November 2020-January 2021: Catching Up On Life

It has been months since I blogged. I found this post sitting in my draft folder and decided to add a few more notes and post it. Enjoy!

Sunday, November 22 was home church and family time. Rest and preparing for a trip to pick up the college girl.

Monday and Tuesday we did a couple of art projects. There were nutcracker drawings, gingerbread houses drawn with glue/white paint, and paper mittens cut out and painted. We used burlap to do some yarn weaving (aka. embroidery). 

Wednesday - At 5:00am Emma and I climbed into the car and started driving to Virginia. We had a whirlwind day to go pick up Makayla at college and bring her home for the holidays. She will do online classes/exams for the last two weeks of this semester, and will not head back to Virginia until mid-January when next semester begins. It took us 14 hours to get to Makayla and back home, a long day of driving. 

Thursday was Thanksgiving. Our morning and afternoon were pretty laid back, just enjoying time as a family. In the evening my sister's family and my mom and her husband came over for dinner. We had a great, noisy time talking, eating, and laughing together. 

Friday Jason was back at work. The kids and I played more games today - Gubs, Farkle, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, and Harry Potter Headbanz. We ate leftovers, so there wasn't even a lot of cooking to do today. 

Saturday morning was just relaxed family time. In the early afternoon Grandma came over and we all headed to the zoo. We had a plan - see lots of animals and stay long enough to see the holiday lights show. It was a great trip. Favorite animals seen today according to the kids were the elephants, seals, red pandas, a silver variant of the red fox, and the rescued baby manatee. 

Sunday November 29th it felt like I was in the kitchen more than usual, though I really wasn't. Lunch was beef fajitas. Yum! Dinner was potato soup made in the instant pot. We also put up our Christmas tree today. 

Monday it rained and snowed all day. It didn't change over to only snow until evening. Today was our last day of Thanksgiving break. We played a lot, cleaned a fair amount, and finally moved the last of the kids' shorts out of their drawers and into the attic. Dinner tonight was pancakes, because we finished off the batch of pancakes in the freezer last week. We make up a giant batch, eat what we want, and then freeze the rest for easy breakfasts. 

We finally finished listening to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! We started the first Harry Potter book in March at the beginning of quarantine. We have now ready the first four books as a family. We won't read the rest of the books aloud, as they get a bit dark for our younger kids. Now we need to choose our next read aloud.

Tuesday morning we woke to a couple inches of snow. It was beautiful but cold. We did a morning of school work. The kids doing geology decided to add in an art project after learning about agates. Out came the watercolors and salt, and beautiful agates were painted. 

In the afternoon we voted on our next read aloud. We had 5 options:

• The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang
• Enola Holmes: The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

We had each person rank the books in order from 1 (want to read next) to 5 (not interested in reading). Then we did some math with the votes and found out which book won. Actually - we had a tie for first place, with The Hobbit and The Reluctant Dragon each receiving 19 points. That meant looking at how many #1 votes each received, and The Reluctant Dragon slid into first place. As that book is only 53 minutes long, we will then quickly move into listening to The Hobbit after that. 

Wednesday was school work. Kids wrote, drew, read, computed, and explored topics they love and topics they are less enthusiastic about. In the evening we had a surprise delivery of snowman soup packets (hot cocoa with marshmallows and candy canes). 

Thursday we trudged through school as quickly as we could, before I took Emma to the orthodontist. She is getting ever closer to finishing her time in braces. In the late afternoon our new freezer arrived, replacing one that was 20 years old and falling apart. Lots of minor rearranging commenced, in an attempt to find a good place to put things. 

Missing weeks! Lots of them. I know we did school, had holidays, and so on

A few December notes:

Our month has had simple home-centered moments of fun. I'll just list a few:

• Roasting hot dogs and smores over a fire.
• A lot of board games and card games.
• The last birthday of the year - Emma turned 15. My kids officially will begin 2021 at the following ages: 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19. Of course, not even two weeks into January we start the birthday rounds again. Ha!
• Baking days: muffins, banana bread, cookies, scones, cakes, peanut butter pie, cinnamon rolls, bread, rolls, and more. 
• Decorating the tree. And redecorating it daily as the younger kids remove all the ornaments they can reach, and put them back on. 
• Christmas was wonderful. Some family members send gifts for the kids from other states, so we were able to spread out gift opening a bit, which the kids find much less overwhelming. 

JANUARY NOTES

In January we sorted our games. We love playing games.
We now have more than 130 games, all of which we 
play at different times.

 Mason turned 9 years old. He had a fun birthday and got some neat gifts that give him lots to do, like this magnet lab and a book in a series he likes.

We soaked up every moment of family time we could with Makayla. She bought a car. That led to a crazy trip to take her back to college with 2 vehicles (hers, plus ours so we could get home) with Daddy, Daniel, Makayla, and me. Each car had 2 people in it, one driver and one person to keep the driver awake on the drive. At every stop we rotated drivers or vehicles or both. It was a safe and uneventful trip to Virginia and back in one day. 

We started back up to school after our two week Christmas break. We've moved into a new unit in history (westward expansion) and are reading Redwood Pioneer aloud. The non-high school kids are doing Beginning Chemistry from The Good and the Beautiful, having finished up the Geology unit in December.

We also decided that for the winter we need Art Project Fridays. Basically, we will work on mom-led art projects on Fridays. There is a lot of art going on outside of that, but the kids like the Deep Space Sparkle art projects I have filed away.

This month we focused on learning about graffiti, studied different well known graffiti artists and their work, discussed legality of art on public property without invitation, and learned about typography.

This project took three Fridays to complete. On the first class we sponge painted the spray painted the background papers. Then the kids chose their word to draw in pencil.

On the next Friday they used paint pens to graffiti the backgrounds. 

The final Friday they used oil pastels to color their tag (big feature word), cut it out, and glued it to the graffiti background.  

Emma got her braces off. Three kids have now made it through the braces process, with more yet to go.

The other thing that has been happening a lot is Lego creating. I snapped this picture of a UFO beaming up a cow that Daniel made this month. 

I'll share some February updates soon.