Mudpies and Make-up: Peek at our Week

We’ve trimmed the tree and covered every square inch of the house in garland.

Ok maybe not every square inch, but close. I’m always surprised each year at the amount of garland I’ve collected. More than any one person should own. It does make everything really festive though.

My least favorite part of putting up the Christmas tree is keeping the cat out of it. The shiny ribbons and dangly ornaments are just too tempting for him. He finds himself getting a big squirt of water while he mindlessly bats at, climbs up, and runs under the tree.

My other peeve about decorating is the endless pine needles that cover my floors. No matter how much you try and vacuum, they end up everywhere. I told Saul I thought it looked like we had artificial turf in our living room.

By Thursday and several attempts at vacuuming up all the pine needles, I discovered a huge clog in the tubing. No wonder nothing was being sucked up off the floor…

Now I’m no vacuum specialist or anything. Certainly this couldn’t be a difficult task. But after 20 minutes of shaking, poking, and prodding, I was no closer to unclogging that tube than before. Even the marshmallow fork and butter knife barely helped, which is weird, because I’m sure they are the exact tools Mr. Kirby himself would use if his wonderful machine were to clog up. I wouldn’t really know though because we’ve never spent more than $59.99 for a vacuum…

It was nice to be able to get back to routine this week.

Last weeks break was very needed, but I’ve mentioned before that my kids just function best with routine and our routine involves school.

Isaac had another very rough week. I’m not sure what is going on, but he was stuck in his room a lot.

Nate is working through his times tables still. We put his regular math on hold so that he could finish memorizing 7’s, 8’s, and 9’s.

I picked out a bunch of Christmas Books from the library and we’ve been reading through them over lunch and for our morning journal time. This was a neat book, How Six Found Christmas. We used it for a journal prompt: How do you describe Christmas through your senses?

We are going through the Names of Jesus, making these ornaments, and reading through this 15 day devotional to start of each of our school days. It’s a pretty scaled back Advent, but still special and fun.

In Zoo 3, we finished horses. The kids learned to draw a horse (Draw Write Now Book 8) which was one of the hardest animals we’ve done so far.

Elaina has been doing a lot of math review. Math is one thing she really enjoys.

I’ve been trying to convince her that she is now old enough to try to spell words by sounding them out. She wasn’t buying it. I got out this game for some simple spelling practice and it really helped to boost her confidence. She spelled 17 of the 20 words correctly.

Olivia had a cold, which meant she was not interested in doing school. She wanted to “hold you” most of the day and sit on my lap all through our morning lesson time.

By Friday though she was feeling better. She sat down to do the Building Thinking Skills Book and that occupied her for almost an hour! She loved it so much I actually overheard her telling her sis, “This is not your book anymore sissy. This is MY book now.”

Oh ‘livi…

We stayed pretty close to home this week. The weather was absolutely freezing and the wet snow made for terrible traveling conditions. I foolishly planned to run all of my errands on Wednesday, when we got the bulk of the snow. The icy roads were making cars slip around and that makes me really nervous.

All of the kids need snow boots. Isaac has been wearing my boots, which is crazy to think he is getting big enough to do that. I caught Elaina out in her Keens, without socks even, in the four inches of snow that we had. What are you thinking girl ???

Friday night I hosted my Girls.

These gals are pretty amazing! We’ve been meeting for nearly a year now for regular time away, and it has been wonderful to help me balance mommy brain with time for myself. We had an ornament exchange and made ourselves into Elves.

My brother and sister-in-law came to visit this weekend. It was really nice to spend time with them! They were so sweet to treat the kids to a movie too.

We finished off the rest of the Thanksgiving turkey, mostly just by eating turkey sandwiches. My kids love potato pancakes so I used up the leftover mashed potatoes making those.

I made soup a couple of times too. The only way I can bribe the kids into eating soup is by making homemade bread to go with it. I haven’t made this Bushman’s Bread very often, but it is so yummy each time I do.