday, August 26/27/28, 2017

Somewhere along the line, I really messed up on dates and day numbers again. I think next year, I will just stick with the real date and a title.  So, this will get us up to date on what happened this weekend and keep us on track with numbers!

Saturday:
Some of these are leftover from Friday evening when we went over to Gary and Leah's to eat dinner.  Otherwise, it was a pretty normal Saturday of projects and church.

The kids LOVED this book!  And no, Mommy is not going to try to make any of these, sorry.

Warning: the baby has graduated to the big table with a booster seat!

Sweet! Literally!  Anybody want to guess what they used for the keys? That's right, white chocolate Kit Kats.  And then it looks like stick pretzels or wafers for the lgs.

Justin really wants this one.  This candy looks like the "smarties" chocolate candy of Canada.  Remember, the USA's version of "smarties" are "rockets" in Canada.

Ok, maybe I can do this one!  I like the reverse stencil effect on it!  It's much better than cutting the cake into the shape of a number, which I've done before!

Again, Kit Kats!

Since we didn't get caramel apples at the orchard, we brought over all our different kinds of ice cream toppings to use to dip our apples in.  Including, vegan hot fudge! Which basically means, no dairy, no GMO's, no gluten, no soy!

Bye bye high/booster chair!  It will be put in "retirement" but I don't plan on giving it away just yet.  Sometimes it's nice to have the baby stuff around for when friends come over.

I totally forgot I had put in laundry that afternoon that included our sheets!  So I put it out right before we went over to Gary and Leah's around 6.  Well, the air had cooled off by then, and the sun is now setting a little after 8, so not everything was perfectly dry when we came home.  Therefore, I had to improvise.  The good news is that the big box fan dried the fitted sheets' corners in 30 minutes!

Saturday morning pats!

New purple flowers next to one of big trees in the backyard.

"Carwash."  I guess he thought since it was tunnel like and we were in the bathroom where we get washed, that his cars could get washed, too.

Operation fix Keturah's closet!  She's notorious for throwing all her clothes back into her closet when I tell her to clean up her room, and she does it with both dirty and clean laundry!  So, I made her take everything out, sort them, fold them and stack them on her floor.  Then I came in and helped her figure out where everything needed to go.

The beauty of her doing most of the work, was that she spent over an hour doing that, and I spent about 15 minutes finishing it!  Plus making labels!

I'm loving the label maker for this exact reason!  I can't remember how I've organized everything every time.  This will help both of us!

I was given lots of books I don't need from some lovely moms who have graduated their students.  I'm being the middle person between them and the homeschool community.  So, the result is that I'm thinking about opening up this kind of ministry out of our garage.  No buying/selling, just giving.

After church fun! Rolling under the bench and then rolling out.

Very random, but Abishai wanted to sit on the rock when we got home from church.  Isn't he adorable?  And some plant has taken over the front flower beds again, but this time, it's very low to the ground, spreading almost like moss.

Here's that lovely Tim Horton's mug again in case I didn't already post it.  It's a 12 oz mug I believe.

I'm thinking this is the Detroit skyline? I'm not sure.  I've never been in Detroit unless it was in an airport on my way to or from Indianapolis.

Sunday
Let's see.  Sunday was a normal day.  I think we took naps.  Then Jared went to church early with Benaiah because he was doing tech for Crave, the middle school/high school youth group.  I then had to bring Justin and Keturah with Abishai to church an hour later after A's nap, drop them off to Jared so they could go to youth group and choir, and then make it to a friend's house for our homeschool group.  I'm not sure if we are going to keep having our homeschool group at homes or bring it back to the church, but this past meeting and the next one, are at homes because the newer homeschoolers wanted to see how we set up our homeschool "spaces."  Both of us have smallish homes, so we stash a little bit of stuff in every room, lol.  Anyway, I'm excited to have the women over in September.

