School Days

 This week, things started heading toward whatever 'normal' is going to be this fall. 

We had our first day at our Classical Conversations community on Monday. It was what they call "Week 0," not a real week following the curriculum, but it gave us a chance to try getting there on time and to see how things will go. We made it on time, but not prettily. Alison is trying hard to think of a different way to do lunches - everyone says "just have the kids make their own" as if that weren't MORE work than doing it all myself. And Sunday evenings are an awful time to have something scheduled, because we don't have a schedule Sundays after church and we like that. Oh, well. We'll figure it out. We don't have community this week, because of Labor Day, so we have another week to think about it.

The girls wanted to do first day of school pictures like their cousins, so we took some Monday afternoon. The boys didn't want to do back-to-school pictures, so we just have pictures of them without the little whiteboard sign the girls filled out. Alison meant to send them out on the family Signal chat but hasn't got around to it yet.

The kids do a presentation every week on community day, and this week they were asked to give an impromptu presentation of "tell us something about yourself." Everyone is supposed to ask the presenter questions, and they did a really good job at that! Most of them had fun; Sara didn't want to do it and ended up saying, "My name is Sara and I like breathing," but she did it! And she answered questions, too. Hopefully this community will go well.

Timmy is making great progress in reading and got almost halfway through the new level he started this week. Gideon is doing more handwriting as part of his reading and math lessons than I've done with the other kids, and he spent sacrament meeting today writing the days of the week over and over. He was very proud of himself. Rea and Sara's new language arts program was backordered, but it finally shipped, so we should be able to start it this week. The caterpillars we got last Friday have grown from tiny specks to huge long bugs, and they should be spinning their chrysalises any day now. Overall, school seems to be off to a good start.

The kids had a really hard time with our nature group last year because they had no friends in the group, so this year we decided to do our own, smaller group with some good friends. The kids Timmy's age couldn't join us, though, so we were scrambling. Then on Friday he made a new friend at the park, and his mom said she'd like to join us! So we might be able to start our own nature group this week. Alison is pretty excited for a more relaxed and fun group.

We decided to do a no-screens week this week because we've been using them a little too much. It was hard at first, but it's getting better. The kids are playing with toys more, and Alison got physical books out of the library to read. It's probably good timing, because Alison's phone seems to be going bad. We'll probably have to replace it soon; hopefully it won't completely die before Alison actually orders a new one.

Rea has been saying that she's old enough to babysit and urging us to go on a date. So on Friday we went out to have Greek food at Greek Souvlaki. We wanted to go to the new Dog Depot store near us, but it closes at 6, so we went to Savers and got some winter pants for the boys and some sundresses for Boo - she is pretty good about potty training when she's not wearing pants, so we're just going to have her wear dresses with nothing under them for the foreseeable future and see if that works. The girls are going clothes shopping with their grandmothers this week, so we need to check what clothes we already have and what we need. Maybe that will be our Labor Day activity.

On Saturday morning, we got invited to help pick the Plastows' apple tree. We ended up with a gallon bag of dried apples and a gallon of applesauce, and we've still got two thirds of the apples left to process.

Saturday we did baths for church and our new bathtub got used for the first time. It is wonderful! Boo had so much fun, she took two separate baths. She says it's big enough to swim in. Alison got to soak in the bath, too, and loved it. It will be wonderful this winter.