The Week Between Holidays

We had a lovely Christmas weekend with family and church. On Christmas morning it is always fun to watch the children's reactions to our carefully chosen 3 gifts. (It still looks like a ridiculous amount of gifts around the tree with 11 people in the family!) Seeing their surprise, enthusiasm, and joy is wonderful. Having children all happily playing together and using their gifts for weeks on end is also wonderful.

We started the week needing to get repairs done on one vehicle unexpectedly (after replacing the battery on the family 12 passenger van last week - oy vey!). The first quote was $1000.00. Not exactly what you want to hear at Christmas time or any other time. We went to a trusted mechanic after that and the repairs were about half the first quote.

Our day to day activities were pretty laid back - sleeping in until 7am or even 8am for some kids, chores, and then free time all day long. Kids played, crafted, enjoyed the new tabletop air hockey, and played Ticket to Ride: First Journey (a gift from great-grandparents). Kids also drew, built more Legos than they knew what to do with, rebuilt Legos into new creations, read books, and ate candy canes.

Tuesday was a temple trip for the oldest two children with their youth group. Wednesday my Boy Scout headed on a cold weather campout that included caves and hiking. He was thrilled. I'm grateful for leaders who make campouts happen so I don't need to.

One frustration this week was the collapse of Landry Academy. Makayla has taken a couple online classes through them and loved each one. She just finished up Veterinary Medicine 1 this month. Next week she was to begin Veterinary Medicine 2 and Criminology. That won't be possible and we are not likely to get back the money we spent on the classes. Such is life, I suppose. We have already purchased the book for criminology so we will do the usual homeschooler thing - study the book anyway. Makayla and I will work through it together, probably later this winter or in spring. We have already started talking about what her goals are for the course.

One last picture from Christmas:

I got some organizing of book shelves done one day, watched some webinars, and made sure everyone was fed. It's Friday afternoon and I'm going to go tackle a few more school shelves before Tobias wakes up from his nap. I'm rotating out some things we've read and making other things easier to find. Then it's on to making dinner and challenging kids to another round of Ticket to Ride!