Our Autumn Break Week

There was no school Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week, due to teacher retreat, so the kids and I had a nice 5 day weekend.  

We decided to make spooky pretzels for Katie to take to school for Monday's party.  

Like my high tech double boiler?

When I was a teen, my step mom had a fancy wooden chocolate stirring implement in the kitchen.  We just use a chopstick.  

Double duty, as it both stirs the chocolate and picks the pretzels out.  

This was super simple, literally just pretzels, chocolate chips, and eyeballs.  

But we had fun, and hopefully the kids at school will like them.  

I love biographies, and we have a biography bookcase in the library, but we also have a little section of biographies in the younger kids' section, and I finally got around to putting up a small sign to designate that.  

We received the book Camp Max from author Penny Reeve!  She's even got coloring pages and teaching notes for it on her website.  

This was one of the books I picked up at the book fair last weekend.  I think I'm going to do a space theme in January.  

I've been setting aside all the Autumn/October/spooky books and now that we're through Fire Safety Week and Indigenous Peoples' Day, I put them all out.  

I'm now starting to set aside the Thanksgiving/Christmas books as I run across them.  

Acting on a hot tip I got from a librarian Facebook group, I picked up some new books and stuffed animals at Kohl's.  They sell for $5, but the clearance ones are only $2.50, and that makes me happy.  

Grumman and Fiona have come to a grudging acceptance of one another.  There's still a lot of chittering between them, and the occasional hiss or swat, but they can both hang out on my bed at the same time now, which is huge progress.  

Those tiny dots in the field are the middle school flag football team.  Katie has practices 3 days a week now, so I'm getting some extra time in the library while she does that.  (Although I stayed in the car and read a book one day.)  They have a scrimmage soon, and they're going to be playing a school a couple towns south of us after that.  

Unfortunately, a couple of Katie's team mates are immature middle school boys who made comments about Katie being "as fake as her leg."  I'm planning to have them read Molly The Pony and Winter's Tail this week.  

It's turning into space heater weather here, and Fiona is a fan of it.