what's up weekly.

Happy Friday yet again, folks!

This week was another slow one, now that school is pretty much done.  The kids still do 'morning school' - reading, grammar, narration, math, history, which sounds like a lot, but really doesn't take too long and they're always finished well before breakfast.  So we've been trying to figure out what to do with our free time.

On Saturday, our day was actually pretty well structured for us.  We did our usual Saturday morning routine (Saturday Dadurday for the kids while I ran errands outside the house.  I went to Natural Grocers for the first time since last summer!) and then we went up to the Amish.  It was so nice having Todd drive.  Once we got home and did a late lunch, laid the kids down for nap, and took my requisite recovery period on the couch, it was time to make dinner and I had NO IDEA what to make, so we got Wendy's.  Whoops.  Our Saturday rhythm will need some tweaking now that we're fitting in our weekly Amish trip in addition to all the other stuff we already do.

Sunday was Trinity Sunday.  I would like to say we do more for this than we do, but at the moment all I have in me is placing the order for the Neapolitan ice cream Todd requested for the day (get it? three in one?).  With Pentecost and Ascension and Memorial Day, I'm pretty partied out by Trinity Sunday.  I'm hopeful my finitude will expand its capacity at some point so we can do more, but for now, ice cream suffices.

Monday was Memorial Day.  The kids spent a lot of the day in general 'crafting mode.' 

Rocco, honing his graphic novel skills by copying the illustrations in Cardboard.

Penelope made this little doll for Laurelai.  It still needs to be stuffed.

Laurelai's illustrative summary of the solar system.  I mean, "Unovrs."

They also made Memorial Day-themed decor, including American flag posters and a banner that said, "Thank You, Armed Forces."

I could not love this funny little backwards flag any more than I do.  HOW CUTE IS EVERYTHING THIS CHILD DOES?!

After dinner, we had microwaved s'mores.  Our fire pit is basically a jungle swamp hole right now, so the sticks were too wet to light.  We had to figure out an alternative Mes'morial Day method of making our traditional treat.

Tuesday, I was looking for something to fill the time with, so we went to Lowe's and got luxury items like a new trash barrel and a utility broom.  We fancy.

Wednesday and Thursday were days spent at home, and while the kids got a little stir-crazy, it wasn't too bad.  Our backyard is currently off-limits because of the mud and grass seed action happening back there, so we got creative and spent a little time in the front yard instead.

My garden is starting to produce a bit, and I'm finding strawberries are the PERFECT Van Voorst crop: they are low-maintenance and perennial, they get eaten before they go bad (and there are never too many of them), and I actually enjoy picking them - the leaves don't scratch my hands or make me itch or get my nails all grimy.  So I'm planning to eventually get this whole bed planted to strawberries.  In the meantime, I do have some volunteer onions and a good number of herbs planted at the other end.  In the second bed, Penelope's zinnias are sprouting.  

I only have strawberry plants in about a third of this bed.  The middle is empty, the end has flower pots and herbs - sage, thyme, rosemary, lavender, basil.

I also have four pear tomatoes that are going strong.  We are going to be up to our eyeballs in tiny tomatoes, but what can I say?  They come in a four-pack and I couldn't bear to waste any of them.

Penelope's zinnias in the middle, and a few sprouting cannas at the very end.

Todd continued chipping away on stripping the coffee table I bought, and I am IN LOVE.  Now I just need to figure out if I have the right sandpaper on hand for the next step, then it's on to stain!

He even got all the little details stripped.

It's weird - the legs look white even though they're totally stripped down and are clearly made of natural wood.  I wonder what kind of wood this is?

The top, dampened with mineral spirits.  This is going to be so pretty.

And lastly, I died my hair blue.  Accidentally.  Semi-permanently.  Faintly.  But blue nonetheless.  It was a (not entirely unsuccessful) attempt at toning the orange out of my hair - I mixed it way too strong, and applied it all over, rather than just at the roots where the oranging was the biggest problem.  That said, my hair is not orange anymore, and is only slightly blue in a couple of spots on the ends... so I suppose I still came out ahead?  Here's to hoping that it fades sooner than the six weeks it's meant to hang around...

And that was our week!  Today we're headed to a playground, and then Penelope and I have a standing date to eat popcorn and look through Zillow Gone Wild on Instagram and laugh at all the outrageous houses on there.  Should be a pretty good day!

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!