Surprise!

 

Here are my oldest four girls.

My first set of babies.

Looking so beautiful!

A childhood friend got married this weekend, so Pixie flew out, and Super Star drove over, and all four of them attended the wedding an hour or so away from here.

Pixie's arrival was a complete surprise (she loves to do that!).  

And we have just laughed ourselves sick having all of us together.

As I write, I have a ham in the oven, pumpkin desserts on the counter, side dishes to prepare, and dinner with all 13 kids (12+1 son-in-law) and Sir Walter Scott to look forward to.

The weather also finally decided to be fall today.

It's such a happy day!!

As for school and all . . . after taking a kind-of-break while Little Princess was gone, I'm having a hard time finding our rhythm again.

It doesn't help that I'm making getting outside with the kids a priority.

And I know that the outside time counts!

I do!

It's kind of ridiculous that I feel guilty about doing bookwork because we need the outside so badly, and then I feel guilty about being outside because then there's not time/energy to do the bookwork.

*sigh*

If only we could do it all!

😁

The high schoolers and I read and wrote about The Girl of the Limberlost, and we completed reading and narrating the North Korea section of our Eastern Hemisphere textbook.  

With the kids, we're reading 2 books by Grace Lin--A Single Shard and The Kite Fighters.  Both are outstanding.

Everyone is doing math and various forms of language arts daily.

I let a few items from our Loop Rotation rest, and we focused on Human Anatomy, US Presidents, and poetry this week.

Mister Man doing math and making dinner simultaneously


Lola asked me to look up several different natural treasures she found. 
We identified the fruit of the Callery Pear tree.
We also looked up some nuts, but the results were inconclusive.

Our best outing day was Friday afternoon when we hiked to the Unity Village creek and just hung out as long as we could.







This was some sort of seed pod that Ladybug found and took apart.
It stank inside!!



Brother and Beowulf are in the distance of this picture.
They spent an hour chunking rocks out there.






It's book 7 of the Harry Potter series.
Brother doesn't like reading at all, but he's worked his way faithfully through these books, and he's determined to finish--even to the point of taking the books on nature walks so he can walk ahead and read until the rest of us catch up.

There were church activities for all of the kids on Tuesday night--a talent show for the youth, decorating cookies for Baymax, and making s'mores around a fire for Lola.  I had a primary presidency meeting that ran long (as all of them do!), so the kids played sprout ball in the parking lot for an hour while they waited for me.

My Civil Air Patrol cadets all participated in PT on Thursday.

Little Princess had her first shift at her new job on Saturday!

We went to the library on Wednesday, checking out more books than we returned for the umpteenth week in a row.

Sir Walter Scott took the youngest 5 to the park to play baseball together on Saturday.

I keep reminding myself that whether we hit the books hard or not, we're all learning . . .

all of the time.



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