what's up weekly.

You know what day it is... it's Friday... and Friday... means mail.  I mean, What's Up. (Weekly.)

So, I have to admit, this week was pretty uneventful.  We are so. close. to wrapping up school for the year.  We finished the bulk of it last week!  The kids still have some minor independent work to do before breakfast each day for the next few weeks, and the big kids still had Latin this week (today's their last day!), so we're not completely out of the woods.  But the majority of our yearly goals have been met and checked off and shoved to the back of our minds.  It feels good!

We have spent our free time lounging and trying to find stuff to do inside while it's raining.  This spring has been so incredibly rainy, and our backyard is off-limits right now anyway, so we've been going a little stir-crazy in the house.  Which is how stuff like this happens:

Normally this would look strange, but anyone watching the news lately has likely been tempted at some point to dress like this.  I might even bet money you already have one of these outfits ready to go in your closet.

Rocco got his very own Bible this week, and it even has his name engraved on it.  He can regularly be found curled up in a chair, flipping through the pages like he's reading it.

I tried to be at least a little industrious with my extra time this week.  I cleaned out Juni's room and closet, as well as organized the dressers in her room.  I also, for the first time, tried out the bread machine someone gave me six years ago.  I picked strawberries from the garden and worked on the front lawn a little when it was dry.  I am nearly finished with The Shaping of a Christian Family by Elisabeth Elliot, and started the ever-re-readable Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.  I also actually put on jeans a couple of times, and did my hair once.  I am unstoppable.

The light was weird the day I took these pictures so they're overexposed, but look at my roses!

I always have an audience when I do yard work.  Usually they're wearing more clothes than this.

Lastly, I would like to highlight last Sunday.  First of all, I went into Hu Hot here in town and NO ONE WAS WEARING A MASK and it was crowded and I got extra rice in my to-go order and everything just felt right with the world.  Second of all, it was Pentecost, and you know what that means: CHEESEBOARD!! With mimosas.  Because I felt like it.

And that was literally our whole week.  What a doozy (not).

what's up weekly.

Hello, hello!  It's that time of the week again, and this week you get a twofer.  So let's rewind the tape two weeks and get started!

Juni got some stickers for her birthday, and the girls had fun decorating themselves.

That Sunday, it was Mother's Day!  We all got dressed up for church, and Todd was sweet to think of taking a picture of me with all the kids.  (Seriously, if it wasn't for that man, there would be no photos of our lives at all.)

Sometimes I am just floored by the fact that I made all these people.

Todd surprised me with my very favorite gluten-free pizza for lunch.

Then I took a nap, because Mother's Day or no Mother's Day, you better believe I'm going to be a lazy bum.

The kids got me surprise presents with their own money, bless their little hearts.  They had picked things out at one of the discount stores up at the Amish, and paid for them stealthily so as not to ruin the surprise.  (Unfortunately, Rocco had purchased my gift at the same time that he purchased a gift for Juni's birthday, so he put the Almond Joy he bought me in his pocket to save for later and it melted... he was distraught.)

I am clearly known and loved.

This gift was a little less intuitive but I love it even more for being so random.

A few days earlier in the week, I had called a dirt guy to come and give us a quote for our backyard.  Our yard is on a steep hill and has been eroding away like crazy.  Very little grass grows on it anymore, and all we have is weeds and hardpack.  We needed to level off spots that were becoming mudslides or low points where water would just sit and collect.  But the quote, while not unreasonable, was still higher than we could swing right now, so I prayed that God would help me come up with a different creative solution.

The next morning, my sister texted me, saying she and my brother-in-law had been thinking about our yard situation and thought they might have a creative solution.  They could come down on the following Monday and help us get to work.  Um, okay!

So the day after Mother's Day, we buckled down.  Austin started by thinning the branches in our massive, dirty trees.

Then on Tuesday, we got some dirt delivered.  And by "some" dirt, I mean 10 yards.  20,000 pounds.  A whole dump truck full.

We were able to move it to the back using a loader-thing.

Austin trucked dirt back and forth while the rest of us worked at spreading it out and packing it down.  I was so proud of the kids: they were genuinely helpful, they worked hard, and they lasted most of the day without complaining or wanting to give up.  

We took a break for lunch.

If you can believe it, we got every last bit of that dirt moved and spread, and grass seed laid down, by 5:00 that evening.

Then the heavens opened up and we have been experiencing torrential rain for over a week now, and the forecast for the next ten days has two dry days in it.  It has been somewhat disheartening, as some of the dirt has washed away and I'm not totally sure how much of the grass seed is left back there to sprout.  I am just trying to rest in the knowledge that the God who helped us with a creative solution to a need is the God who is now sending floodwaters, and there must be some kind of logic behind it all.  I'm sure it will all be fine.

This past Wednesday, the county and city finally lifted their mask mandate.  We've been under mandate since last July, so it has been a long stretch.  We wanted to do something to celebrate, so we took the kids out for ice cream.  Granted, it was a drive-through and we brought it home to eat, so it wasn't even a chance to finally walk in somewhere maskless, but the point was to celebrate, and I think we did that pretty well.  (Although, Todd was like, "I feel like someone broke into our house, stole our TV, brought it back a year later, and I'M supposed to act grateful to the thief for its return.  Maybe the thief should have to thank me for his having it for a year.")

Then this past Sunday was Ascension, so you know we partied it up.

My biggest lessons learned in making a decent cheeseboard:
1. at least 3 different kinds each of cheese, meat, fruit and crackers, and avoid letting each 'type' of thing touch another of its kind.

