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July Officially Ends

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 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 an...
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More Summer Camps

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 The 3 big boys got home from Boys' Camp yesterday.   (No pics have been shared yet.) They are full of stories about fishing, touring a cave system, river rafting, chair soccer (broke one of our camping chairs!), devotionals, and not showering even once. Those of us who stayed at home kept busy with Little Mister, The Munchkin, and Sugar Bear who came to spend a day with us here and there.   We didn't read together while the big boys were gone. We're reading a wonderful book called The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo!!!  We started it before the boys left, and we're finishing it up now that they're home. While they were gone the remaining 3 kids watched a lot of the Percy Jackson series (Lola has been rereading The Lightning Thief ) and some Harry Potter movies (Lola has been rereading that series as well).  They did a lot of personal reading--Ladybug likes teen romance novels, and Baymax has been working his way through Fablehaven for the third...
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New Challenges

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 As a family, we've been in a stable place for a season. And now we are not, again. We are facing some of the old challenges grown larger.  Weare facing some new challenges that feel simply too big. This week a few of the kids are at CAP Encampment. One, who should have been there, is not because of a mistake he made that had large consequences attached. In the past I have written somewhat freely about our challenges. Now, I feel inclined to turn inward. The only homeschool business I have to write about is that we're still reading My Friend Flicka , and we quite enjoy it.  It's wordy, and has some racially biased tendencies (and a nasty word or two).  I edit that out as I read aloud (or sometimes I stop for a conversation about what's in the story and why it's not okay).  The plot is quite engaging, and the peril level is just right for my crew to feel excited as the story progresses, but not actually frightened. We've got kids coming and going so much now that...
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Space Ops Academy

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 Little Princess was accepted into two NCSA camps this sumer.   I do not know what NCSA stands for, but I do know that these are Civil Air Patrol camps for cadets to develop various skills/further studies in areas of particular interest.  Little Princess loves space, so she applied for this camp. She also applied for a leadership position at the camp and was selected as a flight commander. The best I can understand about this particular NCSA is that it was kind of a glorified career fair focused on space. The cadets spent a great deal of their time touring highly classified areas, so we have few pictures of the week.  At one location, the check-in process took several hours . . . and that was even with the cadets having submitted documentation in advance! They participated in lectures by various career leaders in the US Space Force, from companies that build space equipment, from various military bases, and at USAFA (again for Little Princess!). STEM class Space...
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