A Week, Briefly (4/27/20)

The days continue to follow the same pattern they have for several weeks.

We continue to thrive.

The days are marked by moments.

I put away Caddie Woodlawn as a read-aloud for the young ones.  They hated it.  Baymax even asked to be put to bed before story time.  I switched to Tales from the Brothers Grimm, and I have happy, eager listeners again.

On Wednesday it rained.  We were outside making the most of the day before we had to go inside, but when the rain came, it came quietly.

So, we stayed outside.

Playing Follow the Leader

Jumping in puddles

Discovering the water pouring out of the downspout

The boys' hair was wet--fun to style

 

When everyone was wet and cold, we came inside for warm baths, jammies, and board games until dinner.

Dinner is often not eaten until nearly 8:00 pm these days.  A far cry from the dinner-at-5-baths-at-6-bedtime-at-7 routine we keep in the winter.  We're outside making the most of the days.  Even then, the kids moan when I call them because they'd rather be out than in.

Thursday afternoon, Brother proudly called to me from the septic leach line trench, "Mom!  You just missed it!  Earlier all 5 boys from our family were digging and working at the same time in the trench!"

They're making good progress, and they're proud of their work.

I have poison ivy.

I was intentionally clearing it from the section of our woods in which Nature Angel is trying to build the playhouse.

I wore protective gear!

After the work, I scrubbed myself with dish soap in cold water!

But I've got it anyway.

On both forearms . . . from wrists to elbows.

And on my face.

I knew that root that flipped out of my hand hit my face!

Nature Angel and Little Princess and I are painting their bedroom.  After we finished reading and watching A Comedy of Errors together, we were casting about for what to do next for Colloquium, and we realized that the time would be best spent on a project.

Their room has ugly paneling from the 70s.

We're painting it bright white . . . one wall at a time.

Before we paint, there's lots of sanding, spackling, cleaning, and taping to do.

Little Princess really likes using the power sander. :)

We've finished the first wall and the closet doors.  We're ready to apply the second coat of paint to the second wall on Monday.

Best lesson they've learned so far?  Cleaning out paintbrushes and rollers well is important and a job worth doing right.

It's been a week of birdwatching.  The kids have found a Cardinal's next just up the road, and there's a batch of Pileated Woodpecker babies in a hole in a tree in our woods.

The babies are loud, and the parents are very busy keeping them fed.  Tiny gray heads poke out of the hole at irregular moments, and Nature Angel has spent long hours trying to get photos of them.

To no avail.

However, one baby bird makes a split second appearance in this video right at :02.

I had to watch it about 15 times before I could see it. :)

But it really is there.

The kids stand transfixed on a log, watching the parents fly back and forth feeding the babies.

And there's a nest right above our raspberry canes.  We weren't sure whose it was, but Little Princess came running in one afternoon yelling, "Mom!  Mom!  Mom!  A Robin just dive bombed me when I was near the raspberries!  It must be a Robin's nest!"

Later that day she reported that she made eye contact with the Robin, who twittered and hopped back and forth on a branch, slowly working his/her way away from the nest, clearly trying to distract her from it.

Indoors, we continue to finish up book work.

As I've plunked these books into our "work completed" box, I've also given them new copybooks printed at home from free sites that I googled.  They're currently working on the beginning level of this book, and I also made some scripture pages for them at this site.

Nature Angel spent the week studying the American space program for her history assignments.  Prompted by her textbook, she found incredible videos about the first lunar landing, about astronomy, and one that took her on a video tour of the international space station.

Baymax couldn't help watching with her.

In Academy, we finished up Children Just Like Me (we have the 1995 edition).

By finding each country on our world map and discussing how each child's life is both similar and different to ours, we had a delightful geography study.

I opened up and read the first lesson in Our Star Spangled Story to the kids on Friday.  They seem to like it. :)  And it inspired a challenging discussion about reading and understanding flat maps compared to globes.

I used custom-made ABC Data sheets to collect data for Brother's ABA therapy plan, and surprised the therapist with the results during our Telehealth parent training session.  She said she has a lot more to learn about Brother than she thought, and she's looking forward to spending more time with him in person.

(I can't help suspecting she's had a lovely lesson about large families.  She let slip that she thought his behaviors would be motivated by a need for attention, but not one of them was.)

The teens and I are still slogging through Plutarch's Lives.  His narratives rarely follow a smooth line--instead they are pock-marked with Oh-that-reminds-me-of-this! side stories that really challenge us.  His narrative on Fabius Maximus was the best-written one we've read so far because Plutarch caught himself drifting off topic and writing, "But that story is best left for another time."

We're hoping that the biographies are arranged in the order he wrote them so that the improvement in his writing we've seen this week will continue to grow through the rest of the book.

But we're not holding our breath. :)

One afternoon, during bird-watching, Nature Angel turned her attention from the birds to her little siblings.  She took some pictures:

There's something so beautiful about each of these pictures . . . probably because I'm the mom. :)

I've got a spreadsheet opened, named, and outlined for plans for next year's school.  I even made my first purchases early Saturday morning.

I've also been studying the calendar in order to figure out how and when to shift from our school-year schedule to our summer schedule.

Saturday was so warm that I let the kids get out the wading pools.  I don't have any pictures, but as I stood in the kitchen prepping meals for the week ahead, I was able to listen to their shouts of glee and their laughter as they splashed and sprayed and jumped and played.  I thought more than once of leaving my work for later and joining them, but I realized that it is my Saturday work inside that allows them to play outside and that allows me the privilege of teaching and interacting with them all week long.

So I worked and listened and offered a prayer of gratitude for our many blessings.