Year in Review-November 2017

While celebrating Reformation 500, we didn't carve pumpkins until November.  Sorry for the poor picture quality. Lamb 2 and 3 each carved a jack-o-lantern, Lamb 1 thinks he is too old to carve pumpkins.

Our church celebrated their 125th anniversary. I made cake toppers and chocolate favors. This is the dessert table with my decorations and other dessert too.

Chocolate Bible favors. Idea was here. The anniversary was really a fun day with both friends that are members and some visitors that day too.

Photo Credit: CLHS Facebook Page
Lamb 1 attended Concordia Day. He wants to be in JROTC now.

Lamb 1 won a t-shirt at Concordia Day. It was perfect for him since he wants to do cross country next year.

I met my mug swap partner. Everyone that sees the necklace she made compliments it.

Only Lutheran homeschooled boys would practice a hymn for Sunday School choir during a play date.

Everyone on Facebook was doing a black and white photo post. I didn't do 7 days of posts, but I did post a photo of our mailbox at our rental house. A delivery man complimented it a few days before I took the photo.

Our public library had an author visit, Laura Numeroff. I was at the end of the line, but she stayed past library closing time and signed everyone's books that were in line. The Lambs came and listened to her talk before signing, but Ram took them home while I waited in line to get my book signed. 

I sold more books to Hyde Brothers. This one surprised me and was worth about $100.

This is the book that got me started on buying books at the library book sale. I thought it would be valuable with the prints inside. It was worth about $25.

I read this biography of Tasha Tudor before I sold it to Hyde Brothers. It is more recent but was still worth about $20. All these books I sold were 20 cents each at the library book sale.

Lamb 1 needed a new coat. I really didn't have time to shop for one and was unsure what size to buy him or where in Fort Wayne to shop for one. A friend messaged me and asked me if we could use a coat that they found when cleaning out their closet. It was Lamb 1's size AND his favorite team is the Seahawks and it was their colors. I am just amazed at when God provides for us, not only just what we need, when we need it, but also when it is absolutely perfect for us! I couldn't have gone to the store and found a more perfect coat for him. Another example of a blessing while Ram is a student!

 

My sister came for Thanksgiving and we remembered to take a picture in our Harvest Raise t-shirts. It didn't turn out the greatest so we'll have to try again next time she visits. I was noticing how much my sister and I look alike in this picture. I have never noticed that before, we used to be so different that I wondered if we were really sisters!

I wanted to buy Lamb 2 a dressy coat for church. When I measured him he needed a men's size M! The sleeves are a little long, but the coat is not that big on him. He loves to dress up for church and was happy to get this coat. I used several coupons to buy it and I think it will fit him for a couple of years.

The pastor asked a question in Bible class about what was on our pulpit. I sit in the front row almost every Sunday and I was drawing a blank when he asked the question. Ram went upstairs and took a picture for me to jog my memory. (John 14:6)

We went to Christmas in the Park which used to be called the Christ Child Festival. The Lambs were a little old for it so we didn't stay long. I just wanted to know what they did. I had grand plans to take a family photo for Christmas, but there was too much in the background that disqualified this photo without a lot of photo editing.

Unexpected To Do List on All Saints Day

Last night our church hosted a Trunk or Treat so we were at church for several hours. When we got home Ram and I decided to splurge and get pizzas after our busy week. The Lambs got to bed late but I wasn't too worried because of the time change and we don't have church until 10am.

About 2am I heard the sound that every mother recognizes and hates to hear. Lamb 3 threw up 3 times on the way to the bathroom. It rates up there as the nastiest I have ever had to clean up due to the pizza and lots of candy. Twice was in their bedroom and once was in the hallway. I quickly wiped it up and put rags over the top of it-there was no way I could scrub that with 3 Lambs trying to sleep. (Ram slept through all of it!) I cleaned up the sink and Lamb 3 and sent him back to bed. It took me awhile to get back to sleep and I mentally made a to do list:
1. Notes for Ram for announcements at church since I couldn't be there.
2. Decided Lamb 2 would need to stay home with me because I wasn't positive that Lamb 2 would have a Sunday School teacher and I wouldn't be there to sub.
3. Knew I would need to completely scrub down their bathroom and also clean the carpet.
4. Was very disappointed to miss church on All Saints Day.
5. Decided to get started baking for the bazaar on Saturday after the necessary cleaning.

