Winter is a'comin in

We spent this week (and will spend the next) in self-quarantine before going to California for Thanksgiving. It's been challenging at times! But we also had some fun.

Monday we woke up to snow! One day a week our school time is devoted to handicrafts and tales - normally we embroider or draw while I read aloud from King Arthur, Tales from the Odyssey, and whatever else we're reading. With the beautiful snow, I decided that snowcrafting was certainly a handicraft, so we headed outside. The boys and I built a snow fort, and the girls made a snow garden. It was a lot of fun! When we were tired, we came in and drank hot chocolate while I read aloud. It was awesome. 

In the afternoon, we tried to do our Crowned with Virtue meetings over zoom. It didn't work so well. Only one of the two other girls got on, and Rea and Sara started by being super silly and ended by fighting. Oh, well.

Tuesday we finished up our unit on medieval Japan. We must have done something else, but no one remembers it.

Wednesday we finished Charlotte's Web and made plans for our book party next week. We're going to decorate with webs with words in them, eat soup (to look like pig slop), and watch the old cartoon version. We're excited! Tempers began fraying and people started getting grumpy in the afternoon, but we're making it.

Thursday was sunny and beautiful, so we did nature study day (since we're skipping our Friday nature group for quarantine purposes). The girls explored our new neighborhood and found a fabulous fort behind some overgrown bamboo where the sidewalk ends. It's exciting! After Mike got off work, we went hiking out in the wilds of Crestwood Park and picked barberries at our old Forest Kindergarten site. We had a lot of fun playing on the rocks - Sara found the tree where we took a picture of Grandma and the kids the year Gideon was born! We made a fabulous wildberry jelly that year with barberries, oregon grapes, and fireberries, and we're trying to reproduce it this year.

Friday had freezing winds, so we were very glad we'd done our outside time Thursday. We had a fabulous math discussion about a game at a school fair where the kid got 3 balls and had to knock down 10 ducks. We figured out how many different ways you can do that, and I tried to make a 3D graph. It was really cool.

Saturday we went berrying again. We got more barberries, lots of hawthorn, a few oregon grapes, some wild grapes, fireberries, wild grapes, and some amazing apples that were rather mushy but tasted like cider! The berries will be made into jelly soon, but we deseeded the apples, blended them in our blender, and ran them through the applesauce maker/food strainer that Mike uses for jelly. What came out was the most amazing cider ever! We'll have to make picking cider apples and making cider a tradition.

Now the kids have made a fort and Rea is reading aloud Calvin and Hobbes while I write this and Mike orders the food for our drive. :D

Another new family moved into the ward and reached out on the ward Facebook page looking for friends for their kids. They have daughters age 11 and 9, so Rea now has a virtual playdate scheduled for this week. The mom is actually starting an online business as a coach, so maybe Alison will have a friend too!

Alison is working hard on her business again. She enrolled in a class that identifies your Brand Identity (basically your personality type for business) in hopes that it would re-energize her, since she loves personality typing systems. It worked, and now she's transitioning back to being polyphasic and working on a bunch of things. She's hired a designer to redo her Facebook profile pictures (yay!) and is figuring out something to start selling and also working on a new system for getting more people into her Facebook group without spending so much money on ads - choosing a cool challenge to take on (related to Power Emotions, of course) and inviting people into the group to watch her do it. She's excited to try it.

Mike has been continuing to work on his masters degree, and is approaching finals quickly. He hopes to keep the As that he currently has, but will count those chickens when they hatch. He also is teaching his college course, and continuing to post jokes to his joke blog.