Lake Lanier

Last night I got to get out by myself! I went (via carpool, of course) up to Lake Lanier for our RS campout dinner. I didn't spend the night because I'm really not sure Alexander and Andrew are ready for the emotional trauma that will entail, but I did skip bedtime.

It was a beautiful area and was such a lovely evening. I brought a sweater—because it's the end of September and I knew I'd be out late—but didn't even need to put it on! And to think it snowed in High River (and much of the surrounding area) today! Living in the south has its perks!

A snippet of our new daily grind

While the kids were busy with their math this morning (and I was sitting by Benjamin urging him on (my children have no concept of how to do exercises in a notebook because they've only ever done worksheets, really, but in the hopes of reusing these (expensive) textbooks with more than one child, I'm having my children do their work in a notebook and—oh, man!—they have no idea how title their page or number their problems or even write within the lines) I drafted up another fall poem.

The view from our kitchen window offers a lovely view of our tree-filled backyard and leaves are constantly falling from our trees. It's not even very much like fall here (yet—we still got into the 90s today) but the trees have had enough and are slowly dropping their leaves. We're constantly clearing our deck and walkways of leaves. I had to think of what things will look like when autumn is truly upon us.

Anyway, here goes...

As summertime draws to a close
The forest sheds its worn-out clothes.
It knows the year is growing old,
That winter brings death, dark and cold,
And so it offers us a pledge,
The final act of every hedge,
Of every bush or plant or tree
'Fore slipping into dormancy—
Pinecones, acorns, nuts, seeds, grain—
The promise things will grow again.
It tosses bright confetti leaves,
Bids us adieu and takes its leave.

It's almost time to start working on our annual Christmas poem so we'll consider all this poetry my warm-up.

We've been spending quite a lot of time with science this week. Our unit on recycling prompted us to listen to Greta Thunberg's speech together, which led us to research the Paris Agreement and a circular economy, which led us to a module introducing students to the idea of a circular economy, and everything just tied in so nicely. We're finished with our recycling chapter but still have more of the circular economy module to get through, so I think we'll do that before heading into the next chapter of our text book.

Alexander quotes

Tonight I drove Andrew's car to the church with the girls for their respective activities but when I returned home I was too afraid to attempt parking it in the garage because some incompetent soul parked the van way too far to the right, leaving far too squishy of a space for his vehicle to easily slide into.

The incompetent soul was me.

It's fine.

I just parked it in the driveway and began collecting scooters and helmets and chalk and other outside toys that hadn't been picked up while Rachel ran in to tell Andrew that he needed to come park his car. He came outside with a very sad Alexander who had not had a very happy time without Mommy.

Alexander happily came to me but became rather perplexed when Andrew hopped into the car.

"Daddy, no!" he cried. "How 'bout stay? How 'bout stay? How 'bout staaaaay?"

"He's just parking the car in the garage," I explained.

Sweet, silly baby. He really likes people to be home.

*****

Some poetry

The kids and I tried our hand at some poetry the other day. I wanted to do something a little more fun and seasonal with them, trying to remember that while I might be super interested (and thus entertained) by all the book learning we're doing, and recognizing that I am never really the life of the party, my children probably need to some more traditional fun in thrown in the mix.

And one of the characteristics of poetry is that it's "fun" to read.

Benjamin told me this (and it checks out because when I was doing some background research for our lesson this characteristic kept popping up as well, though I don't know that all poetry is fun to read). He wanted to write a haiku first:

Orange, red, yellow
Leaves of maples fall off trees
Brown sap dripping off trees

Then he drew a tree and in the treetops he wrote:

I really
love to
rake in the fall
and jump
in the huge piles

And lastly he wrote this (which I think may have been inspired by Percy Jackson, but I'm not really sure because I haven't read the series):

Zeus is a happy guy and
He powers our e-cars.

We've been talking a lot about the environment this week (having finished discussing life cycles we've moved onto other cycles...like reducing, reusing, recycling) and I think that's where the e-cars came in...maybe...though Zeus? I mean...I dunno. Thunderbolts = Electricity. Who knows what he was thinking when he wrote this?

Lepidopterophobia

Last night (after already being up with the baby, mind you), I was yanked from my sleep by a piercing, panicked shriek. I popped right out of bed and dashed out of my room.

A child had obviously been to visit the bathroom (the light was on) so I poked my head around the door frame. Zoë saw me, jumped and screamed again, and then fell on the floor sobbing.

"What is it?" I asked, pulling her back up.

"THERE!"she wailed, shakily pointing toward the stairs. "There was a... There was a..."

At this point my heart was racing and I was feeling rather jittery myself. Spit it out, child! WHAT WAS IT?!

Saturday and Sunday with Naanii

On Saturday the rest of us spent a rather quiet morning at home while Andrew ran Miriam to a stake-level Activity Days event. The church is unveiling a new youth program this coming Sunday and I'm crossing my fingers that they've come up with a better name than "Activity Days" because I always end up saying silly things like, "There will be an Activity Days...activity...this Wednesday."