In reality my to do list grew and grew and grew today.
1. Lamb 2 got up way early due to the time change and I wasn't ready to deal with all his questions. He was very frustrated that he had to miss church and didn't understand why. I wouldn't allow him to watch TV and he didn't know what to do while his brothers were still sleeping.
2. Lamb 1 had changed his own alarm clock and he accidentally set it two hours back instead of one. So when I told him it was time to get up he refused to get up. When I finally got him up, I had to answer all the questions again since he hadn't heard my answers for Lamb 2.
3. Lamb 3 should have slept in after the night before but he was up at regular time to get ready for church. He was grouchy because I put him on a diet of applesauce, banana, saltines, and ginger ale until I knew he was okay. I still wouldn't allow TV so both Lamb 2 and 3 were upset.
4. Finally Ram and Lamb 1 left for church and Lamb 2 and 3 started playing a game together. I started by cleaning off the kitchen table which had messes of candy and dishes on it. We were all gone the past 4 nights so it was a mess.
5. Then I unloaded and loaded the dishwasher because we had no clean glasses.
6. Then I cleaned the Lamb bathroom.
7. Throughout the whole day I did a lot of laundry and I kept running out of clean rags.
8. Then I decided to clean out the pantry. A few weeks ago I bought some oatmeal on sale and it has been sitting on my counter because there wasn't room in the pantry for it. I threw out a bunch of expired stuff and got everything to fit in the pantry.
9. After lunch the Lambs cleaned up their bedroom, put away their clean clothes, and Lamb 3 changed all his bedding.
10. I cleaned those carpet spots.
11. I have two crafty projects to complete for the bazaar on Saturday. I completed one this afternoon. I haven't even started the second one.
12. A few days ago I began cleaning the downstairs bathroom and decided to finish that project today. I cleaned the toilet and Ram replaced the toilet seat. When I was in the middle of cleaning the bathroom Ram came and told me that our garage refrigerator was leaking all over the garage floor. Our garage fridge has been dying, but I still had blueberries, cranberries and stuff like that in the freezer out there. The fridge out there was full of nuts and flour and stuff like that-if I had more freezer room most of it would go in the freezer but I don't have that much freezer room. I was gradually using up stuff in the freezer and was hoping it could make it until after Christmas when we would go down to just the inside fridge.
13. We took everything out of the fridge and freezer. We removed all the magnets from the front of the fridge. Ram cleaned up the water as best as he could. I was thankful we cleaned out the garage last weekend or cleaning up the water would have been a bigger project.
14. I cleaned out my chest freezer (in my kitchen) and put everything from the garage freezer in it. I cleaned out the refrigerator and fit most of what was in the garage fridge in it.
15. Cleaning out the pantry and the fridge and the freezer made a lot of trash and a lot of dishes. Ram took out the trash several times today and we both did several loads of dishes today.
16. I supervised Lamb 2 practicing piano and helped him with his theory work.
17. I finally got back to finishing cleaning the downstairs bathroom.
18. I am scheduled to get 60 lbs of chicken next Monday. We have to go fridge/freezer shopping tomorrow.
19. I didn't start any baking today, but I know what ingredients I still need after cleaning out the pantry and the fridge.

I am praising God because:
1. Lamb 3 was fine after that one time. No one else was sick.
2. We were able to do all our activities last week and should be able to do all our activities this week except for missing church this morning.
3. Sunday is my day of the week to clean the Lamb bathroom. I would have been cleaning it today any way, just disinfected a little more than a normal weekly cleaning. I did laugh at myself that I was so happy this happened the night before my normal cleaning day!
4. The garage fridge died a week before I got the chicken and two weeks before the grocery store has a sale that I always stock up at. I could fit almost everything in my fridge and freezer inside my house. This would have been a huge problem and also cost us a lot of money if it would have happened in a few weeks instead of today.

