The Week Before the Week Before Christmas

 It was a hard week.

Hard enough that I'd like to just pretend it never happened and move on with life.

But we did do Christmas School each day, and I am obligated to record our learning somewhere, and this blog is my chosen record.

We covered Japan, Czechia, Kenya, France, and Puerto Rico this week.

This has to be the funniest Christmas story we've ever read.  I couldn't stop giggling as I read it, and the kids cackled several times.

Our other Kenya Christmas books didn't arrive, so we watched YouTube read-alouds of A Kenya Christmas and A Kenyan Christmas.  But A Stork in a Baobab Tree was by far the best one, and I really want to add it to our library.

Tome dePaola sets the story in Italy, but it is a retelling of a French story.

(Madeline's Christmas didn't arrive in time, but the kids have since taken turns reading it on their own.)

This book has the cutest illustrations!!

For Japan, our activity was folding origami paper cranes.  It could have been because we had a horrific morning with Beowulf, and we were all emotionally exhausted or it could have just been that origami with my kids is a bad idea, but it was an awful experience!

Crying!

Yelling!

Throwing projects!

Ripping projects!

We were all successful in the end, but I told Nature Angel that origami is forever off the table for us!

Then I said, "I'll probably forget, though."

She said, "I'll remind you!"

We made sweet little jam sandwich cookies for our Czechia activity.  It would have been the most authentic to cook a carp, but . . . blech!

"I not want jammy on my cookie!"

And a quick photo of kids studying the art piece for the week.  Our curriculum has us play "hide and seek" on the first day of art study.

On the day we read about Kenya, we made mandazi (little doughnuts), and we read that mandazi is usually eaten with tea.  We had tea from Tanzania in our cupboard that Pixie brought back to us from her teaching adventure earlier in the year!

We had a tea party!

While they waited for the mandazi to finish, they ate from the graham cracker houses they'd made at church activities the night before.

For France, the assigned project was galette des roi, but I was not up to making gluten-free puff pastry.

I substituted a buche de noel which was far easier to make than it looks, and when it's a chocolate sponge it is naturally gluten-free!

It was beautiful, but you're going to have to take my word for it because I forgot to take a single picture of the process or the finished product.

We had to delay our Puerto Rico study/activity because the problems that started on Thursday afternoon continued through all of Friday.

We had friends over on Friday morning because their presence helped change the atmosphere in the house, and then my parents came over bearing pizzas, and that helped, too.  In the midst of it all, our case manager made an emergency visit to try to mediate a little bit.

By the late afternoon, everyone was ready for some normal, so we did Christmas School.

The activity was pretending that the three kings came to fill our shoe boxes with treats.

We folded paper boxes (Ha!  Origami again!  This time the process was already familiar to everyone, so we only had one breakdown.) and filled them with straw from the bale in our garage.

Then the kids all had to pretend to be asleep while I put some treats in each box.  They ate their treats while I read aloud to them.

We watched The Great British Bake-Off Holiday Edition and had soup for dinner.  

The tension that had been simmering all day came to another head in the evening, but this time we seemed to reach a state of peace.  

It was a tough 30 hours.

I hugged Ladybug at one point, and she was rock hard through her neck and shoulders.  The tension she's carrying is severe.

Baymax is having lots of tantrums.

Little Princess broke down in my arms.

Nature Angel is keeping her distance creating presents in her room.  She'd be doing that anyway, but it is a good outlet and safe place for her.

I'm walking around in a daze, and the only way I get things done is to have them written down so that I can look at a list and choose what to do next.  I have apps on my phone for housekeeping, meal planning, and other things, and I am depending on them because I am otherwise too foggy to function.

We read one or two more advent selections from Unwrapping the Names of Christ, but we have not done what I wish we could.

We are racing through The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, though.  It is odd and fairy-tale-ish, but we like it well enough.

I'd hoped to read A Christmas Carol to the kids again this year, but we watched the Disney animated version instead this weekend.  There's a bizarre horse-and-cart chase scene in it, but it is otherwise quite faithful to the original story.

And there were some pretty good jump scares!  

It was drizzly for much of the week, so there were long hours playing games, building with Legos, and reading. 

I am much afraid of the week ahead, but we can't hide from it.  

My coping plan is to live very simply.

However, we do have a birthday this coming week as well as youth activities at church. 

Other than those events, we're going to stick with our Christmas School schedule, and because Sir Walter Scott was assigned to work on the 23rd (our Christmas Eve), I have a wonderful excuse to do away with our usual Christmas Eve activities.  Instead, I'm going to copy the viral (for several years now) activity from Iceland--Jolabokaflod.  I'm going to fill several boxes with new books and snacks that we will open on Christmas Eve afternoon.  We will read and eat together until it's time to hang stockings and wait for Santa.