Year 3, October 15th-18th, 2018: Mini Fall Break Week

After having a somewhat laid back weekend and regaining some traction on emotions, I gathered up my thoughts and declared a mini break from all the school subjects that involved a lot of time from me.  With the sudden change in weather, we have to go through clothes and make the seasons switch and I can't do that and teach history.  So, the kids are continuing their math and their memory work and some reading.  I do have some leftover science and history projects to do, but will hopefully tackle that later in the week.  We don't have a lot on the schedule, but there is something practicially every day we need to attend to, from appointments to playdates to errands and possibly park day on Friday.  I so don't want to go through the clothes again, but I don't have a choice.  In fact, it's almost worthless because Abishai hasn't grown enough to switch sizes yet, so I'll be putting a lot of that away again for later in the winter if he has a growth spurt.  Justin has gained some height so I do know I have to go through all of that again and possibly make a 4th trip to Goodwill to get him some pants. Bummers.

On Tuesday, we visited with our great friends, the Wagars, not only to play but because Mrs. Jenn Wagar is a master at the sewing machine and volunteered to help me with my long list of things that needed repairs.  It probably would have taken about the same amount of time for me to hand sew them, but it gave us the opportunity to visit with one another, which we haven't done in months.  Jenn is someone I can trust with a lot of opinions and viewpoints because they, too, lived in another country for 4 months, have a large family, view homeschooling in the same way, live on one income, etc etc I think we covered a broad range of topics and encouraged one another along the way.  And of course the kids had fun playing together and oohing and ahhing over the menagerie of animals they own.  They have as many animals as they have kids!  Mostly reptiles like 3 pond turtles, two snakes, two lizards, and they do have one dog.  It's kind of crazy over there and their house is very "lived in" and always makes me feel better about my house because well, ours is a bit more organized.  And she doesn't clean for me, and I love that.  An instagramer/blogger I like recently showed her cluttered house during a normal homeschool day and then how they did a quick pick up (not everything was in it's place, but it was much improved) and I thanked her for showing that side of homeschooling multiple kids and homemaking.  You only have so much time and energy and it's good to know I'm not alone in balancing it all.  So, I always feel encouraged after spending time with the Wagars.  And now my huge pile of sewing is almost completely gone after sitting there for months and months.  Sometimes you just need a little helping hand and a friend to chat with.  Oh, and I choose to go there instead of to a mom's night out (I would have had to switch my piano lessson anyway) because I really didn't know any of the women that were going and being an introvert, meeting new people isn't always something that I'm up to doing.  I would rather have some time with someone I know well and in a place I've been to before.  So, today, I made that choose.  Other days, I would have tried harder to attend the MNO.

So, the kids are enjoying a little more freedom and being more creative with their legos and crafts, and I'm working on clothes and errands.  That's our week so far through Tuesday.  Here's the pics from Monday and Tuesday.  I have been in a rut, though, and haven't taken many.  I haven't felt the best and just don't want to spend a bunch of time processing photos or posting them anyway.  So, I'm not taking them.  We have a ton of the everyday happenings recorded, so I guess I'm involuntarily taking a little break.  But I'll share what I do have.

Jared had nursery duty on Sunday.  I love that he's doing this regularly now!

It's easier for me to just let you read this instagram posts.  It's been a rough few days physically and mentally.

Abishai wanted to help a ton with grocery shopping last night.  He wanted to put things on the conveyor belt to be scanned and then put them in his shopping bag!  What a great helper!

We needed dog food, too, this week, and the pet store is in the same shopping plaza as our favorite Aldi's location, so we made a quick stop to pick it up and look at the animals.  Daddy's not usually with us when we do this, so it was a treat!  Fish, birds, and rodents.

Keturah fell in love with the chincilla!  Cute rat like creature.  A mixture between a guinea pig, a squirrel, and a bunny.

Stole this picture from the NYC group.  Benaiah won't return my texts so I'm relying on Instagram and the leaders posting there to post some pictures.  So far they've done a lot of walking, praying, and sight seeing, including Rockefeller plaza with the ice rink!  Can't wait to hear all the stories when Benaiah gets back on Thursday night!

We woke up to our first hard frost of the season!  Daddy said, there's ice on the grass!  So naturally, Abishai wanted to go out on the "ice" and "slide" in it!  In his socks, no less!  And he literally purposefully ran and slid and fell down without getting upset that he was wet.  It was maybe 45 degrees and he's in socks and a short sleeve shirt.  #Canadian

Little baby feet.

See!  It's actually 37 and not 45 degrees!  Crazy!

And the clothes sorting begins.  I usually have the little kids try on a couple of things to get a good idea at what length and waist size they are.  Then I use those items to measure other items to so that I don't have to try every single pair of pants on the kid.  Same with shirts.  I finally pulled the last of the 18 months size pants but had to leave the 2T's because that's what fits him best.  There's a few of the 3T's he fits into, but a lot of them are still too long.  Ugh!

