Sunday

We had a nice weekend.  I’ll tell you about Saturday tomorrow, but for now I’ll tell you about Sunday. We started the day by gathering in the living room to watch our church’s service. Don’t tell, but I’ve taken to coloring during the sermon since this ordeal started and it’s quite nice. The kids brought out all the Woodzeez and played quietly. Chris manned the technology (it kept pausing).  Chris and Caleb made hamburgers and homemade French fries for lunch. 

Last year, Buddy chewed up the cushions from our front porch rockers, and since then they’ve lived in the shed, where rodents have helped themselves. (We moved Buddy’s wire so he isn’t allowed on the front porch anymore.)  Saturday when I was at Walmart, a lady was having fabric cut (looked like she was going to make an Ariel costume and an Elsa costume to me) and so I was emboldened to have some nonessential fabric cut as well.  So here is our before and after. Ta-daa!

My mom and I were going to meet at the walking track (so grateful it’s stayed open!), and the kids decided to join us. This was the boys’ first time taking their hoverboards out and about. They mostly crouched as they zoomed around, scared to have a big wipeout in public, I think. 

Now we are about to start school and we are already late because the children seem to be enjoying a luxurious breakfast while I hide out and type this. If you’re wondering how we did on our productivity charts last week, we won’t talk about Eleo, Josiah (and I, if I was playing) earned $1, and Caleb earned $5!  Last Friday, Caleb filled in all his missing holes by doing extra chores to earn his perfect score, but this week we are getting tough, and perfect scores have to be earned perfectly. If those kids will quit chomping, we would get to it. I was just thinking yesterday that this reminds me so much of playing school (usually pioneer) with my sisters and cousins. I really enjoy having an little more authority over my current pupils, it really helps in the cooperation department (I’m looking at you, Lou, ha!).  I need to find some sunbonnets and suspenders and lunch buckets and slates and then we’d really be having a good time. In other news, my sister is FINALLY reading the Little House series for the first time in her life (how is that even possible) and I’m having the best time discussing them with her. And in more other news, the boys and I started listening to ‘Little Men’ and it is just so good. I keep feeling like I could finish the sentences sometimes, I must have read it a lot back in the day. We only heard the first chapter last night but I have the feeling I’m going to learn lots of helpful parenting/teaching strategies as I listen. I’ll keep you posted. Happy Monday!

This Week

Eleonora and Caleb and I went on a little bike ride yesterday.  

Irises in different colors are blooming all over our yard. The kids are supposed to still be memorizing their AWANA verses, then we record them saying them and post them on our church’s AWANA Facebook group. We used these as backdrops yesterday. 

Eleonora has her first wiggly tooth. 

We’ll be finishing up our fourth week of homeschool here, and on that note, I better hop up and get to it!

Jump Jump Candy Guys

These pictures are from back in the days when people could go places. It seems like it was a cold and dreary day off of school so I decided to take the kids to a jump park, and Heather joined us. 

We had the best time!

Heather and I bounced, too. 

Swinging on the flying trapeze was not as magical as I expected.  It felt like it tried to rip my arms out of their sockets instead. 

This was our picture in the photo booth afterwards. 

It has officially been 31 days since we went to school. 

Here’s to being able to venture out again soon!!!

Happy Easter!

Hope you all had a happy Easter!  Our drive-in service was cancelled for bad weather so we were home all day, except for one little rainy walk for me. We watched the service from our living room. 

We made lots of yummy food ranging from resurrection rolls (you wrap dough around a marshmallow which has been rolled in butter and cinnamon sugar and when you take it out of the oven, the marshmallow has disappeared, leaving an empty (and delicious) roll.) to homemade cauliflower pizza crust. I’ll let you guess who made what. 

Our library leaves out craft supplies every week. 

We have been puzzling it up over here!  We’re getting close to ten, prolly. 

The kids made a huge ‘fort’ in the living room on Saturday and have slept in it the last two nights. I laid with them and we listened to the audiobook of Doctor Doolittle on my phone both nights. Books usually put Eleonora and Josiah to sleep pretty quickly but Caleb could listen all night!

Now it’s Monday morning and we are getting down to business for our fourth week of Corona Home School. We started with handwriting, the boys’ weakest subject, which is really nothing to complain about, I guess. 

I made everyone (including myself) a new chart for the week with prizes attached!  If they get 70 points, they’ll get $5, 60-$4, 50-$3, 40-$2, 30-$1, 20-$0.50, 10-You owe me $5, haha. We don’t usually do prizes with our charts but we are ready for some excitement around here. Caleb says his goal is 70 points and Josiah says his is 20. What are your predictions?

