July Officially Ends

 Little Princess graduated and came home from Cadet Officer School!  Graduation was available to families via Zoom, and we cheered for our girl at the dinner table as the rest of the kids prepared to head out the door to church activities.

Little Princess with her flight
There were twelve flights of 10 cadets each at COS.
The extra people you see in this picture are her flight commander and sergeant.

Our busy girl had one day off before heading into two days of work, a doctor's appointment, and babysitting her nephew.

Then we found out that the daddy of one of our former daycare families died suddenly at work on Friday. 

Little Princess joined the rest of our family in taking care of the two little boys as well as helping to clean their house.  We offered to take the boys again today (Mom is literally bed-ridden with grief, and Grandma is fragile), but they had a bad night last night, so they opted to have a quiet day at home together.

They talked axles and wheels and trucks for a long time!

And these two worked on creative projects for hours!

I spent the week making homeschooling plans and schedules, but I can't finalize anything because we are adding at least 3 new therapy appointments per week, and those will affect what we do, when we do it, and how much of it we can get done.

We talked about starting just math this week and working our way gently into a schedule, but the vote split literally in half, and I would be the tie-breaker.  I feel too much at loose ends with final intake appointments and waiting for therapy slots.

As well, I have a bunch of choreography to do for American Rhythm.  

We had our parent information meeting that we advertised on a couple of different homeschool Facebook pages as well as via personal invitations.  

Not one new family even came to ask questions!!!

But that is probably a blessing because we still have 21-22 dancers (still waiting to hear from one possible returning dancer) and a new director.  A small group can be a blessing during transition seasons.

Little Princess will not be dancing.

She's danced with American Rhythm since she was 3 years old, and she's graduating from high school this year.  But there are some circumstances which simply cannot be overcome in time for the practice season.  We're all grieving the loss.

We did, in fact, finish The Beatryce Prophecy, and we're reading Smoky the Cowhorse now.  It's basically a western variation of Black Beauty--a story of a horse told from the horse's perspective.  We have mixed feelings about this book: we're not in love with the story, but we're curious enough about what's going to happen to keep reading.

Ladybug has gotten into K-pop and K-dramas via Nature Angel's influence.  

This led her to borrow books from the library in order to learn Korean.

She's completely self-motivated to study on her own!

Just for fun--I found Dad and Baymax snuggled up during a movie.

The kids and I agree that the year is flying by, but July lasted F.O.R.E.V.E.R.

Many good things happened, and we're practicing counting our blessings.

But we have a lot of work ahead to overcome the bad things that happened.

So we're all taking a deep breath and preparing for what is coming.