What We've Been Up To...

Being blessed with well meaning relatives, come holiday time, my kids are spoiled with copious amounts of chocolate. Most of this I send to the freezer so that it is not devoured in a gluttonous single sitting. The hoard was getting fairly mountainous so I made fudge one night. Brian, who doesn't have a sweet tooth in his head, actually liked it. So we made more. I now have fudge in my freezer.

Actually, a lot of it has been given away. Brian took a bunch to work where it quickly disappeared. Here he is stirring the third batch we made one evening. He's very efficient in the kitchen. Otherwise, Brian is back to a regular schedule at work - five day weeks. It's a strange time of year. Longer weeks feel somehow shorter due to the shortening days.


Here's Kori doing her math lesson. I've changed the structure of our lessons. She has her independent work and her lesson. I keep the lesson short and to the point. Everything else is independent work. Unless it involves chocolate, as this lesson did. Then she's ok with a longer lesson. I'm sure Saxon die-hards are rolling in their graves, but the format laid out was causing grief. Instead of the tedious counting aloud, she writes out some number patterns on the back of her meeting strips. As we're establishing our Fall routine I think this format is best. During Friday's lesson, she even asked me to explain something to her instead of putting on the brakes and quitting. So it seems that our goal of finishing these math books by March Break is a bit more reasonable after an ok week of regular lessons.


Raiden's hockey has begun. It's the 'pre-season', or so I've been told. As the first practice was barely-controlled chaos, I'm hoping for improvements. At this level (I'm such a bad hockey mom, he's a pee-wee? I think?) they will split the kids into four teams and have rotating round-robins throughout the regular season. Then there is a tournament to wrap up the year with an out of town team. He's playing in the Christian league which means no weekend, late or early games. The focus is on skills and learning the game, not standings and points. This also means that home-town hockey is starting up as well as NHL. Lots to keep track of for Raiden. Quietly, in my mind, I call him my little statistician. Where he gets his love of sports is beyond me. Perhaps it's the competitiveness that draws him in. He's excited for indoor soccer to begin and he dragged me out this morning to see my brother play touch football. Rai was on the sidelines for the whole game, sitting on his soccer ball, taking it all in.

I got a present. The happy thoughts about my present are eclipsing just about everything else that is going on in my life. I've liked these red dishes for a really, really, long time. They're a little pricey so I usually just walk by them in the store, check them out and move on. When in the store this weekend, I moved on from the shelf and Brian snafued a box and that was that. We'll need to get another box in order to have enough dishes in the cupboard. And I'm planning new placements and perhaps something else that matches to spruce the table up a bit. New dishes and planning table settings are just as endorphin inducing as moving furniture around. Other than my new dishes, I have to say I'm feeling pretty excited about our school year. This last two weeks with my pre-planned school schedule in place has gone much more smoothly than I anticipated. It's scheduled enough to keep me on track, yet flexible. We didn't get to a couple of things I had in mind for Friday, and I'm not freaking out. Perhaps we'll do them this week, perhaps not. It's all good.

Nuk is still tearing up cardboard. Of particular enjoyment is a take-out drink tray. She has shown some recent interest in swinging her knotted ropes around like they're weapons and then chewing them to her heart's content. So now, along with all the hair she's blowing, I have string to pick up too. Fun.