Around Here Week 45: 11/04-11/10

A glimpse into what it is like to live in our home just this minute.

photo cred: Gemma Rose

Intentional Outdoor Hours: 521+ hours (of 1000)
We got out for a few walks, but other that, it's been pretty cold and wet around here. Also, daylight savings time has taken us all for a loop this week. I love the sun up when I am leaving for work in the morning - it has done wonders for helping me get moving in the morning, but it is pitch dark around here by about 5:45p. The kids run outside as soon as they get home and only get about an hour outside before it's getting dark (or they're too cold). Grey was like "What is going on, Mom - it's not even 6:30p and it looks like the middle of the night!" Only up a little more than one hour this week!

Reading and finishing The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Then I started reading Juntos because my Spanish Praxis is coming up this month and I'm seriously starting to sweat with test anxiety. eek! send good thoughts please.

Watching Grey participate at church as an altar server for the first time. He was pretty nervous but he had some great 'teachers' in Jeremy and Julian (long time altar servers). He said it definitely made church go faster and he'd like to do it every week. (hah).

Panicking over our first ever scare with lice nits. We got the call from daycare this week that it was going around and that Violet had a few nits in her hair. Obviously, I became immediately itchy myself (hahhaa, I know you're scratching your head right now too!) and quickly spiraled into crazy momma land of clean.and.kill.all.the.things. I meticulously searched through my family's heads and thought that maybe (?) Gemma had a few nits too (did she? did my eyes start crossing and I imagined it?) so I treated Violet, Gemma, and myself just to be sure. All the boys looked perfectly fine - which made sense to me; if anyone is snuggled up too close; it's us three girls. Then it was throwing all.the.things in the wash (bedsheets, stuffed animals, etc), and lint rolling carseats and couches, and putting brushes and hair ties in the freezer...ya know, all things I definitely had time and energy to add to my chore list. LOL. In any case, we've moved on from that little scare all clear and fine - but even just writing about it, I'm itchy again.  waaaah. #liceparanoiaforever

Opening an art instagram account for our resident artist: Violet Mary. I have been repeating that she's a real live artist since the girl could hold a paintbrush/crayon - I've even taken in some of her pieces to show our high school art teacher (haha, #crazymomma)  Each day she comes home from preschool with these crayon drawings, but one this week really blew me away with the movement and the intentional choices. Like, I screamed aloud. So I opened an account for her and I've been daydreaming about her someday running it herself and sharing her creations. I want to support her but it feels like it's bigger than me. I will keep encouraging and sharing and try to learn more about art.

High fiving our kids for good report cards. They both did good and Grey worked hard enough this second half of the marking period to pull all his grades up to make the honor roll. He was so relieved (no more xbox ban!) but also commented that he understood how much work it took to dig out of that whole of bad grades. Let's hope it sticks so he just keeps 'em up from the start!

Serving breakfast for our local veteran's at my school's annual Veteran's day breakfast and assembly. The elementary school kids made adorable and thoughtful placements and posters while our high school student council helped volunteer - but it is our teaching staff that does all the donations, cooking, and serving. I loved walking around filling coffee cups and chatting up the veteran's who come from the community or who are long ago alumni of our high school.  Our chickens even helped prepare for the breakfast; I washed 5 dozen eggs and gave our home ec department another 4 dozen to wash for the morning #chickenswhogiveback (LOL)

Feeling grateful to nature as B got his buck for archery season. He scored an eight point on a very cold and windy morning and then about a half mile of dragging it out of the woods uphill. He was grateful to get it done so that now he can just take Grey for rifle season (Grey was pretty pumped about that too, hah). I'm pretty happy to have a stocked freezer now, as we were fresh out of deer meat.

Giving the kids a little special time. The sweet skips (Gem & Rust) got a sleepover at Abba & Chum's house on Friday night while the wild skips (Booboo & Vially) got to choose a friend and went to the Tomahawk Hockey game on Saturday night with their momma.

Teaching and reviewing everything from Unit 2 with the Spanish 1 students and giving them their Unit Test this week. Spanish 1 Honors learned all about Ecuador and capybaras to prepare for their first Spanish novel: El Capibara con Botas. Spanish 2 finally got their day of the dead catch up by watching Coco and reading some comprehensible input in a Coco article. Spanish 2 Honors learned more about writing their own Spanish spooky stories (next week!) while Spanish 3 Honors dipped their first two into Spanish past tense (!) I'm starting with Imperfect tense (is that weird?) and we'll go from there. I'm using Mis Clases Locas Super 7 Imperfect verb unit and we're doing personal interviews. We also announced our painted calavera winner from our collaboration unit and it was an art student: Scotty!

Making chicken and vegetable casserole, chicken and fries for the kids, flatbread pizza, and chicken wings in the air fryer. For the first part of the week, Brandon and I were doing that wacky 3 day 'military diet' detox which basically is meant to starve your self while eating really weird combinations of foods. It was mostly an experimental effort to remind ourselves to be conscious while eating (hah) and be more intentional as we move into the holiday season. Over the three days, I lost a little over 4lbs and B lost about 8lbs. Moving forward we're going to try to make better choices and just be aware to keep us from snack, snack, snacking all day on this Halloween candy.