what's up weekly.

YEAH YEAH YEAH.  Friday!

Friday is quickly becoming the best day of the week.  (For reasons other than because Friday is objectively the best day of the week.)  (Though, subjectively, it is now giving Mondays a run for their money, and y'all know how I feel about Mondays: All The Smooches.)

Fridays now involve tea time, artist and composer study, mapwork (which is weirdly a favorite subject amongst all of us, which I didn't anticipate becoming the case), and our nature walk.  This is major for me, because consistent nature walks are something I have been terrible at keeping on the schedule.  It's something that easily gets dumped off the list for me.  But I have found my magic Nature Walk Formula: set an appointment with someone who expects you to show up.  Namely, set an appointment with Todd.

So now every Friday we head over to Shelter Gardens, where we eat a picnic lunch with Todd and take a walk around the grounds.  Is it nature in its most primitive? No.  Is it nature at its most varied?  No.  But it is nature.  And I like the fact that we'll become really familiar with this one spot, and see it change week to week as the seasons change.  I'll hopefully get around to documenting more about it, but for now, that's all I have to say about that.

In other Notable News: Finneas turned seven and a half!  He now has one big tooth on top, filling the hole that has been there for the past two or three years, since they pulled the baby one.  It's nice to see a toothy grin again, though I will miss how scrappy he looked for so long.

In Bruise News, I have a Bruise.  This is no ordinary bruise, friends.  This Bruise can be seen yards away.  This Bruise looks like I should be pressing charges.  But in fact, this Bruise exists because I scratched a single bug bite too hard.  Scripture says creation is groaning under the curse, and I can tell you that the capillaries in my thigh are definitely under the reign of entropy.  It will all be made new.  It will all be made new.

On Saturday, I took the morning to head out by myself for a little alone time.  This chunk of time has become a lifeline for me.  I look forward to it all week - not because I don't love my people and my home base.  I really, really do, and even now, I can't get enough of them.  But there is something about being alone for a couple of hours to think linear thoughts, to read my Bible, to plan my week, to breathe... I come home refreshed and ready to pour it all out again.  This week, I grabbed an iced coffee and then headed back to Shelter Gardens to read my Bible in the shade of a tree, listening to a waterfall.  Not too shabby.

After I got home, we rounded up the kids and ran a couple of errands.  We needed to get some plywood to support the girls' new mattress, and I needed to get a new vacuum.  Our old one is on the fritz, and while I think it's just a belt issue that will be easily resolved with a little finagling, I don't have much time to finagle in the immediate future, and I'm in desperate daily need of a vacuum.  We vacuum twice a day at the moment, and that's still probably not as often as we should be doing it to keep up with the mess.  Our floors are disgusting.

You know that thing like when you watch New Girl, and Jess is so cute with her fake eyelashes and her big hair, and then Megan Fox shows up, and Jess suddenly looks like a big dull dud you could run into at Fareway on a Thursday?  My new vacuum makes my old vacuum look like that.  They're literally the same make and model, but my six-years-newer vacuum is just so Megan Fox.  It is now evident to me that the hose on my old one is held together with neon pink duct tape, and the canister is coated with greasy slime.  I still love it but... the magic has faded a bit.  It will be relegated to basement duty.

Sunday's big news was that Juniper cut her first tooth!  WHERE DID MY BABY GO AND WHO IS THIS TODDLER?  Okay, okay.  Maybe that's overkill.  She's still in toe-grabbing stage, so I still have time to grieve the passing of her infancy.  She had her four-month appointment on Tuesday, at which she measured at the 44th percentile - I'm pretty sure that's the largest any of our babies has been at four months.  I'm going to start calling her The Big Tiny.

(Rando sidenote, I was once in a yoga class in which the yoga instructor kept mixing up the two names for this pose - Happy Baby and Dead Bug - and calling it the Dead Baby.  I think that may have been the last yoga class I ever attended, but I don't think it's because of that.)

This week, school has been much kinder to us.  I think I'm finally finding a rhythm that works for us to get everything accomplished without major stress, which is an answer to prayer.

On Wednesday, we found ourselves with a very unusual, totally open day.  Normally we drive up to the Amish in the morning, but a friend was headed up there and offered to pick up my stuff for me so I didn't have to go.  And we typically take Wednesday afternoons off anyway.  And Atticus and Todd had driven to Kansas City for an orthotropics appointment, so I was actually down one kid.  So the day was wide open... so I had a friend show me how to cut some trim out in the dining room to make room for our bookshelves, and I painted the boys' room.  It was a much bigger undertaking than I had anticipated, and I was a little underprepared, so the ceiling still isn't totally done, but it needed it and I had time, so I just jumped right in.

Did I clean up to make this room look better on the internet?  I'll let you be the judge of that.

Of course I don't have "After" photos, which I really should get because it looks so much better, but that's clearly not hard.  Their room was a total sty.  It's in the back corner of our basement, so I don't have to face it very often, so it gets bad.  It was dingy and dirty and cluttered - but things are looking much better now.  (You'll just have to trust me.)

And yesterday was more of the same: schoolwork and house projects.  We have been keeping busy around here!  I'm ready for our house to hit a period of rest and rhythm, but I'm loving all the transformations taking place - maybe I'll have to do a tour post on all the new things happening.