7 Quick Takes Friday: Thanksgiving Edition

We took the week off of school . . .

1. Thanksgiving

Obviously, Thanksgiving was a big affair this week! Click here for the report

2. Date Night

Chris and I went on a date without even the baby, our first in an embarrassingly long time. Getting out together during these years is exceedingly difficult because (1) babysitting adds $50-75 to any outing we're doing, (2) we have no family in town, and (3) we're still several years away from having the oldest sibling be able to babysit. I watch some of our friends who finally have middle schoolers and immediately begin going on a weekly date night with husband and wife, and, after all those years of getting out alone only once or twice a year, I can see why!

Anyway, we caught "Sully" while it was still in theaters and recommend it. It had perhaps only one foul world and a few moments of taking the Lord's name in vain, but no other offensive themes.

Dinner at Wolfgang Puck was delicious and wonderful: how I loved to sit and be served by someone else!

3. Advent

Advent is knocking on the door . . . check out a few links for planning purposes (click here).

5. Scholastic Scenes

We took the week off of school--okay, okay, we still did Memory Work and read our History books--but I did publish our new color-coded routines (click here).

6. Family Books of the Week (in progress or completed)

• Read-alouds
• "Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints" (Loreto Publications, originally published 1894)
• "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne (1870)
• We've been reading Thanksgiving and fall-based books from the library for a couple of weeks and I'll return them now that Thanksgiving is past:
• "Giving Thanks" by Katherine Paterson
• "Cranberry Thanksgiving" by Devlin
• "Thanksgiving Is . . . " by Gail Gibbons
• "Over the River and Through the Wood" by Child
• "An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving" by Louisa May Alcott
• "In November" by Rylant
  "The Busy Little Squirrel" by Tafuri
• Mama
• "Divine Intimacy" (1963)--current daily holy reading
• "Joan of Arc" by Mark Twain
• book about Marian apparitions
• For Connecting with History:
• "Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia"
• John
• "St. John Bosco"
• "Manual for Spiritual Warfare"
• "Indian in the Cupboard" (again)
• Mary
• "Young Faces of Holiness"--Mary's daily saint book
• "The Moffats Museum"
• Margaret
• "Mrs. Piggle Wiggle" (with Mama alternating)

7. Meals

• Saturday
• Who knows what the children ate with their babysitter, but Chris had I had a delicious movie-and-dinner date at Wolfgang Puck! Their butternut squash soup is a-ma-zing!
• Sunday
• Zoodles / pasta, marinara, meatballs
• Monday--priest guest over for dinner
• pork tenderloin, green beans, wild rice /pasta
• Tuesday
• Sausage, spaetzle, roasted asparagus
• Wednesday
• Chris took the family to a restaurant for the "pre-exhaustion" of Thanksgiving preparations
• Thursday
• Thanksgiving (click here for the report)
• Friday
• Leftovers

This week, I taught Mary how to make five-ingredient bars I've begun making as one of our out-and-about snacks to cut down on the cost of the very expensive Clif bars our kids eat. They're so easy and now I can assign the 8- or 10-year-olds to "make our bars for the week," and they will!

Making chocolate chip snack bars

Our family already doubles the batch of whole grain waffles for a given breakfast, so now we have to quadruple it to have a batch to freeze for a quick breakfast later in the week.

Bonus Reading: "Elegant Modesty" is a wonderfully useful article on pragmatic fashion tips. They're in bullet format and instead of being elusively vague are practical, e.g., "wearing layers indicates higher economic status" and "wearing brighter colors on the top and more neutrals on the bottom draws attention to the face." I share because I imagine other mothers will appreciate this article in helping guide their daughters in learning how to dress with elegant modesty.

My  Friday and Saturday ahead of me hold: doing school planning for the last month, doing all our Advent preparations (which I already planned on Wednesday), and trying to complete all our Christmas shopping so it is DONE and I can remain SANE. Thus, I commence now . . .


For more 7 Quick Takes Friday, check out This Ain't the Lyceum.