Mudpies and Make-up: Peek at our Week {Rain, rain, and more rain}

These faces really make me smile!

Especially when they are happily playing together.

Nate has got just about 3 weeks left of school. He has done so well! I’m really hoping he gets a teacher next year that is as wonderful as the one he had this year. He has already finished up all the major projects and reports, and is coming home with little to no homework.

Elaina is still working through her Little House on the Prairie Unit. I’ve been having her read aloud to me, a chapter each day. I am super impressed with the reading strides she has had just in the last couple of months, particularly with fluency and confidence.

We finalized Isaac’s paperwork for middle school this week. He seems to be accepting the upcoming change, and although he does express nervousness at times, we just keep encouraging him in the new opportunities he will have. This week brought a lot of new emotions for me too – probably because he turned eleven. Time is really flying by…

Nate was ecstatic to finally see Field Day come. Bright and early Monday morning, we got a panicked message from him –silly boy left his new prized watch at home. The exact watch he just HAD to have, or else risk missing all of his events. It is rather hard to believe he could forget about the watch, after listening to him talk constantly about it these past six weeks. He threw down hints like, “Sure would be nice to get a new watch in my Easter basket,” and “Having a watch would really help me manage my time better, and that would help me be a better student.” Nice try, dude. I’ve already bought you two watches, so this next one is on you. In the end he used his own chore money to purchase a watch at Walmart for $10.99, left it at home for the event he wanted it for, and later told us, “Well, there were actually a lot of people there with watches, so I could’ve just asked one of them for the time.” Don’t even get me started on how many times that was mentioned ahead of time by us….

We all got to bring him his watch though, and it was so fun to see him! I would have liked to stay longer, but it was Isaac’s birthday, and he had other plans in mind for his special day. Anyway, the day was a success and he put it down on record as “the best day ever in the history of Nate.” He brought home several ribbons, and ended up with a sore arm from the Softball Toss that he competed in. We did pick him up early form school, so that he could join us at the movie theater (a special treat for Isaac’s birthday.)

We finished up our Shark unit and are now taking a mini break from Ocean Science. We should easily be done by the middle of summer, but I need some time to get the materials together, and with this nasty cold I’ve been dealing with, energy and time are low on hand. Our fall science units will be repeats from what I did with the boys, so that will make things very easy. At least in theory. I seem to find a way to make simple things more complicated….

We’ve had some crazy weather around here! Lots of rain/thunder storms, and even a couple of big hail storms. Coloradoans don’t even bat an eye though when the snow plows are out in mid-May to plow the highways that are so full of hail that it looks like snow. It did make for a very wet week. We had to get creative in order to burn the excess energy that four growing bodies usually expend on the trampoline.

We played lots of games, did extra crafts, and offered the Xbox K’nect pretty often. By the time the weekend rolled around and the trampoline dried out, they were begging to go out. Now I don’t know if it was the week long break from the trampoline, the extra hormones raging through these pre-teen boys, or just the temptation of believing they had no witnesses, but both boys ended up getting a bit too aggressive. Too much pushing. Too much wrestling. Too much taunting and teasing.

When I came into the kitchen, I just happened to witness the behavior, and overhear some very foul language. Sad smile