Friday

I don't have much today, except that I'm very glad this week is coming to an end.  School was a bit grueling.

As far as pics, I've got this one of an iris that Zach did today.  It was an exercise in conveying texture.

Phone Home

Not much to report today.  This is a testing week, which is always extremely busy but makes for dull blogging material.  As usual I'm proud of how hard the kids are working.  They're all getting good grades on this bunch of tests, except for the slight hiccup in Drew's brain which caused him to forget all about the perfect tense of verbs.  That brought his English test grade from a 100 to an 84.  Oh well.

I swear I had more stuff than that to talk about, but nothing's coming to mind.  Hmm.  Should I tell you about the time awhile back that Mike had a bad head cold, so he took a bath?  See, my phone rang, and Baylee saw from the caller ID that it was Mike, who was calling from the bathroom.  Later on she thought to tell me about it.  "Mom," she said, "Dad called you."

"Okay.  Why didn't you bring me the phone?"

"Because Dad's home.  Why would he be calling you if he's home?  He's taking a bath.  He must've butt dialed you."

"Baylee, I don't think he butt dialed me, since he's IN THE TUB."

It took her a second, but then she realized the logic behind that.  < -------- pun

Life

It's getting downright cold out.  Mike would completely disagree with me, but my feeling is that if it's going to be cold out anyway, it might as well be snowy, too.  At least that way we'd have something pretty to look at.

Yesterday we finally broke down and bought shades instead of blinds for two of the kids' bedrooms.  I don't know what it is about the blinds in those rooms (other than they're significantly cheaper than the blinds in the rest of the house), but the cat will NOT stop trying to eat them.  Since we moved here he's ruined the blinds on 3 windows...twice!  He just gnaws and gnaws on them until the ends break off.  Argh.  Hopefully the shades will fix the problem.

Well, it turns out we don't have to move because of the random slug in my bedroom.  (Why, God, why???  Where did it come from???)  Zach picked it up with a spatula and threw it outside.  Question:  Would you still use that spatula?

That brings back a memory.  When Mike and I were newlyweds, sometimes instead of cleaning a really dirty pot or pan, I'd just throw it away.  It drove Mike crazy.  He'd be like, "Where the heck's the skillet?!"

Learning lately...

Time to Move

 

Decorated

Yesterday Mike and Drew were gone for most of the day, watching football over at Danny's house.  When they got back home, even though it was late, they sat down on the living room floor and spent literally hours cutting all the old, dead lights out of the "prelit" tree.

It was really nice of them.  And the great thing is that it makes our tree perfectly usable on into the future! We just have to string lights on it ourselves now.

While they did that Zach and I hung out in the living room, keeping them company.  The four of us chatted and laughed for probably a couple hours.  Zach also played with the cat.

Then Zach shaped the tree (you know...made the branches look real instead of like they've been in a box all year) and put the new lights on it.  Today Drew, Baylee, and Rachel finished decorating it.  Me?  I relaxed.  I'm soaking in the lack of structure while it lasts.

Leftovers

Today we're hanging out, not doing much.  Oh, and we're decorating for Christmas...kind of.  That was the plan anyway, until we realized that the lights on the prelit tree don't work anymore.  We knew it was coming, and I had a bad feeling it was going to happen this year.  Bummer.  I think we'll just add lights to it and use it one last season.  In the meantime, though, it's standing in the living room, naked.

Here are a few leftover pics from Thanksgiving and this morning...

Patty gave me this cute little nativity scene that spells out "believe."  I love it.

This is for real.  It was 3 pieces of pie...pumpkin, apple, and pumpkin cheesecake...covered in Rediwhip.  He ate it all.

Cribbage before bed.

Baylee made up this bed for Patty.  I thought it was pretty cute that she added a book and a stuffed animal.

Setting up the tree this morning.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Baylee helped me do some of the baking yesterday.  We made the sweet potatoes and a pumpkin roll.  Then the pumpkin roll got wrecked when the wax paper stuck to it (Argh!  Hair pulling!  Teeth gnashing!) so I had to throw it away.  Mike came to the rescue by picking up a pumpkin cheesecake from Costco.

Before any baking can happen, aprons must be donned, of course.

And then they have to be taken off, apparently, because they're constricting.

Today started pretty darn early for me, and was filled with cooking and cleaning.  Finally it was time to sit down and eat.  Everything was delicious.

