what's up weekly. (School. Only School.)

What did we do this week?  Spoiler: only school.

We got to look at things under a microscope, and play with fire.  I think science lab is going to be a hit.

I literally had nothing else on the agenda.  We're still getting used to our rhythm, and I don't have much downtime for anything else anyway, so I didn't even attempt to plan any extras and all the week held was our school routine.  BUT!  That was good.  I'm actually enjoying our new routine and feeling like it's really good for us.  The kids have said the same thing - they're glad to be back in routine, even if it is a bit full.  

Remember how they say that, for infants, "sleep begets sleep"? Well, I'm finding that, for me, structure begets structure.  I think it's because I really have to intentionally manage my time, and stay focused on the best use of the moment I'm in.  But it's paying off - I am in a daily exercise routine, have been keeping up with Bible reading, am on day 19 of Whole 30, have been on top of meal planning and laundry and daily housework, we're getting up earlier and going to bed earlier, and I'm schooling more kids than I ever have... and things feel good.  We really seem to have hit the sweet spot for our current capacity, and it feels good.  Knock on wood that it all stays this easy.  (We all know it won't because life is seasonal, but let's pretend, shall we?)

This is our "touch base" time after lunch: I do spelling lists with the kids, then we go through all the work the kids have done in the morning.  I grade math, check handwriting, read written narrations, and make sure everyone has completed all their assignments.  They say you can't expect what you won't inspect, and ain't that the truth.  Things don't slip through the cracks as easily when I'm making sure to get eyes on things every day.

It also helps that I have scheduled in plenty of breaks, so our first break is actually in two weeks already.  I already have a list of things I'll need to tackle, because school weeks have no margin for extras, but I'm not stressed about it because I know there is an opportunity to get to those things soon.

I tried a second photo session for Oey, since she was not vibing it the other day.  She seems to have changed her tune.

Anyway, though.  It seems smooth weeks make for boring weeks, and I don't have much else to say!  Sorry things aren't spicier around here.  I'll have to stir up some chaos this coming week so I have more to report.  In the meantime, have a great weekend! (And in case you missed it, I posted the first installment of our vacation series earlier this week!)

south dakota 2023: day 1, the drive

Okay, folks; as promised, I'm here to document this year's trip to South Dakota.  There were so many things about this year's trip that made for a really smooth, easy go of things.  The first thing is that we now live significantly closer to our destination than we used to, cutting hours off our driving time.  We were able to get up somewhat early (but not painfully so), make all our usual stops, and still get there before bedtime.  It was glorious.

Additionally, it is an anomalous year when I am not pregnant, or have a nursing baby or potty training toddler, which situations all really slow down travel, or at least make it less enjoyable.  This year provided such an anomaly, so we made really good time.

Our first stop was in Sioux City at a favorite park.  We started going there a number of years ago, when we would take our trip earlier in the summer.  Now that we have been going later, it is becoming a bit less enjoyable, as it is hot.  Can someone please take a second to explain to me why children's parks are now designed with heat-radiating rubber flooring, and no trees to shade the play area?  This isn't the only park designed this way - almost all of the parks that have been built in the last 20 years seem to be designed the same way.  Bring back the trees, I say.  And some grass would be welcome as well.  And I feel like this wisdom could be generalized to address some of our more pressing cultural and temperature concerns, while we're talking about it.

Anyway.  For a modern park, it does have a lot of fun stuff to do, even if it is blazing hot.  (I literally had big patches of back sweat all over my dress at 8:30 in the morning.  It was not cute.)

After playing for a while, we hopped back in the car to make it to Pizza Ranch by lunch time.  This is such a random family tradition, but we have to stop at Pizza Ranch on our road trips.  The kids love the buffet, they actually have to walk around to get their food (which helps them recover from the road), and my morale is always dramatically influenced for the better by hot food.  Don't ask me why, but hot food is like a love language to me.  I could probably single-handedly solve the migration crisis as long as I've had some mashed potatoes first.

After that, we hopped back into the car for a long stretch to the Badlands, where we had a picnic dinner and did a little rock climbing.