This stubborn bottle of Mountain Dew would NOT open!  We even used a knife to separate the cap from the ring.  I think it was pressurized wrong.  So, we had to cut a whole in the side in order to get the pop out of the container!  It tasted yummy, but what a weird way to get it out of the bottle!

Evening sky.

Time to burn more of the wood pile.  I wish we had made two wood piles because some of these are just new scrap wood from the new siding and would have made great planks for the kids to make a fort with.  But Jared's concerned with the termite infested and mold infested wood infecting the new pieces, so he won't let them play with them.  I think it's a shame.  There is such a thing as reclaimed barn wood.  And what other materials do kids use to build their forts in the woods but yucky unusable boards?  I think he's being a little too cautious, but I let him burn it anyways.

Burn, baby, burn.

These outer pieces help to contain the fire within.

Peek-a-boo fire.

Now the outside pieces have caught fire and the kids are enjoying a cold evening jumping session.  Abishai can even spin while he jumps now!

This photo was taken through the window that sits between the kitchen and my desk and then through the outside window of the sunroom.  That's a huge fire!

It's squash season!  My favorite type of vegetables!  Mushy and colorful!  I could eat this all day and I don't put anything on it, not butter, not sugar, not salt, not cinnamon, just plain old butternut squash!  But I love acorn and spaghetti squash, too.  This portion was just the bottom half of the squash.  I'm freezing the top half I got in pieces for smoothies.  Yummy!

Wednesday was a bit busier with a trip up north to drop off donations finally to a ministry called "Widow's Jar" which helps missionaries with all kind of household goods, including homeschool and Bible study materials and give them away for free.  But they are only open a few hours a week, so it has been tricky to coordinate the right time to get it down.  So we drove 25 minutes north and then 25 minutes south with about 15 minutes of unloading the vehicle.  1 bag of clothes, 1 toddler mattress, 1 set of corningware, two or three boxes of books, two or three boxes of misc. stuff, and dehumidifier.  All the stuff I had set aside for the last year!  They had come by our house last year when someone donated a bunch of homeschool materials because two ladies at been at an event south of us and that's how I had heard of them. I feel so much better giving to them than I do with giving things to Goodwill, although Goodwill (and a very nice one at that!) is practically next door to them.  Located just off the main highway, it's a very convenient location when there's no traffic on the northeast side, which of course, I made sure I wasn't a part of.  Anyway, finally got that done.  Then home again to work on clothes and be ready for Bible Bowl and babysitting for the Rooted class.

We only had 3 out of our 7 kids in our classroom that evening because it's fall break week here.  And there were 4 adults! I noticed the tables hadn't been scrubbed yet from all the crayon marks so I texted our nursery director and asked her what things need a deeper cleaning and got started on the tables.  She directed me to some products from Norwex she's been using like their cleaning paste made of marble flour (or dust), natural soap and a little coconut oil and boy was it interesting to work with!  It did make my hands powdery, but not as dry as other cleaners do, so I was very impressed.  I cleaned undersides of tables and chairs and all the legs.  I imagine only the top of the table gets a good cleaning every week.  The rest of the toys in that room really need to be scrubbed hard or replaced because some of them are as old as Benaiah.  But, there's some other upgrades coming for the nursery soon, so that budget is already used up.  I'm going to try to some more cleaning next week.  But my shoulders are definitely protesting that hard work today!  Never mind the restless leg syndrome that came back because I'm taking Zoloft again.  Who knew there was a connection there?  And not being able to take most pain killers because they thin the blood and cause my nose to bleed.  But, oh well, it's life with me!

These two pictures pretty sums up Abishai's life.  There's always room for "one more thing!" because he's got Grandpa's personality.

And then, after all that constant movement, he crashes, with his little folded hands, blankie and paci.  I just saw a Facebook memory post with some pictures of the kids from 2009 and Justin was over 4 years old, but still had a paci.  And his adult teeth are fine.  So, please, no judgement here.  We will eventually get Abishai off of it.

Not sure what the assignment was, but this is Keturah's drawing for Grandpa.  She's getting much better at drawing and her cursive writing is coming along beautifully!  I'm glad we waited until I could properly supervise her on cursive and she was old enough to carefully follow instructions on the strokes.  I think I'm going to do the same when it's Abishai's turn.  Benaiah's cursive is still awful and Justin's cursive is too tall and wide for the lines and that's because I didn't properly supervise and help them.  I should a pro at teaching cursive by the time it's Abishai's turn!