 
Except the gravy I made.  That was HORRID.  Haha!  Actually,  I'm being too hard on myself.  It would've been great if only we were planning to do some papier mache.  Since we wanted to eat it, though, Patty kindly took it back into the kitchen and fixed it.

Drew and I had the idea to recreate a picture I took of him a few years ago...

Thanksgiving, 2009

Thanksgiving, 2012

Drew's reaction:  "I've got much better hair now."

Hope you're having a wonderful day filled with family, food, and thankfulness. We're about to head out the door to see a movie at the theater, so I'm outta here. 

Art Lately

It's the countdown until Thanksgiving break!!!!  Only about 3 more hours of school, and then freedom for 5 days.

Remember how Zach and Drew are both taking art this year?  It's interesting to see how their personalities are coming out in this course.  Drew is a good artist, but he's always rushing and happy to turn in mediocre work.  That is, unless he knows it's going to be sent to the school, in which case he does much better.  Zach, on the other hand, pretty much always tries his hardest and it shows.  He's kinda becoming the standout artist of the two.

Here's an exercise Zach did a couple days ago.  It's about finding the "core" of an object, and using it to give the illusion of form and depth.  See the shadowed part of the cloth?  That's its core.

(Mike said that it looks like there's an elephant under there.  lol  Maybe it should be titled Ignoring the Elephant in the Room.)

The boys have also been learning about 1 and 2-point perspective.  From what I understand, you take 1 or 2 points on the horizon and base your whole picture on them.  It's a way to make sure everything is the right size and orientation.

Zach did this 1-point perspective drawing of a country road, lined by a fence and trees.  It's got some extra lines in it that didn't get erased, because it's a learning exercise.

Wear Your Safety Glasses

Early this morning over coffee I decided to re-figure the time we have left before the semester is over and the tests are due again.  It turns out I was off by one day when I counted a month ago or so, which means we get to start Thanksgiving break on Wednesday instead of Thursday!  I feel like I just drew a "bank error in your favor" Monopoly card!  Woo hoo!  This is good, because I was kinda wondering when I'd have time to bake and cook.

This morning Zach had to do a chemistry class on lab safety.  The teacher talked for awhile about several rules, and then Zach had to watch high school kids doing experiments.  Part of his assignment was to list at least 8 things the kids were doing wrong.  Of course, they didn't make it easy.  Zach was able to get only 6 of their mistakes, even though he went back and watched that section of the video 3 times. Finally he called me over and I watched it.  I couldn't figure it out, either.  I didn't see a single person make a bubbling, smoking, fluorescent green concoction, drink it, and then turn into a monster with a hunchback.  Neither did I see anyone catch their hair on fire.

True story:  That happened when I had chemistry in high school.  Some guy's bangs went up in flames, because he was leaning over the Bunsen burner with a lot of product in his hair.  Whoosh!  He was fine, don't worry.

It's been raining and raining and RAINING here lately.  I had suspected this before, but now I'm sure that Baylee has a weird fear of floods.  I have no idea why, as she's never experienced any kind of flooding in her life.  This morning she asked me several times if it was going to flood and if I was sure everything would be okay, and if it did flood would we wait it out in the attic.  (We don't even have an attic.  We have a crawl space big enough for the Christmas tree box and that's about it.)  I just kept reassuring her that everything is fine and that it rains a lot here normally.

When I was 15 I worked at a camp where it did actually flood.  To tell you the truth, that might've been the most fun part of the whole summer.  We canoed and swam around the athletic field.  It was wild.

Misc. pics from the last week:

Drew was a good sport and let Baylee and Paul mess with his hair.

The dog is not allowed to be on the bed.  Does he look guilty?  (No.  He doesn't.)

 

Sunday

We skipped church today.  We've had a bad cold/cough thing going through our family for weeks, and now Mike and Zach have it.  It felt good to just sleep and be for once.

Last night Baylee and I went to the Operation Christmas Child packing thing.  That was fun.  Baylee packed our box for a little girl from 5-9 years old.  I forgot to get any pictures at all, but this one was posted on FB by someone else.  It's all the boxes everyone did.

 
Our Thanksgiving dinner is planned and shopped for.  We're having turkey this year, by popular request.  It's thawing in the fridge.  I'm excited to have some nice days off filled with family!  A lot of schools have the whole week off, but the Seattle middle and high schools are going all the way through Wednesday, which is great because that's my plan, too.  At least I won't have to battle friends coming to the door and wanting to play.

