what's up weekly.

This week was a long one.  I usually feel like the weeks just fly by: we're busy doing lots of stuff we love, which is a pretty fail-proof recipe for smooth-sailing days.  So it's really unusual for me to feel like a week takes for freaking ever to get through.

via GIPHY

But it is also March now, and I'm getting antsy for the school year to wrap up... which is stupid, because we do year-round school, and we only just finished up our second trimester this week.  We're on schedule to be done the last week of May, so I still have quiiiiiiiiite a bit of time left before it's reasonable to be getting impatient.

Then again, though, I don't think it's homeschool, necessarily, that I'm most concerned with.  Being so intensely involved in the rhythms of college life has me eyeballing the university schedule more than our own.  I'm ready for the breather of spring break; I'm ready for the finish line of graduation weekend.  I'm ready for the slower pace of summer, during which I have big plans to reflect and reprioritize some of my obligations and the allocation of my time.  (Though, I seem to say that every year and very little ever changes.)

This week I sat down and put together large, visual poster board schedules of our days and our weeks, and I felt like I was mapping out military strategies for the Pentagon.  It's high time I start freeing up my schedule, and May will be a perfect time to start.  It's just such a shame it's so far away...



Anyway.  Enough yearning for one post.  It's time to cut to the facts.

Finneas turned six, and I once again marveled that he has survived this long - with his penchant for risk taking, his impulsiveness, and his gung-ho stick-to-itiveness, I'd figured he'd have been eaten by a bear or marched off the end of a gangplank by now.  So every birthday party we throw for him is also a celebratory middle-finger to all the bears and pirates skulking around these parts.

The older kids each bought him a gift with their own money, and though he'll be having his party this weekend, they wanted to give him his gifts on his actual birthday.  It was so sweet.

I went grocery shopping without Callista.  She spent the entire time I was gone expressing her feelings about getting left at home.

Atticus had a speech evaluation at the public school in our neighborhood.  It was SO weird to take all the kids in there.  I'm not usually ruffled by the homeschool/public school debate all that much; it doesn't stir up heat in me.  I rarely wonder if I'm being scrutinized, and I don't really enter into mental competition about it.  I just like flying under the radar, doing my own thing and feeling confident in my choices.  ...And then I haul six kids into the school office in the middle of the day and suddenly all that unaffected disengagement goes away.  It just felt foreign and weird.

And last but not least, here's this week's vlog, in case you missed it.  (Wednesday got busy, and I forgot to post it on here!)



And... that's that, I guess.  It doesn't really look like all that long of a week when I write it out, but trust me, I'm glad it's Friday!