Weekly Wrap up - Homeschool week 6

We finished week 6, our final week of Mexico!

Not nearly as many pictures this week, although I did catch the kids playing "Om Nom" (that's what they call the game Cut The Rope that I have on my ipad.  It was pretty cute.

Jack doing math is not nearly as cute most days.  

Zachary's birthday was this week.  The kids made him cards.

He's back in the Middle East.

I miss him.

Lots of missionary biographies this year.

Bri had a big milestone this week:  Her first paid babysitting gig at the church!  

She loved it.  Looks like she'll get to do it again, too.  

I'm brushing up on my equivalent fractions.

Jack's not a strong reader, so just looking at the explanation on the computer isn't going to work for him.  

Eli was playing with the world puzzle blocks.

Each of the kids pointing to a country they would like to visit.  

Jack doesn't seem very adventurous, lol.

I'm very lucky.  I'll actually get to go to mine next year.

I love this picture.  I caught it at Sam's football game as the 2 older kids were going to help Jack find his football.  I love the way the setting sun outlines them.  

Grammy came for a visit, and we took her to Sam's first home game.

Football found!  This was actually a catch shot.

And there's Grammy.  We took the kids to the zoo Saturday.

Sam (#31) dislocated his finger, yowch!

This week we had our first craft failures.

I've been pretty impressed with the crafts, activities, and experiments in MFW so far.

But as you can see...

The craft flowers were not a hit.

I made a sample flower over the weekend, and it came out huge, so I had the kids make theirs smaller, and, well, 

There were some frustrations.

And some trimming.  Which wasn't in the instructions, but oh well.  

The flowers weren't the only flop.  

Remember last week's pinata that we started?

It popped.

So I went with Plan B, which was a total cheater pinata made from a paper bag.  

Now we're off to learn all about CANADA!

Looking forward to finding out more about our neighbors to the north.

Along with math, spelling, and handwriting, of course.  ;)  

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Linking up with Growing Home  

Eli gets his braces off

I wanted to get one last shot of him smiling with a braces smile, but he wasn't having any of that.

Feels like family here.  

Josiah had braces with Dr. O.

Brianna saw him for a while, too.

The assistant offered to tickle him into smiling for me, but it didn't work.  

Pop the brackets off the teeth, pop the wire out of the mouth, and, whoops!  There's a tooth on that wire.  Oh, well.  It was loose anyway.  

They're off!

And two days later, we went back to get his retainers.  Let's hope he's better about wearing them than Josiah was.  

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You need to learn math because...

You know how kids ask, "Why do I have to learn this?  I'm never gonna use it."

Something occurred to me today.  I have 3 teenagers.  In 2 years, I'm going to have 5.  FIVE teenagers.  Let that percolate a minute.

This, my friends, is why I wish I'd done better at math when I was in school.

Perhaps then, it would have occurred to me that eventually all those cute little babies and toddlers that I adored so much would GROW UP and all need to be driven to different activities.

There for a while, we had babies coming every 18 months.  At one point, we had a newborn, an 18 month old, a 3 year old, a 4.5 year old, a 6.5 year old, and a 9 year old.  For a couple of weeks, we had 6 kids under 10.

Yet, even though I "knew" that they'd be teens someday, I had no real grasp on what that would look like.  The dizzying baseball, softball, football, homework, school uniforms, scouts, C.A.P., friends, appointments, eating like locusts, "Can you drop me off at...?" aspect of it all.

I like to think I've learned something.  Jack and Hannah are a whole 3 years apart.  Hannah and Katie will be more than 3 years apart.  In fact, we'll have almost exactly the same spacing between Hannah and Katie that we did between Zachary and Annaliese (3 yrs 5 mos).  Which was a really nice spacing.

But the reality is, for all my talk about how nicely spaced these later kids are, I know that if the money fell out of the sky, I'd be begging Paul to bring home a little boy with Katie, spacing be damned.

I guess I haven't learned that much after all.

Maybe that's why Paul needs to be the one to help the older kids with their math.  I never was very good at it.

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So how's the adoption going?

I'm celebrating!  Our last piece of homestudy paperwork has been submitted!

We should see a rough draft of the homestudy next week!

Things are starting to come together in other ways, too.

One friend loaned us this changing table.  

I made the blanket; it's similar to the one I made for Hannah, flannel front, minkee back.

Another friend gave us this dresser.

Which just happens to match my dresser, which is nice, because it's in my room.  

I made this little shirt and bow set.

I am putting it up in my Your Adopt Shop storefront.  I figure if it sells, GREAT!   We are going to be paying immigration application fees soon, and every little bit helps.  If it doesn't, then Katie can wear it.  

Katie's top drawer.

When I was a little girl, my mom lined my drawers with the wrapping paper from her baby shower presents.  

This tissue paper was used to package something I ordered for Hannah from Totsy right after we brought her home, and it was so cute, I kept it.  

Since ladybugs are a symbol of hope in the Chinese adoption world, it seemed very appropriate to use it for Katie's drawer.  It makes me smile to see ladybugs peeking out from under Katie's little pile of clothes.

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Weekly Wrap Up, homeschool week 5

Hola!  Viva Mexico!

This week is week 5 of our curriculum.  The children were issued their "passports" on Monday.

This week and next week, we are studying Mexico.  

Our craft this week was these lovely Ojos de Dios, or God's Eyes.  

We learned some Spanish words, including colors.

This is timely, because Josiah is taking Spanish in school this year.  