Because I am off of the Zoloft, I've been a bit more vocal about my opinions, especially on the state wide homeschol Facebook group.  I try to season my opinions with sugar or salt, but I don't think I've been doing the best of jobs.  Nonetheless, there was a discussion about high school transcipts, again, and it was aggravating me.  So, I whipped out mine (thank you Dad for making a gazillion copies of it years ago, plus copies of my GED and the certificate from the state of NH declaring I had a high school equivalency of knowledge) and shared it on the page.  You see, I know my parents didn't fuss that much over it.  It's an Excel spreadsheet, probably with some formulas for the GPA, but as far as content or making sure we had this many credits of whatever didn't seem to bother them.  And the fact that I really didn't learn Spanish but got a B for effort shows how much the overall GPA mattered to them.  It's not difficult to do this.  Plus, every college will look at a multitude of potential credentials and interview each candidate (or they should), and most colleges are eager to have more students and more money.  I guess it's been a long time since I've heard of someone with average intelligence and grades being rejected from college, especially in the homeschool community.  But anyway, that's what I wrote about, that's why I took it out.  Plus, it's fun to see what my grades were.  And now I can use a similar template for Justin.  Benaiah's will be taken care of by Southside of course.  For me, it's not about checkmarking the state standards to get their seal of approval.  I have other goals for the kids that I teach at home, and it isn't even college or career prep.  It's education for education's sake.  So, there's that.  My opinion.  My high school transcript.  My old address and phone number, too, lol.

Later on when we got home, Abishai wanted to put up the car track on the door.  So we did and then Jared showed him how to carefully climb up the ladder to get to the top of the tracks to let the cars slide down.  A little scary, but Abishai has a healthy sense of what he can and can not do.  He went up and down numerous times without help and had loads of fun!

Monday

Why does chaos always reign, especially on Mondays?  There is a reason why I don't usually start the school year unless I've got it 100% figure out.  I tried doing a "soft launch" today, adding just a couple of subjects in, but we definitely had some kinks to figure out.  I guess that was our "lesson" for today.  Lessons like, nope, I won't be able to keep Abishai quiet during morning time enough, especially when we are starting something brand new like Classical Conversations material.  Perhaps we can add Abishai in later, but for now, Tayo the Little Bus tv show will come in handy while we get our feet under us.  Keturah and Justin did seem interested and tried to take on all the new routines and subjects.  So, we are one step closer to being fully back into it.

Meanwhile, 4 ladies stopped by to pick up books that I had received free from other moms.  Phew!  I'm glad that others are jumping up and down and coming quickly to the house to take them off my hands.  But it makes our school day pretty chaotic.  I'm actually a little bit "talked out" about homeschooling.  We had our homeschool parents' meeting last night and I've also been having multiple conversations on several Facebook posts about slightly controversial topics.  Add to that that I'm no longer on Zoloft and wow, my head is spinning!  Here's to a quieter rest of the week!

We started on Math and memory work this week!  Plus figured out our morning and afternoon routines.  Independent work in the morning, together work in the afternoons.  We will be adding 4 other subjects in the next couple of weeks, science, history, Latin, and writing.

I think we all missed Mr. Steve Demme, our math "teacher"!  Or we just all gather round when the screen is on.

Jared brought home this box from work and it's still going strong as a play toy! Jared wanted it into a tunnel and I said we have other more square boxes or taller boxes that would work better for that.  Instead, this one is great for hiding in and pretending it's an airplane or train.

Just a little boy enjoying his swinging time.

Just a little boy just in his diaper, walking the mail up the driveway.

Pretty clouds over our neighbors' trees.  I'm still working on both my iPhone and the Canon DSLR's settings in order to capture the right colors of the sunsets.  It's been a struggle.  I just want the pictures to look exactly like what I see and the devices both compensate in ways I don't quite understand.  Ah!

Is this Abishai or Justin, lol!  It's Justin when he was 4 years old.  He has slightly buck teeth because he sucked on the paci until he was 4.  Abishai chews on his as well, and I've noticed the start of buck teeth as well, so I'm trying to be diligent in leaving paci in his bed.  I did see last night, that it wasn't in his mouth while he was sleeping, so that's good.  But check out those cute dimples and smile and beautiful eyes on that crazy birthday boy!  He will be 12 years old in less than 2 weeks!