Thursday I got an early morning text from Jenn Wagar asking if Wolf and Justin had set something up for a playdate today.  Well, I knew that Justin had mentioned wanting to have a playdate with Wolf this week since he has fall break, and since we were just going to be home all day, I decided to make the effort to go pick up Wolf and bring him back to our house for a few hours.  They mostly played video games, but did play on the trampoline and hung out.  Abishai likes to call Wolf, "Mr. Wolf," because that's what Gary calls him.  And when we asked Abishai who was coming home tonight, he said, "Bryce and Mr. Wolf!"  Bwahahahaha!  Abishai also said when we told him that Benaiah was coming home tonight, "No!  Miah sleep at fry store!"  Apparently, Abishai thought Benaiah lived at Chick Fil A all week when in fact he's been in NYC on a mission experience trip.  But, it's not too far fetched for Abishai to say that because often Benaiah is up and gone before Abishai wakes up and Benaiah gets home way after Abishai goes to bed.  Abishai also had a funny moment when he used a chair and a stool to block the doorway between the fireside room and the sunroom because he didn't want anyone to get hurt in his "construction site" in the sunroom, including the dog.  And he spent 30 minutes this morning laying all over Jared and I in bed trying to get Daddy to stay home.  And lastly, he can climb up part of the bookshelf to reach his paci and blankie and tonight when I had him show me, he broke one of his favorite toy guns when he stepped into a bin right in front of the bookshelf.  I cannot handle this kid sometimes, he's so exhausting!  But at the end of the day he'll say about his day, "Tired. Exhausted."  And yesterday he said, "Serious?!" and laid his head down.  That was after telling Daddy, "Wook, Daddy, YOU wisten!"  Boss baby learning from the rest of us. 

So, we didn't get to everything I had planned to today, but I got to 90% of it by staying on my feet and pushing through my pain.  We made a salt dough map, finished up science papers, and checked other homework.  I made an incredible chicken potato soup that included 2 drops of basic essential oil and 1 drop of clove oil (which is all you need because they are so potent!)  I also made gluten free cornbread (thanks Aldi's for putting it together in a box!) and Justin made "just add water" cheesy biscuits.  We had pizza for lunch and then I had to keep everyone out of the pantry.  So, I feel like I've spent a good portion of the day in the kitchen!  I ran a load of laundry, took a shower, and registered to vote (but I'm too late for this midterm election, who knew my address was wrong on my voter registration?????!!!!  Even after living here for over a year????!!!! Whoops!).  So, in short, I'm exhausted and trying to finish up this post!

Oh, and lots of stories of Benaiah's time in NYC. I think I'll save them for another day though and screen capture some of his posts on Instagram.  He didn't take any selfies though, so I'm kind of disappointed in that.  He got back at 8pm tonight and starts his new shift at 8am-4pm at CFA tomorrow.  No rest for the weary!  Although I'm sure he slept a good deal of the way from NYC to Indy today.  He's safe and sound and said it was a very eye opening trip.  Yeah!

Um, yah! How cool is that!  Student Ministry at the Creek at a branding way before the current one.  I think this was one of the first times they created a logo.  Shauna said it was from her senior year in 2000/2001, which makes sense since we were helping out then as sponsors.  Cool!

Keturah wrote her name in cursive on the foggy glass front door this morning!  There was frost on the cars and grass, too.  And I heard there were snowflakes in the air on PEI as well!  Skipped fall and went straight to winter!

They weren't sure if they were going to be into this project or not, but did eventually have fun with it!  Basically making homemade play dough to make a 3D topographically map!  Justin even knew that green and red make brown!  I didn't realize that, so I'm glad he knew!  The dough is 1 part wheat flour to 1 part salt with enough water to make it a thick dough (like cookie batter, not thin like brownie batter).  The boys and I did these maps last round, too.

Lots of fertile ground, as well as desserts to cover in Israel during the battle of Masada and when the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden.

While Justin made the cheesy biscuits, Abishai wanted to play outside.  I'm in my socks and slippers and he's in 3 shirts and no socks/shoes, go figure.  But he had a great time filling up his excavator and filling his dump truck waiting on Daddy to come home.

We went from 86 degrees to consistently 56 degrees literally overnight, making us focus on making the seasonal clothing switch sooner rather than later.

55 degrees and bare toes.  Canadian sporting his Mackinac hoodie from last year.

He wanted me to sit down but I told him the grass was too cold.  He then proceeds to lay in it.  Crazy boy.

So excited to see Daddy's truck coming down the road!

Here comes Daddy!

Daddy's turn to help!

The trees are starting to change color!

Another night, another bonfire to get rid of all that ugly wood.

Two shirts on one boy.  Abishai saw both shirts and wanted to wear both of them.  He wore the police shirt underneath the motorcycle shirt so "the police could catch the bad guy (on the motorcycle)."  Wow, how did he make that connection?  And we have never put two long sleeve tshirts on the kids.  Maybe a long sleeve for a bigger fleece or sweatshirt, but not two shirts the same size.  And he wore that combination all day.  What a great thinker!

Benaiah's home!  Let the late night kitchen rustling begin!  I rustle with food late at night, too, so he's not alone.  I'm glad he's home and ready to hit the ground running at work tomorrow.  He definitely had the experience of a lifetime this week in NYC.  I'm glad he got to go.

Our finished project!  Salt dough map of Israel at the time of Masada so about 100-200 A.D.  Not perfect, but they get the point.

Another viewpoint.  I'm glad we took this week to catchup on projects like this and our science notebooks and review all our memory work.  It's been a breath of fresh air getting a handle on all the subjects.  They still continued their math and reading assignments, as well as Grandpa class, which they had this morning.  Onward and upward!