A Week, Briefly (October 3, 2022)

 On Sunday evening we finished up The Golden Name Day.  Actually, I summed up a lot of it and jumped to the end when Nancy finally finds a name day that she will accept.  We got fed up with Nancy's pickiness and whining, and when the family got tired of it and sent her to her room and gave her the job of finding and serving someone worse off than herself, we were quite grateful!  

It's not a story we'll read again.

Monday

My plans to get the older kids to help the little ones play catch and work on everyone's hand-eye coordination at the same time was a complete and total fail.  The littles only wanted to dig in the sand pit, and the older ones made a half-hearted effort to obey me and play catch together to try to inspire the littles to join us, but it was a lost cause, so I put the bean bags away and allowed the sand play and basketball that were clearly more meaningful to the kids.

The assignment to find 1,000 of something or some things was met with far more enthusiasm.  I found a program called Wild Math that I'm trying out.  Only my youngest 6 had to do it, but Nature Angel and Little Princess had a blast thinking of funny ways to gather 1,000 items--1,000 pages, 1,000 doll fingers and toes, 1,000 bubbles, etc..

Mister Man worked on 1,000 book pages, but he got tired of the math required to get 1,000 pages exactly, so he switched to tally marks.

Lola miscounted a lot!  Mister Man eventually helped her out, but they got really tired of counting and recounting the walnuts, trying to get a correct number.

I started some of our October reads:

From this one, I read the story of Velasquez

I don't know if we'll read this one again this month . . . the kids really tuned out when I was reading it on Monday.

But this one they love!!  It describes the ocean and sea life in absolute poetry. 

We did some independent study with the new batch of library books, and I got a couple of pictures of kids with their completed 1,000 collections.

500 beans, 100 wood chips, 200 Cheerios, 100 rocks, and 100 Legos!   

200 leaves, 200 rocks, and 600 beans make a collection of 1,000

I read the first story in this Interactive History Adventure about pirates, taking a vote each time a decision needed to be made.  Now the kids are reading it on their own.  (cue triumphant laughter)

Hans Christian Andersen's stories are part of our Holland study

A little one-on-one nursery rhyme time.

The afternoon temperatures are again rising above 80 degrees, so I planned a bike wash to allow for water play and a sense of accomplishment for the kids.  I was stuck inside, so Nature Angel was going to take pictures, but she was busy keeping toddlers safe around the water.  This is what we got--one kind of sad picture of Beowulf. :)

The bikes are clean, though.

In the evening, we started this book:

It's about kings and knights and chivalry and battle . . . and the kids didn't get much into it.  Baymax is determined to hate it even though the storyline is right up his alley.  

Tuesday

Immediately after our morning walk, we set out for the tiny butterfly garden and labyrinth in Hyde Park to have a picnic and make leaf and bark rubbings.

Counting acorns in sets of 10

I tried very hard to identify some of the trees, but the apps/websites I found were either expensive or hard to navigate.  I'll need to do some research at home before our next nature outing instead of trying to find help on the fly.

At the very least, we can tell maples from oaks, and we know black walnuts, osage oranges, and tulip poplars, so we could talk a little bit sensibly about what we were doing.

We came home for a quiet afternoon, reading, drawing, and resting.  

Little Princess got started on the assignment I gave her.

It's not ready yet, but she's made some good progress.

At dinner, I read the first half of Murillo's chapter in My Fine Art Storybook.

In the evening I shortened our reading of El Cid and added a story from this book:

This collection of stories is already a success with my crew.

Wednesday

I had planned to do some measurement activities, play with ocean slime, and encourage the kids to set up one of our tents in the backyard, but they've been asking me for a fire for days.  I'd promised them to ask Dad to set one up for them on Wednesday evening, but the forecast changed from cool to warm in the evening, while the morning was overcast and cool.  On the spur of the moment, I set up a fire for them.

Then I took out the hot dogs that were planned for Thursday evening's dinner, dug out the roasting sticks, and hosted an impromptu campfire lunch.

