Whizzing along from September to October

We've acclimated to the school year routine.  We're weathering the cooler temperatures.  The nights are getting dark earlier.  All signs that winter (my least favorite season) is on it's way.  

I appreciated this reminder not to let the turkeys get me down.  

Terrible dark pictures of Katie roller skating at a birthday party.  

I'm thrilled she's so capable.  I don't roller skate, so it's awe inspiring to me.  

I'm reading my 5th/6th graders The Horse and His Boy this year.  (We did Magician's Nephew last year.)  I decided to get the Narnia map I'd grown up with, but I was disappointed in the quality of this version.  It's not a printed paper poster like the one I had as a kid.  It's photo paper, and not great print quality.  It feels like someone took a cell phone photo of the real map and printed that.  

Katie's flag football season is drawing to a close.  They won one game this year.  

Took the cats in for their shots.  It's nobody's favorite.  I ended up bleeding and Grumman and Fiona gave me the side eye for the rest of the day.  

I stopped at a local Little Free Library to swap some books, and it was full of baby frogs!

It's been a while since I've been up close & personal with amphibians.  

We read a book about the changing season and watercolored autumn leaves on diffusing paper.  

I like that I could use different leaf shapes for different classes, so I could see at a glance which dry leaves belonged in which stack.  The following week, we mounted the leaves on construction paper and wrote Give Thanks in paint marker for a fall decoration.  I didn't get any pictures of the finished projects, though.  

I'm pretty sure there's a picture of Annaliese very similar to this somewhere.  Just purple softball uniforms instead of blue flag football ones.  Katie is #2.  

Speaking of Katie, she had a birthday!

My baby is 13.

At the pumpkin patch for evening church one night.  

This story isn't finished yet.  I introduced my 2nd graders to Kandinsky, and we're working on a Kandinsky inspired project.  

Here's the example I made them.  Fingers crossed they can create something similar.  

My eclipse supplies.  I sat outside on the porch swing for the whole thing.  The kids popped in and out of the house.  

We were in the 80% band of the map.  We did have some clouds, but they were moving quickly, so we got some good views.  

No, Grumman did not look at the sun.  

Is it me, or does the eclipse look like the French hood Anne Boleyn wore?  Not that I'm Tudor obsessed or anything.

Fiona IS autumn decor.  

She's also a fairly good seat warmer.  

Jack's boss needed an aerial shot of his business for the county.  So Jack and I flew the drone one morning.  (Okay, Jack flew the drone while I hovered nearby telling him not to crash, not to go over the road, not to go too high, and other "helpful" things.)  

Tell me you've been flying a drone without telling me you've been flying a drone.  I'm just glad he had access to the roof it came down on.  

Still weird.  

Grumman pulls random things out of the clean laundry and drags them upstairs to me.  He was really enjoying this pair of boxers.  

Fiona would much rather hold down my latest projects in the sewing room.  

Speaking of projects, this was a fun one.  Our city was holding a drive through donation event for the food bank.  Instead of going through the pantry and pulling out random garbanzo beans and such, we made birthday cake kits.  A couple 4 packs of disposable covered casserole pans, cake mix, frosting, candles, extra packs of unopened napkins from birthdays gone by.  I printed coloring pages, and we put a colored page in the bottom of each one, hoping to brighten the recipients' day.  

My step mom sent us an advent calendar.  I put it away so I wouldn't peek at it.  Now to remember 1) to pull it out on the right day, and 2) where "away" is when the time comes.

The school choir performed in church.  I was impressed.  The accompanist lost her guitar strap in the middle of the song, and the kids kept right on singing while she seated herself and began playing again.  

I've found some odd things in the washer over the years.  But this was my first pair of scissors.  Instead of, "WHO PUT SCISSORS IN THE LAUNDRY?!?!" which would have elicited panic and lies, I left a note on the white board, and the guilty party laughed and indicated they'd seen it.  

This year's school pictures, brought to you by the color orange.  Not sure why they're using the Trump filter on everybody, but several of the moms were like, "This barely looks like my kid.  They're supposed to be blonde, not redheaded."  

Unlike the cake kits, this was an idea that was better in my head.  I had no idea how long caramel takes to melt, and by the time it finally did, the kids had lost interest and wandered off.  The results weren't really worth the trouble, so we won't be doing this one again.  

Stay tuned for visits from the adult kids.  Maybe if I get really inspired I'll even go back and share the highlights of the rest of our road trip.  It really was quite the adventure.  

Between Adventures

Upon coming home from Europe, I discovered that Hannah had broken her glasses.  So one of the first things I did that week was take her to pick out new ones.  Two weeks seems like a long time to wait for glasses when your eyes are as bad as hers.  