The kids, including Rachel, are still playing hours and hours of Monopoly.  I guess it makes sense, since outside is pretty cold, wet, and dark.  They made another new rule:  If you say "Illinois" with the "s" sound at the end, you have to put $50 in free parking.  I like that one. 

Saturday

This is one of those times when I simultaneously have several things I could talk about, and almost nothing at all.   That is, none of them add up to much.  I know you're thinking, "That sounds pretty typical." lol

Baylee started level 4 today.  There's a mean girl in her class this time who made it pretty obvious that she doesn't like her.  Baylee is bummed about it, but not overly upset.  I reminded her that ultimately she's there to learn to swim better, and possibly be on a swim team someday.  What I didn't say, but know to be true, is that it's important for her to get out into the world and be  "socialized."  She needs to learn to deal with all kinds of people and situations.  Still.  Argh.  It always hurts me to see my kids hurt.

Speaking of swimming, Baylee lost her goggles at the pool last week.  When we went last night for our usual Friday free swim she told the people behind the desk what happened, and asked if they have a lost and found.  They pulled out a huge bin filled with unclaimed goggles.  It was goggle purgatory.  Baylee pawed through it for a second, then said, "Nope!  I don't see mine here!  Thanks!"  Is it bad that inwardly I face palmed and wished she just would've claimed a pair?  I mean, there were probably over a hundred goggles in there!  Sigh.  Outwardly I said, "Good job being so honest, honey."

Drew's reading Swiss Family Robinson in English.  He doesn't love it, but he enjoys it a lot more than Zach did.  In fact, he does a pretty accurate (and funny) impression of the father in the story.  The other day he was given an assignment in which he had to take several sentences and passages from the book and put them in his own words.  This is easier said than done, because this book is written in VERY 19th century language.  (Just as an example, do you know what "The riven masts had gone by the board" means?  What about "We rose up betimes"?)  He made me laugh with this translation:

The book:  "...it occurred to me that it would be well to make a kind of sledge, so that the labor of fetching might not fall so heavily on ourselves."

Drew:  "I figured out that it would be pretty good to make a sledge, so that we don't have to do so much work carrying crap."

Tonight a bunch of us from our peer group at church are going to meet at someone's home, and we're going to pack Operation Christmas Child boxes, eat, and have fun together.  I'm looking forward to it.

Sad

A couple nights ago at Pioneer Girls my friend told me that there's a family in our church whose 20 year old son committed suicide last week.  I don't know very much about them, except that the dad was Drew's basketball coach a few years ago.  I really liked him as a coach.  I know they're active homeschoolers.  I know they're Godly people.  I know they had 4 sons.

What my friend said about the boy who died...that he was so loving and gracious with others, but so hard on himself...it makes me heartsick.  How can we help people to truly understand how vital they are?  How cherished?  How can we make them hear?

Book Report

In the comments in the last post we were talking about when kids eventually leave the house, and I brought up a children's book called Love You Forever, written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila McGraw.  It's about a mother who, no matter how irritated and tired she gets with her son, always sings this to him at the end of the day:

I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
my baby you'll be.

It's actually a really nice story.  The only thing is...well...it gets a little kooky.

Here's the cover:

Basically, a woman has a baby, rocks him, loves him, and sings him the song.  Then the baby becomes a toddler and gets into everything, but no matter. She still sings to him while he's sleeping.

He grows up to be a kinda naughty, messy 9 year old.  She holds him and sings the song at night.

He's a teen and he does irritating, loud, strange, teen-type things.  She responds with this:  (That's her singing to him.)

He grows all the way up and moves into his own place across town.  She misses him, so she...umm...ties a ladder to her car and sneaks over there.

Then she breaks into his home and holds him in his sleep while she sings.

My thoughts as I look at this picture:

1. Wait.  What?!
2. Dang.  She's strong.
3. He is one heavy sleeper.

Finally, at the end of the book she gets really old and can't sing the song anymore, so he sings it to her.

That's sweet, right?

We own this book, because my mom gave it to Zach when he was one.  On the inside cover she wrote:

Zach,
When you get to be a grown man and have your own apartment, let me know...I'll buy a ladder.  (ha ha)
 Love, Grandma
October 31, 1996

(Probably Too Much) Honesty

Zach had Christmas in November this morning.  First, I told him that he accidentally worked ahead in Health and didn't need to do it today if he didn't want.  Second, his Chemistry class didn't have homework.  (That makes 3 times lately!  Before this chapter it NEVER happened...not once since 9th grade started 2+ years ago.)  So he was very happy.

