July's Updates in a Nutshell

In case you haven't noticed, I don't blog a ton during the summer. Ha! We're more than halfway through July and it has been a relaxing summer overall. Makayla and Emma just finished Girl's Camp so we are officially done with camps for the summer. This post will include a few things I want to remember from July as a series of random updates.

One morning my sister, her husband, and their 4 children came over, as well as my mom. Grandma had gathered the materials to do tie dye with the grandchildren and my house and backyard were chosen as the site for the mess making. It was a lot of fun and much easier than I expected. I scrounged in my camera and found a few of my kids in their tie dye shirts for this post.

Throughout the month of July we have listened to our current book club title Swallows and Amazons. This was has not been a big hit. While it is charming there is simply too much detail on sailing to hold the interest of most of my kids. We will finish listening to it over snack this week in time for our book club meeting and will not read the sequels.

Rebekah is 5 1/2 months old. She's interested in everything going on around her, rolls over all the time, and likes to chew on anything she can grab. Samuel turned 5 in July and we had our usual Sunday family party to celebrate. He's a fan of Legos, dinosaurs, stuffed animals, and the cartoon PJ masks, so his gifts from family reflected that.

We discovered a leak in the roof and are in the process of getting the insurance adjuster out here and the roofing contractor. There is damage to one bathroom ceiling as well as whatever needs done up on the slate roof.

I've gone through our homeschool materials for this school year and wrapped my head around most of it. I've come up with weekly lists for each child showing how many days per week to do each subject. I think for our first 6 weeks we will try having 4 days for the main chunk of the week's school work and the 5th day lighter in work, to see if the kids like that. Then if they want to spread out more of their subjects into the 5th day to even things out they can.

I have printed a few things and have a few more to print. I think we will be ready for our August start in a few weeks. I'm hoping to get everyone into a solid routine before September 7th. On that day Mason has his next surgery and the best way to keep school moving without major interruption for most of the kids is to get those routines in place.

This week's bag of veggies.

One fun thing we've done this summer is participate in a weekly local farm's crop share program. We purchased a share in the farm over the winter for this year, providing the growers with funds to start out their growing season. Then we receive a weekly bag of fresh produce from the farm for 20 weeks (late spring, all summer, and into fall). It's a lot of fun and challenges us to eat more vegetables, try new vegetables, and find new ways to make those veggies. After several weeks heavy on zucchini that we fried, made into noodles, roasted with parmesean and garlic, and stir fried, I introduced the kids to zucchini bread.

All but one of them loved it and wondered why we hadn't been using the zucchini this way all along! This morning I made fresh salsa with the tomatoes and onions from this week's bag and the fresh garlic from last week's bag, plus some jalepeno, lime, and cilantro from the store. Tonight we'll enjoy the sweet corn. Tomorrow I'll put the green beans in the crock pot with some ham to be ready for dinner after church. My personal culinary challenge this week is to find a yummy way to make those eggplant. It is a vegetable I have never made and liked, but I'm sure that can change!

Other random things from this month:

• Makayla finally took the ACT for the first time. She wasn't impressed with hours of testing and had really done zero preparation. My goal was just to get her to do it. She'll then use the results to guide her in what math areas she needs to study this year on CTC math, because we know math is her weak area. 
• I prepared and mailed in our yearly homeschool notice to the school district. 
• We have played 44 of our more than 80 board and card games in the house. And then friends gave us 3 more games - which we also played. I'm not sure we will finish playing every game before our summer is up and we start back to school, but we sure have had a lot of fun trying! 
• My 100 days of scripture reading is going great. I'm reading the New Testament in 100 days for the summer, as well as The Book of Mormon. I'm a bit ahead of schedule and enjoying it. 
• We took the family to see fireworks. Everyone liked them, Rebekah fell asleep during the fireworks, and Mason was able to enjoy them with earplugs solidly in place to help with the noise (because of his hydrocephalus, shunt, and brain shape differences from spina bifida he struggles with noise, both too loud noise and specific sounds at lower volumes). It is the first time we have been able to go see fireworks in years.