Because I tend to take a theme and r-u-n with it, we watched some Netflix movies about Mexico.  From educational movies, like National Geographic, to, um, less educational movies.  ;)

A friend mentioned Little Passports on facebook recently, and I was intrigued when I checked them out.  They send a package each month with a different country that their characters are visiting, and you can learn more about that country.  Well, that corresponded really well with what we're doing for school this year, so I thought I'd give it a shot!  I emailed them because we would be needing our countries more than once a month, and they were great to work with.  (Our curriculum highlights each country for two weeks.)  

Brianna is unscrambling letters to find the name of a country.  

And one of the fun things about Little Passports is the toy/craft/game they send in each packet.

We also got to put the Mexico flag sticker on the map, and add Mexican flags to their flag holders.

In science, we're studying deserts.  So we drew turtles and used thermometers to discover whether our turtles were warmer in the sun or shade, and near rocks or not near rocks (and accidentally "in plants" or "not in plants" when one of the turtles that wasn't weighted with a rock blew off the porch rail).

We checked our turtles several times over a 24 hour period.

And recorded our findings.

Meticulously.

Isn't her haircut cute?  :)  I look silly in short hair, but she really pulls it off.  

And she was impersonating a school kid when we walked Hannah to kindergarten.  Hannah had left her backpack in the van (she tends to fall asleep in the van after school by the time we get the big kids and get back home) and Brianna retrieved it and wore it.  

Hannah was not amused. 

On the way back from taking Hannah to school, we stopped at the park to do nature drawings.

Which rapidly turned into "PE."

Or maybe even "survival skills."

I'm really enjoying these guys this year.  

This crazy project is going to take multiple days.

Bits of newsprint

Slimy starch

Letting it dry well between layers. 

I love "catching" my kids doing something that could be labelled educational.  :)  This was just free block play.  

Looking forward to next week's tissue paper flowers, and Brianna and I are going to try to get into the sewing room and make a poncho or two.  

And because it's fun to read about what OTHER homeschool families are doing, I'm linking up with some other MFW blogs here:  http://discovertheirgifts.blogspot.com/2012/09/mfw-creation-to-greeks-week-1.html  Check it out!  

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Another Update on Paul

Today marks 5 weeks since the accident.  Paul's recovery has gone very well, and he's been released from physical therapy with full range of motion.  He heads back to work tomorrow on Light Duty.  Please be in prayer for our family as we adjust.  This is the longest Paul's been off work, ever.  (His paternity leaves have ranged from a few days to a month, depending on his job and our circumstances at the time.)

We were really counting on overtime to help pay for our adoption, so this has been difficult for us, financially, but we're trusting that God will provide.  I'm planning to add more homeschool items and more hand made items to our Your Adopt Shop over the next few days.  If you can share our blog fundraiser page with others, we'd really appreciate it!  Thank you!


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Perspective

A friend recently posted a picture of her "big family" on Facebook.  I laughed when I saw it, because she and her husband have four kids.  To me, that's a nice, medium-sized family.

When I had Zachary and Annaliese, my grandmother told me I had, "One of each, a boy and a girl, a millionaire's family, made to order."

When we had Josiah, this same grandmother consoled herself by saying, "Two boys, an heir and a spare!"

I sent her a birth announcement after Sam was born.

At my grandfather's memorial, I showed up great-with-child (and I really can't remember which, but I *think* it must have been Eli).  She spied me across the room, scowled and said in that "old people who speak louder than they realize" sort of way, "She's having another one?!"

Now that I'm older and wiser (snort) I realize it was about perspective for her, too.  She had 2 bad marriages.  Her first husband had an affair with her best friend.  Her second husband was an alcoholic who had a hard time keeping a job.  She struggled like heck to raise her 2 kids in dirt poor conditions. At the time, I didn't see it.

It's merciful she went to heaven before we started adopting, because she was very narrow minded and racist, and would never have understood us adopting a "crippled" "commie" baby.

This isn't meant to be a "bag on grandma" post.  It's about perspective.  Understanding that what seems normal to us may not seem normal to someone else, and vice versa.

This hit home for me this morning.  I follow a bunch of blogs.  Friends, adoption, foster care, large families, etc.  As I was scrolling through new posts this morning, I came to one picture that just looked institutional to me.  I found myself thinking, "Twelve kids!  That is a ginormous family!"

Hello, pot?  This is kettle speaking.  You're adopting #9.  You just convinced your husband, against his better judgement, to have the homestudy written for 2 kids, "just in case."  You, my friend, are every bit as much of a freak, it's just that your kids aren't all under the same roof at the same time.

I'm sure I have friends who think we have "a ginormous family."  But, to me, it's normal.  I can do 7 kids.  I've been doing 7 kids since Furby was born, with the exception of the 9 months between when Zach left for boot camp and when we traveled to pick up Hannah, when we only had 6.  (Only 6 kids.  Are any of you laughing at me?)  Since Annaliese is so close to spreading her wings and leaving the nest, it's likely that the overlap between Katie coming home and Annaliese leaving (if any, depending on adoption timelines and Ese's plans for next school year) will be fairly short.  The dynamic will change, but the number of people in the house doesn't actually swell that much.  I'm still counting the same number of heads on outings, still doing the same amount of laundry, still buying the same amount of groceries.

Perspective.

This whole convoluted thought process is a good reminder to me to not be so swift to make judgments on those whose choices are different from mine.  I know I hate feeling like others are criticizing my choices without seeing things from my point of view.

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