Happy Monday!

February & March Books

I started February with the third Poldark book. Like the others, they hold my attention, and I mostly enjoy them, but they can get a bit depressing at times. 

One of our (Jennifer’s and my) favorite bloggers, Erin of SunnySideUp always talks about this book. Supposedly Mark Twain said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you. This book is just full of tips on being productive and making the most of your days. It seems to be written with business-people in mind, but it has tips that would work for anyone. So the frog tip would be, when you make a list of things to do for the day, highlight the hardest/most important and do that/those first. I just listened to this one. 

Another Poldark. I enjoyed it but took a break on the series after this and haven’t gotten back to it yet. 

I listened to this with the boys at night. It’s an imaginary history of an imaginary game from the Harry Potter books. Simply riveting!  (Not really.)


I read this one because it popped up without a wait on my library app, and it can be hard to find a book that you want to read that you don’t have to put a hold on. I think this book is supposed to elicit sympathy but my first thought was...Do something else if you don’t like it. Nobody told you you had to clean houses.  (I’m not saying every person on earth has options, but this lady had the education to write a publishable book for Pete sake.)

Now this was actually a good one!  Very sad!  Now if Stephanie Land is looking for people with hard lots in life, she should read this. This book is a collection of ten accounts of people telling their stories of being in slavery as young people. The stories are excerpts from full-length autobiographies. The complete autobiographies would be worth finding and reading as well. 

A friend from school gave me a stack of the Covington series to borrow, and while I don’t love them, I usually like them okay, and it sure is nice to have a stack of real paper books to just pick up and read. 

So these were the seven books I read in February. The crazy thing is that I only read four books in March and I was at home for Spring Break and quarantining for half the month!  You want to know why I didn’t read as much in March?  I will tell you. All my productivity rules got tossed out the window for the second half of the month. My most important rule for myself is no technology (Facebook/instagram/Pinterest/blogs/etc.) until 7 pm/the kids are asleep. I have got to get back to that for the rest of April!  

Another Covington book. Pleasant. 

The boys and I listened to this at night. Another one I picked on the library app because it was available immediately. This is serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Here’s an example of one of the questions: 

I thought it was over our heads, but the boys claimed to like it, so we listened to the whole thing over the course of many, many nights. I thought it would never end. Maybe they’ll be smart when they grow up. We will have to hide and watch. 

We also listened to The Swiss Family Robinson audiobook (and watched it on DisneyPlus) but the book is so very long that our two weeks ran out before we could finish it and we had to go back to the end of the virtual line to borrow it again, so hopefully we can finish it someday. Most memorable part for me, and also the one detail I remember from reading the book (probably an abridged version) as a kid - an anaconda swallowing a donkey. 

Another Covington book. They’re  all about these three older ladies who are best buds and they all live in this cool old farmhouse together and have a great time together.  Fine. My problem is, one by one, they fall in love with distinguished gentlemen who wish to wed them but none of them will (or they will but they will just visit their husband across the street occasionally) because it is so imperative that they keep living with their besties. I don’t believe it.  

Same. Nice not to have to learn new characters for a new book, but I’m not buying that these ladies aren’t getting on each other’s nerves after all these years and they’re not ready to go live with their new hubbies. Malarkey. 

Now just hold on to your hat and excuse my dull choices in March, because I’ve already read some zingers in April that will knock your socks off. 

Good Friday

Good Friday to you!

Some guys from our church recorded a Good Friday service in our cabin the other day, so we will get to watch that this evening. 

Yesterday the boys helped me clean out the shed. 

They carried nearly everything out for me, we sorted it, and put back everything that didn’t get taken to the dump or the Goodwill. 

They were fun to work with.

Ahh, much better.  Now we are ready to plant some seeds!

They also hung our new ferns on the front porch. Two birds are already building a nest in one!

Chris painted the front of our house!  It looks great!  (We are hoping that the sides and back will follow, haha.)

A lady from church brought her porch ferns and lots of other flowers to decorate the cabin while they recorded the Easter service and the guys had just carried them to the front porch for her to pick up when I was going to take a picture of my ferns, so I arranged her plants and let them hop in my picture. 

Makes me want two more ferns. 

Look at these tulips!!

“Jesus replied, “You have said it. And in the future you will see the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God’s right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

Matthew 26:64