Wandering Through the Week

This week has seemed to fly by and I'm not really sure why. 

In our classroom this week I'd scheduled two half days. One for Wednesday as I'd be out shopping with Noni (my mother) for several hours and Daddy wanted to spend the day relaxing with the kiddos instead of worrying about school, it's not often that Mommy isn't home and he gets all of them to himself. The other was Thursday because we took a field trip to our local fire department (read the whole story here ). We ended up doing absolutely no school on Wednesday because Mommy didn't want to wake up two of the three children super early and end up with everyone frustrated before noon.

PreK/K has been chugging along nicely this week. We were able to finish the entire week's worth of lessons without meltdowns despite Peanut having taken three whole days off this week because her sinuses had her feeling icky. I gave her the option of doing the letter "S" next week or the letter "L", of course "S" won because of Santa! This won't be as cute as our "T" is for turkey at Thanksgiving unfortunately because my printer still isn't liking me. (I'm sure it's time to buy a new one.) She took Tuesday through Thursday off from school and I had vaguely wondered if our quick snow on Monday and our hour out in the freezing weather for snowball fights and snow angels had anything to do with it. However, it is her sinuses draining which would have happened if she'd spent time outside or not because of the weather change.

Third grade has been going well for Younger Cracker Jack. Her little green slips of paper are sticking in every workbook and text book that she has, not to mention the two (!) Dr. Seuss books that she's reading now. That little bit of green is still doing the trick and I don't even wonder how it works anymore, I'm just glad that it does. She is pretty much right where we'd planned for her to be right now this year. We'll be using the week after Christmas as a "focus" week where we'll be focusing on any subjects that the kids need work on, for YCJ this is definitely her English. She's pulling great grades and understanding the work but due to her reading level it's simply taking her longer to finish her assignments.

Sixth grade couldn't appear any easier when you look at Elder Cracker Jack. Passing every single class and course I throw at him. He finally did get that report about The Lord of the Rings Trilogy into my hands and I was very impressed. He is reading Little Women right now, but it's not like the other books he's read. ... He'll read just so much of it as you assign for each day and then put it down, off to find a book he'd rather be reading. It is, to quote him, "Sooooooooo booooooooring!" He'll be handing in his rough draft on this book by Christmas and his final draft by New Year's Eve. He's still enjoying his Apalogia science lessons, though we haven't done any of the experiments yet.

In religion we're still concentrating on Advent. Hanging our Jesse tree ornaments, reading the Bible passages, and visiting Holy Heroes daily. Peanut is the only one who fidgets at all during the beginning parts of the audios and ECJ is great at hiding his humor from her at some of the videos he knows are directed towards younger children. Since the printer is down they've almost caught up on their coloring pages that I'd already printed out for them, I'm not sure if they'll be able to finish their Advent books I'd planned before the end of Advent. If not, they'll work on it after Christmas.

For health lately we've been concentrating on hygiene and safety. This theme fit right in with our field trip to the fire department. The Fire Chief gave them a quick quiz about safety during fires and a coloring book that reinforces the concepts. They've been coloring a few pages for the last two days. Poor ECJ learned an important hygiene lesson when Daddy went to trim his hair. It seems that ECJ hasn't been washing all of the soap out of his hair during his showers, this caused some dandruff and dried soap issues which were discovered during the hair cut. The natural consequence to this was that instead of a trim ECJ got a shave. He's really glad that he has some warm hats right now! Our more formal health lessons will be starting January 6th.

Other than that we've pretty much been taking it easy lately. Spending time together and enjoying the season. There's approximately a week left until the official start of winter and we've only got two items left to cross off of our Fall Bucket list (the entire list can be seen here ). The final report on it, including pictures, should be up sometime next week. I think some of you will be surprised at how we got creative completing some of the items on the list.

Trixie cat caught in a rare moment actually on someone's bed other than Mommy's -
this one happens to be YCJ's.

Ever since our friends over at Learning Life with 3 Sons came by a few weeks ago for our really super busy and fun visit, I've been absolutely addicted to crocheting granny squares! Yup, I know for someone who's been crocheting for over 25 years this should not hold my attention so much. The thing of it is that although I can make puff stitches, popcorn stitches, lace work, and several other interesting and far more complicated stitches ... the granny square had always alluded me until Mamma J showed me how to do it! I haven't even picked up one of my other projects in over a week because I enjoy making these so much right now.
 I have quite an impressive little stack going on right now, all about seven or eight inches square. I'm attempting to combine different purples, greens, blues, and white (although there is a bit of brown there in the one) to make a new and interesting blanket that will fit YCJ's bed come spring. I intend to do the same for both of the other camper kids in colors that will match their rooms. Although, I probably should finish ECJ's blanket from last year before I go too much farther in making three brand new ones.

A new recipe I can share with all of you is really very simple. Everyone here has decided it's a new favorite and it's been made at least three times a week for about the last two weeks (probably more times actually). We've used this at breakfast, snack, and desert time and even Daddy (who doesn't like much yogurt) is enjoying them.

Quick Yummy Smoothies (my kids name for these smoothies)

• 1 1/2 cups vanilla yogurt (any brand)
• 1 1/2 cups 2% milk (we found whole milk to make this too thick, you can cut down on the milk by adding some juice, we've also cut half a cup of milk out of the recipe)
• 1 handful whole frozen strawberries
• 1 handful frozen blueberries
• 1 banana cut up
• 1-3 tsp sugar if you want for added sweetness

Just combine all ingredients in your blender and put the lid on tight. Pulse a few times to get it started, blend for about 30 seconds, and then place on liquify for another 30 seconds. This recipe fills my blender and makes enough for everyone to have a full glass (sized according to what they usually drink) and there be extra left over for all three kiddos to have seconds and sometimes thirds.

**Check back tomorrow for information about how our outside time has been this week and how we're doing with the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge . **

Posts you may have missed this week:

Outside and Picking a Tree

Getting a Bit Healthier

Advent Begins Week 2 - And Other Tid Bits

7 Ways to Get Some Sanity Back

The Gift of ADHD - Book Review

Field Trips Work

We're linking up today with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers , Faithful Mom of 9 , Great Peace Academy , and Homegrown Learners .

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