The classic.

Someone somehow parked their truck in such a way that it drove itself, unmanned, over the curb and headed down into the valley.  "Luckily," it ended up capsizing before it got too far down.  I do not envy them the pickle they were in.

Oey loved it.  She was still not walking at this point (and only now takes a few steps every couple of days), but she was enjoying standing up and looking around, and finding rocks to throw while yelling, "BALL!"

After the Badlands, there's only a short stretch until our destination, so we got there in great time.  Such a fun day to kick off our trip!

what's up weekly. (Back to School: WITH PHOTOS!)

Well, this week was a doozy.  It was packed to the gills, and I am now just about dead on my feet.

Last Friday night we had some friends come from Columbia to visit and join us for the Psalm Sing that evening.  They brought their three boys, and a bunch of food from the Amish for me.  Jen cut my hair.  We sat and visited.  It was so wonderful.  We also had a couple of other friends drive up from Columbia just for the Psalm Sing and head home the same night.  It was so fun to see so many friends this weekend!

The City of Sisterly Love

After our Sabbath rest on Sunday, I threw a bunch of apples from the Amish into my big roaster to cook while we slept, and I spent the early part of the week getting them sauced and canned.  Over the weekend, I had already canned up a bunch of pineapple that I had found on sale at Walmart, so this was apparently going to become the Week of Unprecedented Canning.  It wasn't intentional, it just happened that way.  I put up 19 quarts of pineapple, 19 quarts of applesauce, 7 quarts of apple juice, and 1 quart of tomato sauce.  (This was my first time making tomato sauce, and maybe I concentrated it too much or something, but goodness gracious, ten pounds of tomatoes turned into 2 quarts of marinara!  Canning yields are such a conundrum to me.)

This was all done between Friday and Wednesday - by far the most I've ever done in a week.

Monday morning, we started the school year!  And look at me go, I ACTUALLY REMEMBERED TO TAKE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL PHOTOS! (Albeit, these were taken on the second day of school, but that's pretty punctual compared to when I usually get it done.)

Someone is not ready for summer break to end.

I never got a cheerful photo of her by her sign; I'll try again soon.  But for now, here's her "Cheese!" smile, and I think you can see why we call her Baby Shark.  I swear she has already sprouted every last tooth she is ever supposed to get.

After running our new schedule for a week, our days are clearly very full, and pretty tiring, but seem to be doable.  This is my tenth year homeschooling, and I'm finally starting to learn my limits.  I'm trying to avoid being overly ambitious, and we don't regularly schedule things on the list that others would probably find essential, but I'm learning what works for us and what doesn't.  My current daily schedule looks like this:

7:30 - I'm up and making my own breakfast, helping the little kids with their math and handwriting

8:30 - 10:00 I tackle my Bible reading, dinner prep, and any housework I can get to while the kids eat breakfast and do their chores

10:00 - 11:00 I spend 1:1 time with Callista, working on phonics and doing Read Alouds.  Juni often joins us, as does Rocco, if they feel like it.

11:00 - 12:00 Read Aloud time with Rocco

12:00 - 1:00 I exercise and shower while the kids eat lunch.  Penelope watches Oey for me for the first half hour, until Oey goes down for nap.

1:00 - 2:00 Touch base: we do spelling at the table, and I go over the kids' work from the morning.  I have found I really have to tackle this daily or it doesn't get done.  I have them read me their written narrations, I look at their handwriting, and I check their math (or ask the older kids how they did on their computer math).

2:00 - 3:00 Read Alouds with Finneas and Laurelai

3:00 - 4:00ish Read Alouds with Atticus and Penelope, although we aren't doing much of this together this year so we have been finishing a bit earlier than this.

4:00 Pass out in a post-school coma

Wednesdays are a bit different: we focus on table time in the morning, where we do grammar, dictation, maps, math drill, timelines, and memory work.  Then in the afternoon we read something fun together as a big group - right now we're working our way through the Little House books.  Fridays, my little kids don't have morning school, and I use that time for science lab with my big kids.  You will notice I don't have music, art or foreign language squeezed in there; we just don't have the time.  I'm okay with that.