But they were finally ready, and for the most part, she's happy with them.  They don't darken up as well as her old transition lenses did.  

We've been helping with the school rummage sale setup two mornings a week.  

There's rather a lot

of rummage to rummage through.  These were taken a couple weeks ago.  The quantity of stuff has doubled as donations have come in, and it's quite overwhelming at this point.  I'll be glad when it's over.  

I did, however, find a blast from my past among the clutter.  My mom had these dishes when I was a kid.  

Books, books, books.  I'm currently reading The Princes in the Tower.  Having been there in person makes it all the more real and fascinating.  

I don't think I mentioned summer school.  I'm working one day a week.  I do story time for the summer camp kids and the preschool, and I've been processing tons of books.  

The summer camp has an around the world theme, so when the kids learned about Australia, I had them make aboriginal dot paintings.  

The staff start school next week, although the students don't come back until mid August.  

Speaking of rummage, 1/3 yd. stripey woven cotton and 1/3 yd. tie dye-ish flannel made 3 pretty new napkins.  

Which inspired me to make some more napkins.  Bugs are flannel, gold is woven.  

I cut out a peasant top for Hannah.  We'll see how long it takes to get to the sewing part.  

We had a trip to Shriners.  Hannah will be getting a new leg, so we're headed back again in a week or two for the next step.  

And when they learned about India, we did faux henna hands.

Sigh.  Cats.  

My Target box looked like whoever packed it literally just tossed it all in there.  

But the point of the picture is that we're close enough to start of school to be buying uniforms!  We did the annual try on of last year's unis, and Hannah found one of Jack's shirts in her closet and Katie found one of Hannah's skirts in hers.  Sigh.  This year, I bought the girls slightly different styles of tops and skirts, hoping this makes it easier to tell whose is whose.  

I'll wrap this up for now and hopefully tomorrow I can share about a little trip we took.  

Our Spring Break Week

Our Spring Break was a week earlier than Jack's will be.  We're winding down the "year" in our curriculum, so after the next two weeks, I'll be cobbling together random bits to get us through the rest of our 180 days.  It's nice that we've worked really hard, and accomplished a lot!  If we were going to be homeschooling again next year, I'd just start on Creation to the Greeks, the next year of My Father's World.  But since the kids are headed back to school next year, I don't want to purchase the materials I'd need to do that for only 7 weeks.  

This project was something different.  The girls used glue over a very simple ocean scene, to make a raised picture.  Then we wrapped the cardboard with foil, and used a q-tip to outline the glue bumps.  The colors were added with Sharpie.  

Origami shamrocks

Katie's "stick & ink" (toothpick & liquid watercolor) drawing.

I'll just take a picture of the bookmarks the girls colored...  Oh Grumman.  

For some reason, Grumman spends more time on Katie's desk than on Hannah's.  So I took this picture on Hannah's.  

I'm fascinated at how different these faux tie dye paintings turned out!  We used pan watercolors, and a wet on wet technique.  Hannah used very little paint on her brush, and achieved a pastel look.  

Since this week was Spring Break, we didn't do any math or scheduled learning, but we did do art, projects, and some St. Patrick's Day related things, such as acrostic poems, journaling, summarizing a reading passage, etc.  

Our household seems to function best when we stick to our routine, at least a little bit.  

My leprechauns, Shenanigans and Malarkey.

 

Clover!  

The good news is, we had some sunshine, so we could take pictures!  The bad news is, there was sun while we were taking pictures.  Sigh.  

We had corned beef and potatoes for dinner, of course, but I realized even my lunch was green.  

Jack in his St. Patrick's Day shirt.

Josiah made cupcakes for me to frost and rainbow-ify.

books, books, books

Sam got his driver's license yesterday!  No grinning DMV picture, as he's about 6 years too old for that.  

These didn't turn out as well as I had hoped they would.  Shamrock watercolor paintings with gold paint marker accents.  

Katie's St. Patrick

Katie's plate bunny

And a lousy picture of Grumman.  He snagged a pipe cleaner animal, and decided to combine two of his favorite things:  Pipe cleaners, and shoe smell.  I'd toss the pipe cleaner for him, and he'd bring it back to the shoes.  If we could combine rattle, shoe smell and pipe cleaner, I think he'd be ecstatic.  

I've been doing some thinking about what I want to do in the autumn when the kids head back to school, and I just completed the first training to be a volunteer ESL tutor through our library system.  I'm not 100% sure this is the road I'm heading down, but I wanted to at least explore the option.  I love books and literacy related causes, so this seems like a good fit.  As Josiah pointed out, I'd be helping other people become productive members of society.