April 10.

Spring, spring, spring!

We had a mostly good day at the park yesterday.  One of the families had some car trouble and the mom was trying to deal with that while the other moms watched her kids and waited for her to get back.  Unfortunately, what's wrong with her car is going to be expensive.  This poor family has had one financial blow after another, after another and it's hard to watch and it's hard to know what to do or how to help. 

After the park, we went to 4H and learned a ton of stuff from the representatives of our local electric cooperative.  They did a great job explaining how things work and telling the kids stories of trying to get to the poles by whatever means available - truck, car, 4 wheeler, horse and boat!  How they have gone to help other states during disasters and how they had to get help from other states during our ice storm a few years back.  

After 4H we went back to have dinner with some of the other homeschool families and had a great time, again, as usual.  We've been so blessed to find this group.

Pink trees and pink eyes.

Our ornamental peach tree is proclaiming spring!!

We have plans today.  Lots of plans.  We have 4H electricity club at 4 o'clock, park day at 2 o'clock and a doctor's appointment for the pinkeye I woke up with yesterday at 1 o'clock.  I went ahead and let my job know that I probably won't get in a full day's work today.   Oh I hate pinkeye.  One time when the kids were little, they kept passing it back and forth between them. Finally I put a chart in the bathroom and told them that we were going to wash our hands 100 times a day and get prizes for it.  We never made it to 100 in a single day, but the pinkeye went away and the kids got prizes which were much cheaper than all the doctor's office copays and eye drops we were paying for.  (Of course I didn't take into account the water bill!) Hopefully, this time, I will be able to keep it contained.  It's easier now than it was with little ones. 

This and that, Sunday and Monday.

We had a pretty good day yesterday.  We caught a ride to church with my cousin.  Then when we got home, I made lasagna for lunch.  (I've gotten really good at the gluten free lasagna).  Then I started working on a jam cake for my mom's birthday party.  Tomorrow is mom's 76th birthday.  It was my first ever jam cake and I made it from scratch because usually we start with a spice cake mix, but I can't do that because I wanted to eat some of it and I am gluten free.   It turned out to be pretty good, but a little too moist in my opinion. (which didn't stop me from having it for breakfast today!) I'll try next time with less butter.  Jam cake is my mom's favorite cake, so it's worth trying again.  For mom's birthday supper I made potato soup and despite my complete inability to follow a recipe, it turned out pretty well.  I'll try that again.  I did write my changes on the recipe, so hopefully, I'll be able to get very close to that the next time.  :-)   We had a very nice small family gathering to celebrate mom's birthday. 

Later on, we made the girl try on 5 prom dresses that were loaned to us by a friend.  Two of them are just gorgeous on her, but of course, the girl does not like them.  She is extremely picky about her clothes.  I remember a few years ago, taking her to JC Penney and she was going through the clothes, dismissing them without even trying them, on, going through the racks saying "sleeves", "pink", "flowers", etc. as a reason to reject them.  We once walked all the way through Limited Too without her liking even one single article of clothing enough to try one of them on.  We've done the same with many. many other stores.  I am not looking forward to prom shopping at all.  A part of me, just wants to say pick one of these 5 dresses or else, but what if this turns out to be her only prom ever and all she remembers is 'mom made me wear this green dress and I hated it."  What is a mom to do?

Some pictures from our house.

The kitchen phone.

My attempt at Book Spine poetry it says The Lord God Made Them All, Dragon's Fat Cat, Bears on Wheels, Oh My a Fly, But Not the Hippopotamus, Thank You God.

The kid's chore white board, which they have embellished with this tyrannosaurus trying to pick up a pineapple.  I am not sure why.

I thought Friday

was going really well this time.  I did work.  The kids did school and had a lot of outside time because it was really pretty and sunny and warm.  Then, we went to my mom's house to visit for a little while and then we came home to watch our Netflix selection which was season 2, disk 1 of The Mary Tyler Moore show.  I assumed (incorrectly it seems) that if everyone was sitting and watching the show with me, then everyone was finished with their schoolwork.  I was under this delusion until approximately 11:30 p.m. when someone handed me his spelling textbook and asked me to read him his spelling words.  It was only one subject and this only took a few minutes, but still!  I expect the work to be finished before the screen time starts. 