This is table time.  Oey was not a fan, so I taught standing up.

Big group read alouds.

Atticus and Penelope working on their Latin.

It's tiring, but we can get it done without too much headache or stress.  Maybe eventually I can cover a bit about what each grade is tackling this year.  Or maybe I can't.  We'll see!

While we were doing school the first morning, our new dishwasher arrived! We have been without a dishwasher for months.  The kids have been cheerful about handwashing, but stuff wasn't always getting as clean as I'd like, and there were always dishes all over my counter - if they weren't dirty on one side of the sink, they were drying on the other side.  So this has been a verrrry welcome blessing.

Installation fees are literally almost as expensive as a dishwasher itself at this point; it's crazy.  So I could get a lower-end dishwasher and pay to have it installed, or I could pick a nice one (my top priorities were a stainless steel tub and a food disposer, from a reputable brand I had experience with) and we could figure out how to install it ourselves.  We decided to do it ourselves, and it was clearly the right decision.  Todd got it done on Wednesday night after Oey went to bed and other than it being tedious at times, it wasn't complicated or difficult.  And now we have a dishwasher that CLEANS THINGS.  AND DOESN'T LEAK.  It feels good to be in the 1%.  

Well, that's basically it for the week.  On paper, it doesn't sound like much, but it really has been full and I'm ready for Friday.  Because Todd and the kids get pizza for dinner on Fridays, I don't have to cook.  (Well, I'll stick some chicken wings in the air fryer for myself, because I'm still on Whole 30, but that's barely cooking, and the cleanup will be a breeze now that I can just put the air fryer basket in the dishwasher.)  So Friday evenings are so easy on me, and the perfect celebration for crossing the finish line!

I just need to get through the school day - Fridays are our lab science day, and I just really have no idea what I'm doing with that.  We tried it last year, and I failed miserably.  I need to quickly go gather up the supplies I'll need, and oh yeah, also figure out how to use our microscope before class starts, but I've heard that's super simple and not at all complicated, so it should be fine.  (Read: pray for me, I am 100% confident this is going to get hairy.)

I haven't forgotten our vacation post - check back through the week next week; I'm hoping to get it up Monday or Tuesday.

Signing off for now!

Baby Shark attacks again.

what's up weekly. (Where Have I Been All Your Three Weeks?)

Well, boy howdy, it's been a hot minute since I've showed my face around here.  The truth is, we went on vacation and it ended up being a three week process - a week of prep, a week of travel, a week of settling back in at home.  Not to mention the fact that Thursdays are the days that I typically write the blog, and we traveled both there and back on consecutive Thursdays, so it just didn't end up happening.

That said, I'm here now!  We're home and settled in and excited to tell you about the last three weeks.

First, there was a men's movie night with our church family, so Atticus and Todd went to that, and Penelope and I stayed up late to watch the seventh Harry Potter movie.  (I never know how to say that - the first last movie? The first half of Deathly Hallows?  It's confusing since they made one book into two movies.  It was the right call, but it makes it difficult to reference.  For me.  On a personal level.  And I think they should have taken that into account.)  

Later in the weekend, my friend Stephanie and I taught a canning class after church, and we made jam from some blackberries our other friend Rebekah found at the Amish near her.  The jam was amazing, and it was so fun to gather with the gals at church to learn a skill!  That same afternoon, Stephanie sent me home with our new chickens, Rosie and ChickenMine.

Introducing them as neighbors before dropping the bomb on them that they'll eventually be roommates and sisterwives.

They could not be more different from one another.  We have quickly learned that Rosie is chatty and skittish and fast: the second she sees you in the vicinity, she starts gabbing it to the whole neighborhood and running around like... well, a chicken with her very noisy head still on.  ChickenMine is exactly the opposite: she is so docile and sweet and willing to be held.  She coos at you like she's asking a question: "brrrrrr? brrrrr?"  It kills me.  Francis Schaeffer talks often about how evolution cannot explain the existence of personality in the universe.  There is no explanation for personality unless there is a Creative Person behind and above and outside it all.  I think it is so funny and miraculous and incredible that God has made kajillions of chickens over the course of time, and even they have unique personalities.  What an endlessly interesting God we serve.