Anyway, in the afternoon we met my second-cousin at Webb Bridge Park. Dylan has lived in Atlanta for several years now (sixteen, she thinks) and I haven't seen her in many years, so I was a little bit nervous about becoming reacquainted (because I'm always nervous about that sort of thing) and was glad to have my mom as an excuse to break the ice. But I honestly had nothing to worry about! Dylan is just as nice as her mother was and is just as excited as I am to have some family in the area (and Canadian family to boot)!

She was running a little late, so here are a few pictures of us exploring the playground (which is a pretty neat playground):

Zoë's Talk

Zoë was asked to give a talk this past Sunday, which she was rather excited about. We sat down to write it together after she had gained some experience on the subject matter (a rough Monday followed by a better Tuesday). She wanted desperately to work in Galatians 5:22–23 since that's her favourite scripture to repeat from memory these days, and it fit in with her topic fairly well.

Here's her talk:

2 Corinthians 9:7 says, “God loveth a cheerful giver.”

That means that when we be nice and share things, Heavenly Father is happy and we are happy. Sometimes it is hard to be nice and share things so we make bad choices and be mean to each other. But that’s not good. That’s like breaking the rules. 

Rules help us to make good choices so we can be happy. Sometimes rules tell us what not to do, like, to not break the law, to not hit your brother, and to not lie. Those are all bad things to do.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23) because there’s no rules against doing good things!

Like being a cheerful giver—there’s no rule against that!

On Monday my brother and I were sitting on a box together and I didn’t want to share so I pushed him off the box. He hit his head and cried a lot. I got in trouble. And everyone was sad. 

On Tuesday my mom gave us some crayons and my brother and I got to colour on the box together. When my baby brother coloured on my side of the box I decided not to get mad and to just let him colour with me. And everyone was happy.

That’s how I know that being a cheerful giver is good.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

This (being a cheerful giver) is also what she learned about in her primary class. They were challenged to do two nice things this week and when we got home from church Zoë was on it!

I asked Alexander to take off his shoes so he could go down for a nap.

"I will! I will!" he said, as he crouched down to reach his shoes.

"No, I will!" Zoë said.

She pushed him over and wrestled him to the ground.

"Stop it, Alex! Lie still! I'm! Helping! You! Take! Off! Your! Shoes!" she grunted as she fought him over the right to take off his shoes. Then she forced him out of his cute little suit coat.

All the while he's screaming, "No! My shoes! My do it!" and she's yelling at him, "I'm serving you!"

So obviously that lesson went over really well.

Thursday and Friday with Naanii (plus a happy birthday for Andrew)

My mom is headed to Poznan, Poland, for the International Viola Congress next week and on the way she decided to stop and spend a few days with us. Stopping by Atlanta on your way to anywhere is relatively easy since Atlanta is quite a popular place for layovers. In fact, it's the busiest airport in the world (and has been for the last two decades), so we're well-positioned for hosting people on their way to somewhere else (should they choose to have an extended layover here)!

Naanii arrived too late for the kids to see her on Wednesday night (she may have gotten in early enough to see them but her plane was delayed on the runway and then their baggage took a long time to come and by that time the metro (which I simply can't get used to calling MARTA, but people look at me really weird when I talk about the metro) was running on its evening schedule (ie. arriving and departing stations less frequently) so she was delayed at the station as well) but they were certainly excited to see her on Thursday morning.

Alexander knew she was coming and rushed to find her as soon as he woke up and then he just snuggled and snuggled and snuggled, which was weird for me because usually that's the treatment I get in the morning (it was also rather nice of my mom because he'd uncharacteristically soaked right through his diaper (usually he's dry or dryish in the morning) and was getting her damp, too). It was surprising behaviour for him, but I'm glad he's finally decided to like my mom (even if he only decided it right before we moved so far away).

How homeschool is going...

On the first day, we got through all our subjects (except for science, but including music (at least for Miriam)). I drove her to our new homeschool orchestra all by myself (after practicing the route with Andrew on Sunday afternoon). It's a 25 minutes drive, so this was no small thing for me.

Miriam enjoyed orchestra.

We hunkered down in a small classroom off the main room where Benjamin and I worked on social studies together (Benjamin picked out a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition to read together, which we'll be focusing on for a while). Zoë and Alexander played and ran around a little too much.

I know it was a little too much because Alexander tripped and fell, cracking his head on the table in the room.

I'm sure the orchestra enjoyed his lusty screams.

That is not a shadow on his forehead, sadly

Pulling the trigger

Well, we're homeschoolers now, I guess.

I submitted our "declaration of intent" form to the state and instead of walking into the school to turn in my form—Human interaction? No, thanks!—I just emailed them to the secretary and she'll get to discover them tomorrow. We'll still have to go back to get the kids' things (and return Benjamin's library book (he keeps checking out books from The Little House series, which is fine...except we have those, so why...?)).

Speaking of The Little House, I was reading to the kids from Little Town on the Prairie (look at us, logging those homeschooling hours already!) and Pa summarized my feelings quite nicely in chapter 18.

Ironically, this chapter is called "Literaries," but it was in all caps and the kerning was off so I couldn't figure out what the title was. LITE RARIES.

What's a lite rary?

Let's read to find out!

Oh. Literaries.

Neat that I struggled with that word (but in my defense the kerning was off).