I, on the other hand, am having a blah day.  I think I might be a giant baby (I'm not sure, as I'm the only homeschool mom here.  I don't have anyone to compare myself to.), but I'm so very sick of school.  I need a break badly.  Today I figured out that I haven't truly slept in...that is, woken up without an alarm...a single day in 14 weeks.  (Okay, I think there was one Sunday in there that we skipped church.  Other than that, though.)  Something is always going on:  this, that, the other thing.  I just feel like yelling, "Leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone!"  And then eating chocolate.

A nice picture of Mike and Drew doing the dishes together after supper the other night.

 

Old Pics

I should be cleaning the house or something.  Instead I'm looking through the big rubbermaid container of old pictures stored under our bed.  It's everything that's left after I became a Creative Memories Album Maker Dropout.  After all, why would I want to keep making those albums when it's so easy to blog with digital pictures?  So there all those old photographs sit, collecting dust.  Remember having to go get film developed?  I can hardly imagine it anymore.  Remember having to be careful not to take bad snapshots or too many of the same thing, because it was a waste of film?  One time in the early years of our marriage Mike went out into our backyard and took about 20 pictures of some ducks by our bird feeder.  When we got that developed I was like, "What is this???  National Geo-freaking-graphic?!"

Anyway.  So I'm looking through old pics today and I'm coming across some cute ones.

My little beauty with a scrape on her chin.  She looks to be about 3 years old here.

Drew was a ring bearer when he was around 7.  

Brothers.  (Get a load of the TV in the background.  Our TV was a huge, heavy piece of furniture back then.  It had knick-knacks on top.)

An autographed picture of the cast of the traveling troupe I was a part of.  Haha!  Who thought this was a good idea???  How horrifying.

Zach and his clay creations.

The cat hated her.  

Best Of

This is from 4 years ago.  It still makes me laugh.

I had the single weirdest experience of my life today. I swear I felt like there had to be a hidden camera somewhere. In fact, I'm still not convinced there wasn't. I was on my way to the clinic with the kids and as usual I stopped at Starbuck's to get coffee. This was the conversation I had with the woman manning the drive-through:

Crazy Lady: Hi!!! What yummy thing can I get for you today?!

Me: Umm...I'll have a grande caramel macchiato, please.

Crazy Lady: Yummy! Okay! That'll be $3.49. Hooray!

By this time all the kids and I were staring at each other, trying as hard as we could not to laugh while she could still hear us over the two-way speaker. I had to pull the car up to the window as slowly as possible to give us all a chance to stop DYING and regain our composure before meeting this woman face-to-face.

Crazy Lady: Do you want a receipt with that?

Me: No, I'm good, thanks.

Crazy Lady: Hooray! Let me go make that yummy coffee for you!

Which she did. And when she handed it to me she fit in one last yummy, another hooray, and for good measure she called me "my fair lady."

True story.

Christmas and Stuff

Can it be time to listen to Christmas music?  I'm itching to, but I usually make myself wait until after Thanksgiving.

Speaking of that, I was reminded today of something that happened when Zach was three.  I asked him what he wanted Santa to bring him for Christmas and he totally shut me down.  He said in a dry, let's-stop-the-pretense voice, "Mom, I know it's you and Dad."  (Zach has always been about 57 years old on the inside.)

Zach made me laugh until I cried again at lunch today.  Mike was planning to run to the grocery store for a few things, and he asked me if there was anything we needed.  I told him he'd better get toilet paper, as we were down to our last roll and if we put it off much longer it would become an emergency.

"Well," Mike answered, "we still have napkins."

That's when Zach brought up what he called the "great washcloth apocalypse," when we ran out of toilet paper AND napkins.

In my defense, it was only once and it was a long, long time ago.



(Right about now are you wondering why you read here?)      

10 on 10 ~ November

It's called "10 on 10" and it comes from here.  The idea is to take a picture every hour for ten consecutive hours on the tenth day of the month.  This month's 10 on 10 is fun and different because it's a Saturday and because Paul is visiting!

{8:00} brrr

{9:00} not quite ready to get up

{10:00} my view of swim lessons

{11:00} Mr. Incredible and Baylee hit McDonald's

{12:00} bustin' a move to "Eye of the Tiger"

{1:00} yard work with Dad

{2:00} back at the pool...this time with friends

{3:00} Wall Street Journal

{4:00} abandoned play

{5:00} almost dinnertime