Anyway, back to Rosie and ChickenMine.  We only had a couple of days to introduce them to the old hens before we left on vacation, and it didn't go spectacularly well.  They had been picked on in their old flock, and it seems that's their lot here too.  Now that we're home, we're trying to be as intentional as we can about putting all of them in the yard together, so there is space to spread out while still being "together," but they still just keep to their separate groups, except when Howitzer is kamikazeing the new ones.  Poor girls.  I'm pretty sure Rosie is going to die of a heart attack.  Pray for her.

The night we got home from vacation, the kids immediately headed to the backyard to put the chickens to bed, and they discovered an opossum in the chicken run.  Luckily, it didn't seem interested in the chickens themselves, only their food bowl, so we didn't lose any.  So that was good.  But unfortunately for Todd, the first thing he got to do after driving for fourteen hours was bludgeon the varmint to death with a baseball bat.  I'll spare you the photos.

Since we've been home, life has been full of catch-up laundry, grocery shopping and cleaning, and last-minute projects and errands before we start school next week.  Todd took Atticus out to shoot clay pigeons with some guys from church.

I ripped out my south garden bed because it was literally doing nothing except growing the worst okra you've ever eaten.  That week we were away was hot and dry, and everything was in rough shape to begin with, so we returned home to pretty dismal gardens.  I just faced reality head-on and figured it was time to pull things out.

This batch of compost from the city brush site is really leafy and light - it's perfect for top dressing the soil that's already in there.  In a month or so, I'll cover everything with chicken straw to protect the soil through the winter, and to feed it in the spring when I turn it all in.

"We" shoveled more rock.  "We" are a team.

I am the site supervisor.  The girls are bystanders.  The boys are the heavy lifters.

The kids caught lots of bugs, including a cicada they named Barry.  (This year has been The Year of the Cicada, let me tell you.)

It finally cooled off enough to spend some enjoyable time outside, so the kids had breakfast on the deck this week.

Babies with apples are my favorite.  They look so adorable.

Finneas celebrated his half-birthday.  (Fun fact: on half-birthdays, we sing half of the birthday song.  "Happy birth-" is as much as they get.  It's a little foretaste of the feast to come in six months.)

We did spelling placement tests yesterday, and made sure we have everything organized for Monday.  I think we all feel equal parts excited and unready to enter back into the rhythm of the school year.  But, "what's comin' will come, an' we'll meet it when it does."

And that has been the extent of our life lived at home over the course of the last few weeks.  Some of you eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I left a few minor details out, like anything about our vacation, or the fact that Laurelai turned ten years old!  Let me address the latter point now:

Lolo is sweet to her very center.  If people are like a box of chocolates, she is pure goodness all the way through - no weird surprises.  She is servant-hearted and loves to help, and she's a hard worker.  (The other day we were discussing how work existed before the Fall, so that's how we can know it is a gift, not a curse.  And she said, "It was really nice of God to let us keep it even after we sinned. I like work.")  She is a perfectionist, and takes her time to do things well.  She hates messing up or feeling like she has disappointed people.

A self-portrait with her new roller skates.

She is funny and artistic and excellent at math.  She dresses well and spends extra time doing her hair each day.  She likes walking on the treadmill, crocheting, sewing, reading, baking, and caring for the chickens.  She is amazing with babies, and she has asked for a garden bed of her own next spring.  She is extremely extroverted and has limitless energy when she's around new people or groups.  She is a neon lightbulb - a lot of very bright, pulsing light condensed into a compact little tube.  She brightens our home and we couldn't live without her.

Now, as for our trip, I will need to fill you in in another post because there is just so much to share!  But here are a couple teaser photos.

Okay, I'm signing off.  We have guests coming this weekend, and a Psalm Sing tonight, and school on Monday - I feel like the weekend has already flown by and yet I have so much left to do!  So I will be back soon to continue the story of our vacation, but you'll have to be patient with me.

Happy weekend!