Thanksgiving Week

 I am grateful for many blessings:

My husband

My faith

My kids

My extended family

Homemade bread

Finishing a project

Waking up to snow

Snuggling under warm blankets in a cold room

Clean laundry

Leftovers

Laughing kids

To name a few.

I'm also grateful that even though this week almost killed me with the cooking for Thanksgiving Day (I'm a really good cook.  We eat well every day.  The excess of a Thanksgiving meal has been slowly wearing me down over the past several years.  If I had my way, we'd celebrate with a pot of homemade soup and fresh homemade bread dripping with melted butter.), it ended up as a week that healed my heart and mind a little bit.

The teens and I kept up with grammar and history M-W.

Here they are working on a weekly review included with the Mystery of History program.

The younger kids and I only managed to get to Bin School once this week, but we did math 3 days.

I think they got out clay M-W.

Mister Man really enjoyed creating Pokemon sculptures.

Ladybug finished Teaching Textbooks Math 3 with a 97% average!!!

This was her third time through Math 3 via a variety of programs, and after working so hard from 2020-2022, then taking a break in the 2022-2023 school year, coming back to it this school year has been amazing for her.

She already started Math 4!

Sugar Bear wanted to play, too!

These three are often found together grouped around a favorite book.  Sometimes Beowulf reads aloud.  Sometimes Baymax.  Lola listens in, and then she finds a graphic novel version of the book to read to herself, and/or she draws intensely detailed drawings of the dragons in the stories.

They also play lots of board games.

Little Princess made an abundance of cranberry sauce the previous week, so that was already ticked off our list.  However, the kids were thrilled to be involved with making homemade strawberry jam.

Thanksgiving Day included football with our church community--adults, teens, and kids had games going.  My crew came home pink-cheeked and ready for a big dinner!

So off we headed to my sister's home where she hosted 30-ish people.  (We made up 13 of those people because Rose Red, and Super Star and her new husband joined us.)  Everyone brought more than enough to share, and we feasted!

I hardly saw my youngest 6 as they spent the whole day in the sunroom with their cousins, Pokemon cards, and a karaoke machine. :)

Here is Nature Angel making friends with her first cousin once removed who is about 18 months old.

And this is my mom with her great-grandson and little brother to the sweet toddler above. (My dad is looking over my mom's right shoulder.)

I was delighted to be able to make friends with both little ones, and we all visited until we couldn't visit anymore!

We have pie for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving.

In Morning Meeting we finished the New Testament portion of The Bible for Children.

This left us ready to start The Jesus Storybook Bible at the perfect time for our annual reading for Advent!

We plowed through Tal: His Marvelous Adventures with Noom Zor Noom because the kids and I like it so much!

We'll finish it either tonight or tomorrow night, and then we'll be ready for some of our favorite Christmas novels.

Nature Angel finished another beautiful cardigan, and now she's holed up in her room crocheting Christmas presents night and day.

Little Princess has been studying for and passing exams for her next CAP promotion.  She has one more test to pass, and it's the one she's most nervous about--calling drill.

Today Little Princess delivered a talk in church, and it was so perfectly written and so well-delivered that we couldn't walk through the hallways without being stopped for a compliment.  

Not that we give talks in church for compliments!!!  

But it's so joyful to watch my kids develop their talents.

The new med that was prescribed for Brother was a complete fail.  It made everything worse within 72 hours, and as soon as I pulled it from his med regimen, we returned to our usual level of difficulty.

Hooray for our usual level of difficulty!

We moved Mister Man and Baymax into the safe room.  We can still use it as a safe room, but now these two have a place to go that gives them a break from Brother.  (And keeps their stuff safe from Brother's rages.)  I'm hoping this will help reduce some of their traumatic stress behaviors.

I'd move Beowulf, too, but he and Brother are so deeply connected that it might do more harm than good to separate them.

We're not starting our official Christmas School schedule until December 4, so we have one more week to do our best with "regular" school, so we have an academic routine to come back to after the first of the year.

Here's hoping!