Thursday night.

It's 9:35 p.m. here at our house.  My husband has gone to bed.  I've just come back from volunteering at the children's hospital.  My daughter is doing Algebra 2 on Teaching Textbooks and my youngest son who is finished with school, is playing a video game.  They are both simultaneously listening to Jim Dale read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the computer.  My daughter pauses it when she needs an algebra hint, which is verbal on the computer as well. 

I was looking for reading material this morning, searching for good books that we haven't previously read and I found this article. which expresses very well how our family feels about the Harry Potter books. Here's a quote:

"The quest for power without goodness is truly a journey toward pathetic and grotesque brokenness as is portrayed in the King’s Cross chapter in The Deathly Hallows when Harry is face to face with a visual depiction of Voldemort’s soul. Like the White Witch in Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, evil according to the Potter books cannot even comprehend the great strength of love and is ultimately destroyed by it".

My daughter just informed me that we need to go to the library.  We do.  We're addicted to books.

A word of caution, if you have this many books (37) checked out of the library at one time, don't let them get overdue.  Trust me.

I can't think of anything.

There have been a couple of events around here this week that I have considered blogworthy, but when I sit down to type I can't think of them.   Sometimes it is very frustrating being me.  I'm getting my work done, but not much else.  :-(

The girl is attacking her schoolwork today in earnest, after spending a couple of days only doing the minimum and spending the rest of her time reading an amusing book and trying to train the puppy.  The boy got up Monday and blitzed a bunch of his school work so that he could then take several days doing the minimum and spend the majority of his time outside and then blitz the rest of it on Friday night late (probably).  They get it done though although they deal with motivational issues because we have given control over to them.  I wonder, since they've been handed this kind of responsibility pretty young, if, when they get to my age, they;ll be better at pacing themselves than I have been.  It took me quite a while doing my current job, to learn not to procrastinate about it and then work like crazy right at the end of the pay period. 

The weather is so beautiful here.  I really don't want to be inside working so I envy them their flexibility.  

The April fool's day report.

If you all have read this blog for a while, you'll know we enjoy April fool's day.  I get up earlier than the kids, so it's not difficult to get some jokes done before they get up.  I put Jello in the Kool-aid pitcher, tiny balloons in a few shoes, switched all the cereal bags in the open cereal boxes (we have 3 open right now) and put an autocorrect on the computer they use for school work that types the word "April" every time they try to type the word "the".  Some of these have not been discovered yet.  One shoe balloon was found, but no one commented on the other ones, and I don't want to ask.  I did ask my son last night if he'd found the Kool-aid one and he said "what?" and I said "nevermind.", but they did math and other things for school yesterday and didn't do any of the things they need Microsoft Word for, so that autocorrect one will get to surprise them on another day.

My son did the biggest unintentional April fool's joke of all on both his parents yesterday at about 4:00 a.m.  My husband woke up to go to work and before leaving, looked at my son's bunk.  It was empty.  So he checked the couch and the other bedrooms, all other possible sleeping places.  Then (lucky for him) he remembered to look in the top bunk and saw my son sleeping up there.  Apparently, there had been a couple of spiders near the lower bunk.  I don't blame him for moving.  Then, after my husband had left for work, I got up to go to the bathroom, noticed the empty bunk, looked in exactly the same places, but did not consider the upper bunk, because I figured he had it full of legos or something, so I actually went outside and yelled for him, before coming back in and hearing him breathing in the upper bunk.  Normally, I wouldn't have done any of this, but our son had left a light on in his lower bunk, kind of highlighting that he wasn't in it.  My normal routine is to stumble to the bathroom without really looking at anything. 

After work, we had a 4H needlework club meeting and a 4H performing arts club meeting.  At the needlework meeting they were doing community service, making fleece blankets to donate for babies at a local hospital and next month they are going to learn both knitting and crocheting and my daughter is going to teach both!  She's come a long way with her shyness and 4H has a lot to do with that.   It's pretty cool.

We've had a ton of fun with these balloons!