Being quite busy keeping toddlers safe around an open fire kept me from taking many pictures, and most of the ones I did take turned out blurry because I was in constant motion.  Here are a few:

Once we cleaned up and got babies settled for naps, I read a few ocean stories and assigned the kids to draw a shark, following Art for Kids Hub.  It was a nice, simple project after the last two really complicated ones.

I had warm homemade cookies as a reward when they finished. :)

Mister Man's shark

Unfortunately, when they got to free time, the kids chose to play with the dying fire, and they were all sentenced to a quiet afternoon in the house after enduring a rather fierce lecture about fire safety.

Thursday

We had an emergency out on our walk, and that colored the rest of the day.

Theo pulled off his leash and attacked our neighbor's dog.  As I waded into the fray to pull them apart, Sweet Peach fell out of the Moby wrap onto the asphalt.  At the same time, the triple stroller got knocked down the embankment, and The Munchkin, trying to get out of the wagon, fell onto his face on the road.

It was a nightmare.

And even though everyone is perfectly fine, I still get sick and shaky when I think about it.

We never made it to the library.

Instead, I put the kids in front of a movie (Star Wars), and I made horrible phone calls to Sweet Peach's parents--horrible to explain, even though she was miraculously unhurt.  After the calls, I sent photos and videos, but the fear was so great that her Mama came running from work to pick up her baby girl. 

Totally understandable.

We had enough babies in the house that Sir Walter Scott took our kids to dance while I stayed home with napping babies.

In the evening, Little Princess went to her first Civil Air Patrol meeting while the other girls went to their various church activities, and the boys stayed home with me.  They got to watch a couple of episodes of Rebels--an animated Star Wars spin-off.

Word came from Pixie and Belle that Belle arrived safely in Idaho Falls, and the sisters were out having adventures . . . their first one being a trip to the cadaver lab with one of Pixie's pre-med friends.  They got to explore a very-well studied cadaver, actually holding in their hands a human heart, lung, liver, and other organs!

Friday

We walked the dogs separately from the children.  

I continued to fight the shaking and crying that kept attacking me.  I actually ended up putting out a plea on Facebook for friends to say what they could to drown out the voice in my head that was telling me I was a complete failure.  I spent many moments reading and rereading the encouraging words that people took the time to write on my behalf.

When we came home from our kid walk, I had my kids make cards for their Grammie--whose youngest sister died recently.  While they did that, the babies got to play with colored water, pipettes, and salt.

We had to remove Stretch from the activity, which was really best for 3 and up.  He kept trying to eat everything, and he is in a dumping phase, so we gave him a bowl of uncooked rice and some toys to make a mini-sensory bin for him.

My kids wanted to join in, but by the time their cards were completed, the babies had already gone through all of the salt and colored water that I had prepared, and I was totally ready to clean up!

Besides, it was snack time, so they ate popcorn and apples while I read more of Murillo's story.

My parents arrived for a visit--bearing gifts!  We spent the afternoon eating pizza, visiting, and playing with the babies as they woke up from their naps.  

Little Princess worked a bit more on her heat-shield assignment.

Mister Man showed me the pictures he'd spent the week drawing.  Ladybug received an art instruction book about fantasy characters as a birthday gift, but she shared it generously with Mister Man, and he spent hours working on these sketches.

I got pictures from Belle and Pixie--horseback riding and country dancing!

Pictures from Pixie often get compressed in transit from her phone to mine.

The kids and I watched The Great British Bake-Off in the evening, having a picnic of leftover pizza for dinner.

Among the gifts my parents brought was a 5-gallon bucket of apples picked from a friend's orchard.  

We're making applesauce next week!

Saturday 

I cleaned and cooked and grocery shopped, while kids played freely all day . . . and I contemplated how much playing freely all day can be a problem for my kids.

Little Princess succeeded in building a protective heat shield for her candy bar "astronaut."

Belle and Pixie did the ropes course.  Belle was far more adventurous than I was. :)