Parentheticals

Look, we're posting on time! Only one week's worth of stuff, so it'll go fast. Last Sunday, Rea got her patriarchal blessing! She decided she wanted it and set up interviews and things, and it was so exciting to have it happen at last. It was a lovely experience. Wednesday Rea did a Secret Santa gift exchange in Young Women's. She had planned to make a snow globe with a sea turtle in it, but Mom procrastinated shopping until it was too late to find the turtle. After a lot of thought and effort, she ended up putting a Christmas candle in the glass globe with blue glass gems and a package of peppermint bark. It was pretty well received. One of her good friends got her name, and gave her a gorgeous locking journal cover that you can put new books into when you fill one up. It was perfect for her! Thursday this week was Rea's end-of-semester blue book exams. She had to draw the Western Hemisphere + Europe and label all countries, US states. and Canadian provinces and th...

This week on Monday we got a cat. Sara has done such a good job of taking care of Rocket that when she asked for a cat and agreed to take care of it the same way the parents decided that she was mature enough to trust to do it. We looked online at a few options and settled for a mixed breed not-very-allergenic black and white cat. He has had a few names - he started with the name Choge but now he is being called Jello, because he is a jellical cat. We will attach pictures to the bottom of this post. He is 8 weeks old (his birthday is June 14th), and he is very energetic and loving. He enjoys playing with everyone and doesn't love rocket a lot yet, however he tolerates him. Timmy also seems to be getting sick. He slept through the visit to Grandma's house and seemed poorly. He is coughing a lot, but he claims to be well. On Thursday was Rea's first day of school for the year. She is doing a class that meets every Thursday from 8:30 till 4:00. In class they all bring interest...

This has been a busy week! Monday we had CC. We lost another tutor, so now we have all 15 kids in one classroom. The tutor who's still here is a former public school teacher and is AMAZING, so it works, and the kids have made some new friends in the group. But it's also harder to keep everyone focused. We're working on other ideas to help the kids sit still and quiet. Tuesday and Wednesday Alison felt like she was coming down with a cold, so she rested a lot. Everyone else did fun things, probably. Thursday was Rea's Carnival party. We came home from Grandma and Grandpa's house early to meet the Dalyais. Rea picked Vietnam as her theme, and she and Aunt Amy made Vietnamese ginger cookies (yum!), and she helped everyone make paper lanterns and taught them a Vietnamese game. Then they had so much fun playing for four hours that we forgot to have dinner and got to bed pretty late. On Friday the 3rd we had a game day with the Wilsons at our house. We finished up playing...

As I sit down to write this, I see a one-paragraph summary from last Sunday and remember Mike telling me that he couldn't remember anything from that week and did I want to write something. I guess we never did anything about that. Oops. Last week we picked apples at the bishop's house, tried to get grapes, but didn't find many. We ended up buying grapes and made nearly three gallons of grape juice. This week we picked apples at the Paynes' and made delicious apple fruit leather. Gideon loved it so much that he wanted to eat all of it, so Mike told him that if he picked and processed the apples himself, he could have all the fruit leather that came from it. It took him four days, but he ended up with fruit leather that should be ready tomorrow morning. We hope it works for him. Monday was the last day of the first quarter of Classical Conversations; we had donuts and pizza. The kids are still not unequivocally enthusiastic, but Alison still thinks it's a great thing...

Classical conversations began this Monday. The kids all packed lunches and they all did foundations where they practiced memory work. They did a science experiment where they looked at thermometers in the sun and the shade and saw which one was hotter. They also did an art lesson where they learned about all of the shapes that can make up drawings (circles, lines, angles, etc). After that they ate lunch, and then Rea Sara and Mom went to essentials where they learned about grammar and the parts of a sentence. They also played "Number Knockout". Rea really enjoyed it and she especially loved essentials. Boo went to the nursery, and the teacher said that she was very well behaved. Gideon says that the toy oven was a good crib for dolls. Timmy made a friend there, and Sara liked lunch. After we were done with Classical Conversations, we all were super tired and fell asleep early and slept very late. Mike periodically goes down to visit the Salt Lace Community College surplus equ...

 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 picture...

This last week on Tuesday Alison and the kids went to see the dinosaurs at Ashton gardens at Thanksgiving Point. It was the first time that they were going somewhere with the new homeschooling group, however despite Alison's heroic efforts which enabled her to get there with all of the kids on time, everyone else that was supposed to show up showed up super late, and the kids were hot and tired by the time that the activity was supposed to start. It was frustrating. On Wednesday Alison and the kids went to grandma Julie's house in the morning, and then Alison drove back and picked up Mike in the afternoon so that the kids could all show him how well they learned how to swim over the summer. Mike doesn't remember a summer happening, but the kids all did swim really well, so he must have just missed it somehow. On Thursday evening Alison took the kids out to tombstone tales. They heard a lot of interesting stories about the graveyard and how the people in this area used to li...

Wow, SO MUCH has happened in the last three weeks! Buckle up, it's been a wild ride. The first week of August was Rea's first time at Girls' Camp. I'm going to ask her to type up an account of it for her typing class this week, so we'll give it its own post. Suffice it to say, she had a wonderful time! Aunt Amy was still YW President (she got released two weeks later), so she had that point of familiarity, and Rea made good friends with some of the other girls. It was perfect and we're all so happy for her. While she was gone, the rest of the family went to a meeting of a homeschooling group called Classical Conversations. I (Alison) first heard of this organization eight years ago when I was first looking into homeschooling. I went to their three day homeschool parent training class and their high school program sounded AMAZING. My kids were really too young for it then, and it's very expensive, but I bought their Memory Work CDs and we've been using th...