I'm Drowning in Dance Costumes!

 Really, it's my own fault that I'm drowning in dance costumes.

But making them is so much more affordable than buying them, and we're doing a theme this year that we've never done before, so we need a lot of new stuff.

I've completed 4 4T bandana skirts and 2 women's small peasant dresses--both to supplement our current costume stash.

(I also made a pair of upcycled fuzzy pajama pants for Lola, but that has nothing to do with dance!)

Nature Angel is responsible for a can-can number for the older girls.  Have you seen can-can costumes!?!?!?  They're fancy.

We've let go of almost all of our wishes to settle on circle skirts with petticoats under them.  

We already own a couple dozen petticoats.

But we don't have enough matching circle skirts, nor do we have any tops to go with the skirts.  

So . . .

I volunteered to make 14 modified peasant dresses, but as tops, like this:

(not my photo, but what the blouses will ultimately look like)

It's a very simple job, and Nature Angel helped me find two king-size white sheets for $2 each.  I have the thread, elastic, and pattern, so 14 tops for $4!!!!

Why wouldn't I volunteer to do that?

🤣🤣🤣🤣

As far as academics go, The high schoolers and I finished Julius Caesar together, and we watched the 1953 film adaptation of it.

Brother has been very interested, so he asked for Little Princess' copy of the play in order to follow along.

We also completed all of the text reading/discussion/narration for our Eastern Hemisphere study of China.  We're still reading some the folk tales and read aloud novels, but we're happily doing that without hurrying, and we'll probably start on the Koreas in a week or so.

We started our next book for literature--A Girl of the Limberlost.

Human Anatomy is moving along much more slowly than planned, but we're doing what we can to learn.  Ladybug's memory has been affected by her seizures, so we're taking time to review, review, review.  

We finished the chapter about insects in The Golden Treasury of Natural History.

We finished the chapter about Eratosthenes in Mapmakers.

We're up to president #12 in our US Presidents study, and we're adding facts about each president to our memory games.

We didn't do any Studio Art lessons, but I did give the kids the assignment of painting the final scene from When the Mountain Meets the Moon.

We continued reviewing our first 150 essential ASL signs, and I plan to introduce a new video this coming week.

I forgot to record that sometime in the previous two weeks, we finished reading Richard II in Garfield's Shakespeare Stories.  The politics were hard for the kids to understand, but they listened and asked questions, and they say it was a good read.

I finally started Little Princess on American Government 101.  I found a simple book at Five Below, set up a weekly reading/writing schedule for the school year and put her to work.  It will count as a semester class, providing the foundation for a US Constitution class next year.

Brother has hit a wall in his language arts.  Understanding nouns is going to make us very strong if it doesn't kill us.  He's a math dude--he likes his absolutes.  The fact that baby is sometimes a noun and sometimes an adjective is not cool with him at all.  Neither is the existence of abstract nouns.

We've halted dead in our tracks in his book while I copy sentences out of books for him to practice finding nouns so that a sense of what they are can build in his mind.

(Please, oh please, let a sense of what they are build in his mind!!)

Something is weird about Ladybug's math.  It could be seizure damage coupled with her already troubling FASD symptoms, but she's teetering back and forth between comprehension one hour and complete fog another hour.  

One day her math looked too perfect to make sense, so I copied a couple of the problems on some scratch paper and asked her to solve them.  

She couldn't.

Could she have cheated?  (There's no way she understood the answer key--just a bunch of printed answers with no context.  But I moved it anyway.)  Gotten a sibling to do the work? (They all say they didn't.)

I don't know.

I do know I have my doubts that the placement test she took in June reflects her current abilities.

At all.

With those two exceptions, the kids are trucking onward with their daily work.  

We're learning dances for AR.

The big boys and Little Princess are attending CAP meetings (PT this past week).

The big kids all had church activities this Tuesday.

Sushi-making lessons:

And backyard games with friends for the rest of my crew.

One day we provided a bit of service for some small, sweet friends and their exhausted-from-a-night-in-the-ER mommy.  (No pictures included because I don't have permission to share.)  The 3yo girl loved playing with Lola, while the 2 yo girl bonded with Little Princess and Nature Angel.  The baby boy loved Baymax and Ladybug.

Our basement fridge/freezer died, so I made 9 pints of apricot jam with the thawed apricots.  We  also found out that you can safely re-freeze cured meats, so we found space for the bacon and hams that arrived last week when we picked up our whole hog.

I did cook 2 lbs of bacon as part of breakfast-for-dinner on Thursday night, but there were 40 lbs of thawed meat to save, and I'm so, so, so grateful we could just re-freeze the meat!

All of the thawed butter is now in our regular fridge.

Unfortunately, we did lose some food, but the loss was minimal compared to what it could have been!

The youngest 6 played soccer on Saturday morning.

On Saturday night, 5 of the teens headed to a church dance, so there were only 3 kids at home.  They thought I was going to let them rot in front of the TV because I've let them do that too much lately, but I was firm about them having reached their screen limit for the week.  After some time and sulking, they asked if they could build a fire outside.

Yes!

How to deal with smoke:  Wear swim goggles!!

"Dad, will you find me a knife so I can whittle for a while?"
Also, yes!!

We also had several appointments this past week, but now Ladybug's EEG is finished, and she's on the list to start mental health therapy in the next few months.  I don't know what's causing it (there are so many possible options), but she's increasingly mean/moody/defiant since her seizures started.  Is it frustration with slowing cognition?  A side effect to her anti-seizure med?  Typical teen hormones?  Worry about therapy?  Worry about something else?  Something else entirely?

This usually sweet, happy girl is NOT herself.

We're all in with a PCP now, though, and a couple of the kids have referrals for a full neuro/psych evaluation.

We're doing what we can to help everyone thrive.