Ok, as fun as it is to sit here and type I really need to get out the door and do some grocery shopping. Happy July everyone!

Notes for the End of June

Emma finished this manga version of Doctor Strange this week.

It has been a normal, quiet week at my house. There really hasn't been anything out of the ordinary for a summer week. I don't even remember what we did on Monday other than a trip to mail out items that sold on Ebay and Makayla going to work. It was just an ordinary day.

On Tuesday I had a Happy Homeschool Mom Moment - the last of our homeschool materials arrived! I pre-ordered The Good and the Beautiful High School 1 Language Arts on May 1st and today opened up a lovely box of goodness. Makayla is a senior and I'm finding it an interesting year to plan because we can focus on priorities and do things in the way that makes sense for her as an individual. I also decided what the base of her government and economics course will be. She's going to use two video series from Crash Course on YouTube:

1. U.S. Government and Politics (50 videos)
2. Intro to Economics (35 videos)

Homemade bread and playdough

Wednesday I got up and got productive. Makayla requested I bake homemade bread the night before, so I made it early before she headed to work. While the bread dough took time to rise I made three batches of playdoh for the younger kids. Kids did chores and played Pokémon. We listened to our current homeschool book club title, Swallows and Amazons, during snack time. The oldest 3 had youth activities Wednesday evening.

One day I snapped pictures while we were listening to

Swallows and Amazons. Kids were coloring or drawing.

Thursday arrived with sunshine and heat and another day of work for Makayla. Toys R Us closes this week so she'll be finished there and looking for another job. Mason and I headed to physical therapy as usual. It is an activity that he enjoys, even though it is hard work. His current PT is amazing at working with us to challenge Mason, explore possibilities, find his limits neurologically, and keep everything fun at the same time. She's also really open to my suggestions or to brainstorming with me to find solutions or to find the right questions.

Thursday I spent a chunk of time on homeschool prep and planning. I do a lot during the summer to get things ready for a smooth school year. One part of that is going through each child's course of study and pre-reading books, making notes on things, getting materials organized, and working out just what their day to day work will be. Some examples of that:

• I need to pre-read the books that came with Makayla's The Good and the Beautiful course so that I am familiar with them. The books are: Just David by Eleanor H. Porter, Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, The Story of John Greenleaf Whittier by Francis E. Cooke, Into the Unknown by Matthew A. Henson, Jacob Bull, and Bernadine Bailey, and Patterns on the Wall by Elizabeth Yates.
• I make notes on things I am still sorting out, like creating a daily checklist for each child or deciding how to handle the cards for All About Reading and All About Spelling for multiple children in multiple levels. 
• I get materials organized such as filling pencil bags with fresh pencils and erasers, getting books into each child's bin, and organizing our art bins.
• I work out the day to day plans by deciding how often per week each subject or curriculum needs done for each child and sort that into how many weeks we will school. Some things I've used before so I already know what we'll do each week, but other materials are new to me so I'm starting from scratch. 
• This leads to needing to decide when we will start our school year, finish our school year, what breaks we will take/how many days we have available to take off during our school year, and so on. I originally was planning to begin the first week of September but now I know Mason will be having surgery in September so once that is scheduled I will decide if we're going to start a bit earlier in August instead. 

Each child's books will be in a bin this year.

Friday morning between kids and chores I would pull out a child's bin of school books for next year and start reading through and making notes of things they will need (like tracing paper for Daniel). I'm also trying to get a feel for what their day to day and weekly schedules will be. A perk of homeschooling is the flexibility, but it also leaves me responsible for planning everything and making the decisions.

Saturday and Sunday pretty much flew by and here it is Monday afternoon. This morning I mailed 8 packages out (curriculum sales on Ebay), went grocery shopping, oversaw the kids making glitter slime, and now I've sent my husband off with the six oldest kids to see Jurassic World 2 at the movies while I hang out with the youngest four children. We are going to play ball in the house and do some art (aka. make a big mess with paint or glue).