2. nuts, chocolate, and olives are easy single additions to round it out

3. scrunch and squish.  Squash it all in close together. Squash the meat instead of letting it lay down flat.  Pack the board full.  Scrunch and squish.

In other news, I bought a new-to-me coffee table recently.  I've been needing one for a while, as the wicker ottoman we use as a coffee table now has huge holes in the top, and sharp metal points all along the edges where the metal framing has busted through the wicker.  It's just not practical or safe.  But I wasn't wanting some particleboard nonsense from Target; I wanted something solid wood.  But I also am not Daddy Warbucks so I've been biding my time while I've waited for a good, cheap, solid option to make itself known.

So I finally found a decent, small-scale table at a local consignment store, but it was covered in all kinds of layers of chalk paint and spray paint and varnish.  I've been meaning to strip it, but life has just gotten away from me lately and it was just sitting in the garage, unloved.  Finally, Todd decided to take it into his own hands and has been stripping it slowly over the last week or two.  It's slow-going, since the paint is so thick and he typically has 10-15 minute chunks of time to spare to work on it, but I am feeling so excited by what we're finding underneath all those layers!

This is the bare wood, after all the paint and varnish have been stripped, but before the stain has been sanded down.  I am so, so excited by what I see!  The legs are going to be slow going, I think, since there is a lot of detail work on them, but I'm feeling so encouraged to already see the top stripped.

Whew! That is a lot of news to pack into a single post.  Lots of good things happening!  Now just pray for us and our yard to survive the next week and a half of more rainstorms.  Not only is the yard a huge question mark, but the kids are getting so sick of being inside already.  So be praying the sun comes out and stays out!

our trip to south dakota.

Whoo, buddy.  I have so much to cover at this point, so I'm just going to do what I can, and start where I can.  So today I'm going to tell you about a few parts of our trip to South Dakota: the drive, and our visit with Todd's parents.

Our trip up was fun, though we kept it somewhat abbreviated compared to other years.  We will be heading up again later this summer, so we felt less pressure to see and do all our regular stuff, like driving through the Badlands and stopping at Falls Park.  It was raining and cold for much of the stretch across South Dakota, so we just stayed huddled and warm in the car, and plan on hitting those things when it's warmer.

It wasn't that we didn't do ANYTHING fun, though!  We stopped in Rock Port to play, and it was sunny and relatively warm there, considering it was only 8:30 in the morning.

Once we got back in the car, this girl fell asleep.  She traveled so well both there and back, falling asleep easily when she was tired.  My kids don't typically sleep well in the car, so this was a very welcome miracle.

Full house, featuring a double chin.  Can you spot it?

We typically eat dinner in Murdo, where there's a fun drive-in with burgers and shakes, but they weren't open for the season yet, so we made it all the way to Wall before grabbing food.  We don't usually bother with Wall Drug, but if you're in Wall, you can't pass up a photo with the random roadside dinosaur!

We got in to Custer at a fantastic time, and the kids had a little bit of time to unwind before hitting the hay.  In the morning, they did what they love doing at Grandma and Papa's: they watched cowboy movies, ate Grandma's amazing cooking, and ran around outside like savages.

Tiny boy on a tiny bike.

Bigger boys on bigger bikes under the biggest sky.

Now, THIS is my kind of good time.

Callista split her time between outside and inside, coming in long enough to smoke Juni at mini foosball and serenade us all on the keyboard.

Lots of foosball was had by all, including Yours Truly, who is NOT A GAMES PERSON, if you didn't know that before.  I was sweet-talked into it by a handsome nine-year-old and lost my head for a moment.

This is the vision of sugarplums that dances through their heads all year long while they await our next South Dakota trip: their gang of bikes.  We don't really have bikes at our house, due to lack of storage and lack of anywhere to ride them.  (In the name of telling the whole truth, we do have one bike that was rescued from a trash pile on the side of the road that all the kids share, and which has a flat tire.)  So the kids look forward to their once-a-year opportunity to go bicycle gangbusters for a time.

We stayed at Grandma and Papa's for a couple of days, then headed into Rapid City for a conference/rally thing, which I'll tell you more about soon.  After a few days in Rapid, we headed home again.  We stopped to see the Sacajawea statue in Chamberlain...

... and stopped in Sioux City at our favorite park.  We typically don't drive home on the weekend or something, because we were not anticipating it being SO BUSY, but it was packed.  It was also, weirdly, stiflingly hot.  So this was a relatively quick stop as well.

The kids commented on how the baseball mascot guy seemed so much smaller than they remembered him being.  I don't think it's HIM getting SMALLER, but rather...

I like to call this pair of shots, "I Know Where Juni Gets Her Face."

I just LOVE this photo of the boy gang.

We stopped at Rock Port again on the way home. 

The smiles you see on their faces are actually looks of relief - it was a much needed reprieve from some car trouble we had on the way home.  The van was shaking and shuddering like crazy, and would suddenly weave to one side or the other, and Todd had to drive the last six hours of our trip going 55 miles an hour.  We took it into the shop the next day to find out that our van had shoddy tires, one of which was shaped like an egg, so new tires were purchased posthaste.  We also are continuing to have problems with loose steering, even though we have taken it in a few times for this already, which is what was causing the weaving.  We'll be having that looked at again soon.

And that was our trip - fun, quick, and we can't wait to go again in a few months!  I'll tell you soon about the conference we attended while there, and about Penelope's birthday, which we celebrated at Grandma and Papa's.