Last August I was not ready for school to start, but I did it anyway because I thought I should. And in September I had mental health crisis of the most serious kind. This August I am not ready for school to start. And I'm honoring that. However, I am ready to document brief moments of the beautiful learning that my kids engage in when I'm not running school. This week Rose Red is in Florida at a surfing camp. She's with a sweet friend. I could not be happier for her to have this experience away from home, at the beach, out-of-doors, physically active, and just plain cool. As far as I'm concerned, this is a quarter of a credit of P.E. The rest of us are at home. My teens are reveling in their last days of bizarre teen sleeping schedules before early morning seminary begins next week. Pixie has been working on memorizing the dances she's choreographed for our dance team. She'll be teaching the 10-12 year olds and dancing with the 12-17 year o...
I'm not sure why I'm so full of self-doubt and complaints as I am right now, but it's a reality. I'm healthy again. Just left with the sniffles and occasional congestion that will probably follow me until spring. But no fatigue or weepiness anymore. I got the Christmas books ready. I suppose we need a prettier basket, but I'm quite pleased with how many fabric gift bags I've sewed this month . . . and how pretty they are. (That baby gift bag on the left is how Lola chose to package one of her gifts to a sibling. 😆 ) On Monday afternoon, I sat with the kids and read all of the books we'd missed from the first to the 9th. It was a lovely time with so many expressions of joy and remembrance as favorite books appeared. With the fire burning and the Christmas tree lights glowing, it felt like Christmas! Their assignment that day was to choose one illustration from one of the books--each child had his/her choice--and reproduce it as well as possible. I d...
I've been writing and writing about car troubles this year, and we were finally done in by our teen car. The current set of necessary repairs were to cost more than we paid for the car originally, so we decided to donate it to a veteran's organization, and I spent the week shuttling people to and from work. I don't mind serving them at all, but the time it took felt like it took over my mind, my body, and my schedule. I started to feel sick and exhausted, and I struggled to get normal things done. I eventually said to Sir Walter Scott, "The girls are free on Friday to babysit. We are going car shopping, and we are not coming home without a car!" We are 2 years and 2 months away from fitting "the whole family" at home into an 8-passenger minivan, so we decided to go that route, and then when we don't need our full-size van we'll trade that for the pick-up truck Sir Walter Scott craves. I remember choosing to buy a 15-passenger van (despite ou...
Love that. Very self aware.
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