1. Celebrating Chris' Birthday
We celebrated Chris' birthday a couple of days after the fact on Sunday. We had a good breakfast in the morning and he opened his gifts.
My gift to Chris lasted all of 24 hours before our toddler broken it.
After Mass, lovely friends with eight children plus Chris' parents came over for an early dinner. I'm glad it still appeared as a feast due to the brisket--which Chris cooked for his own birthday--because I forgot to put out the lemonade, the hot dogs, the macaroni and cheese, and Grandmom's delicious homemade baked beans! There is a reason nobody trusts me to host (well) or make a simple meal (properly), let alone a celebratory one!
2. Little Attic
We have a little side attic off of the school room which heretofore has stored all our camping gear (as if we ever go camping!). This week, the girls took occupation of it and gave it a feminine touch.
They opened up the camping cot and put in a pillow and blanket. They made it a house of prayer by putting a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, honored by a vase of flowers, a decoration of the Holy Family, a cross, and a bunch of rosaries.
The girls spent the rest of the week in there reading novels, knitting, and playing their violin. Basically, it was the best.
A little brother discovered that the seemingly soft and fluffy pink insulation really does cause hurt and discomfort for a day, so, for now, nobody under eight is allowed in the attic until we have it finished (next week, God willing)!
3. Scholastic Scenes
David playing kitchen during school time . . .
Margaret doing math and John doing computer work . . .
Mary practicing violin . . .
Margaret doing science, John doing Latin, Joseph doing catechism . . .
This is our second week of all doing the same history instead of my juggling three different history curricula. I am still mourning my older two grades doing really fabulous history programs, but we have to try this "synchronization for survival" right now. So far, so good. I'm getting my sea legs with the program.
I thought I could just hand off TAN's program to my third grader to do on her own, but it was not going well at all, shall we say, for the first six weeks of school, even though I tweaked it each week. These last two weeks of my taking over management of it has been good. My goal is to do History with the whole group four to five mornings per week, looking something like:
- Morning 1: Listen to the chapter on CD
- Morning 2: Do mapwork or activity (like one day this week, we made our own codes to practice cryptography as from the French and Indian War)
- Morning 3: Listen to the chapter on CD (again) and do the review questions orally as a group
- Morning 4: Do mapwork or activity
- Morning 5: The top three children take the quiz. Then we grade the quiz as a group (but with nobody offering answers or revealing their grades to siblings), which ensures they actually see their mistakes and learn something (which they don't do if they don't bother to review the graded work I return to their binders). Do the narration exercise as a group, then have the fifth and seventh graders write out their narrations as paragraphs to submit.
Somewhere in there, I would like to have my top two or three grades actually read the chapter as well, not just listen to it.
4. Miscellaneous Moments
Sisters in dresses from Grandmom . . .
For recess one day, in my effort to stop shoving a square peg into a round hole, I took the children outside to work on renovating our rustic fire pit. They even came up with an idea to lay down a new path to the fire pit! It was a great half hour that restored sour attitudes to workable attitudes for school.
Thomas learning how to cut . . .
5. All Hallows Eve
We were rained out on Halloween Night with a big storm that was predicted to involve thunder, lightening, and hail, as well. So, instead, we carved pumpkins and watched a family movie ("A Bear Called Winnie")!
This year was a milestone in that I did not have to carve a single pumpkin as now my two oldest are competent and they helped all the little siblings.
6. Feast of All Saints
We had spent all of Thursday afternoon preparing for the parish homeschoolers' All Saints party. My fifth and seventh graders really designed and created everything themselves, yet I still felt very stretched thin this week. Just to attend the party, one has to create saint costumes for each child, design a poster board about a saint, design a game (which typically will involve errands running out to stores), bring candy, and bring a potluck dish. We cut school in half this week just to accomplish what sounds like such a "do-able list," but sure doesn't feel like it!I try to tell myself that doing things like this counts as school. Surely researching the canonization of a saint for the saint board counts as catechism, and so forth. But all this work for a party involves cutting things like math, composition, phonics . . . and if those get cut too often, then what? Really, I'm thinking more and more of schooling year round.
Then on Friday morning, we were up at 5:30 to attend the 7:00 a.m. Mass for the Feast of All Saints. Chris took us to Chik-Fil-A for breakfast on the way home (thanks, honey!), we picked up our weekly grocery order, spent an hour unloading it, then bustled around getting children into costumes.
The one o'clock party was very well-done and helped encourage our children to know and celebrate the saints and to feel in community with many other Catholics doing the same.
We started out with a hearty potluck. Thanks to Chris' suggestion, I made slow cooker meatballs that were a big hit! I'm definitely going to try making those again.
Then we did the cake walk in which people won doughnuts, each in a small Ziplock baggie and with a deceased soul's name attached so that we will pray for those people this month.
The children then dashed off around the gymnasium to play all the games, picking up candy, saint medals, or stickers at each station.
Toward the end of the party, one of my children who is becoming more self-aware came to me and requested to please leave because 'I am becoming overwhelmed!' so I offered that this child could sit in the car during the 30 minutes it would take me to gather everything and load the van and the offer was happily accepted! Then when we got home, a different child was missing and after a while of searching, I really sent out a sibling search team because I knew this child had been in the van on the ride home. It turns out that this child had stayed silently in the van after we all went into the house just to have some alone time in one of the only places a person can get it.
At this point, this mama wants to crawl under a rock for numerous days of silence, but the best I can do is provide those opportunities for my sweeties. I don't think mamas ever get to go hide, even the introvert ones!
Presenting my saints . . .
Bl. Pier Giorgio (John, almost 13)
Bl. Anna-Maria Taigi (Mary, almost 11)
St. Dorothy (Margaret, 8)
Military Chaplain (Joseph, 6)
Military Chaplain (Thomas, 4)
7. Trick or Treating
Our neighborhood decided to cancel trick-or-treating during the storm and to do it Friday night instead. I had left David home napping with Daddy during the All Saints party, so he was a fresh, happy lobster when he joined us for trick-or-treating!
I don't know how to make this holy three days less exhausting . . . or how to be this exhausted yet still to be cheerful instead of my barking instructions, kids running around crazily, and their becoming crabby. Do you mamas have methods to achieve both? Maybe it is impossible, like we just know and accept that Easter and Christmas are simply going to suck every drop of energy out of Mama for many days. But I do recognize that it was a l'il mistake that I scheduled hostessing four days in a row (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday) amidst these holy days. So, now, it's off to bed for this pumpkin head!
Feast of All Souls' events to be covered in the next 7 Quick Takes!