Halloween costumes

I ran out of time to make Halloween costumes help the Lambs come up with costumes from items around our house. When they were younger we bought Pooh costumes from the used kids store. This is the first time we ever purchased new costumes from the store.  I was surprised that we saw several Spidermans this year, but very few Star Wars characters. The Lambs were very grateful for their new costumes and I expect throughout the year they will play in their costumes.

Spiderman aka Lamb 3

Jango Fett aka Lamb 1

Darth Vader aka Lamb 2

The Lambs went trunk-or-treating three nights in a row.
Once at city hall, once with Cub Scouts, and once at our church.

Our Weekend

Friday we went to an apple orchard and picked a bunch of apples. The first orchard was free all you can eat in the orchard and I'm not sure if the Lambs ate more in the orchard or picked more to bring home. Then we went to an orchard next door to that orchard and picked even more apples for applesauce and baking.
Then we met a fellow Martin Looper and learned about essential oils and made our first purchase. It was nice to have some time to chat together.
Then we picked up new glasses for Ram and Ewe. Ewe only wears hers for night time driving. Ram looks really different, I'll post pictures soon.
On Friday we also received a phone call that Lamb 2 won a $100 savings bond from a local garden center. Many people attended their harvest festival the weekend before and I was shocked that one of our Lambs won.
We splurged from our diet and made homemade macaroni and cheese for supper. Yum!
After supper we went to Target and purchased the first new Halloween costumes for our 3 Lambs ever. They all have outgrown the Winnie the Pooh costumes and Lamb 1 and 2 have outgrown most of our other dress up clothes like fireman costumes. I had intended to make their costumes this year but ran out of time. I'll blog pictures at Halloween time.

Saturday Ewe ran a few errands and then Ram ran a few errands. We had our sprinklers blown out. The Lambs played outside with the neighbors ALL DAY. We got a lot of items crossed off our to do list both inside and outside our house. We had carmel apple nachos for dessert.

Sunday After church and Sunday School we went to turn in fundraiser $ for Cub Scouts. Then we went to two different Michaels in order to get some Halloween items the Lambs requested since last Halloween. I'll post pictures of that soon. The first Michaels was sold out of most Halloween stuff. Then we went to the grocery store and let the Lambs pick out pumpkins. I feel like a bad mom to not take them to a pumpkin patch but we are just too busy this time of year. We'll have to plan for it next year. The Lambs and Ram did some clean up outside before winter. It was beautiful weather today! For supper we made homemade gluten free pizza.

This week I need to work on some more crafts for our church bazaar; also can and bake with the apples we got on Friday; Ram plans to finish our car shopping; and this is the last week of cross country with a meet on Saturday. The following week I plan to do a lot of baking for our bazaar in addition to all of our Halloween activities.

Hopefully I'll blog about some of this in more detail with pictures soon. It will probably be after the bazaar so I figured I would post this fast update now.

Trunk or Treat

I've already blogged about our movers, but they started unloading about 3pm on October 31. We had plenty of time to get into our house that we are renting, make a few decisions about where the movers would put furniture and how we would organize our garage with what we planned to keep in storage, go and pick up Ram's car from the church members that were keeping it in their garage, and take some stuff over to his church office before they got there. Our church has Trunk or Treat on Halloween. So as the movers were unloading, the Lambs put on their Halloween costumes and Ram took them over to church. They went from car to car trick or treating from our church members. I was answering questions for the movers back at home so I didn't take a picture of our doctor, Tigger, or Pooh, but Ram did take this photo.

The Lambs came home with a lot of candy that night and Lamb 1 was pleased to see that most of it was not sticky candy (he has caps on his teeth).
The movers quit unloading about 7pm because they didn't want to be driving their truck through our subdivision after dark on Halloween. First they made sure that our beds were all put back together so that we could sleep there. But we were too exhausted to look for bedding so we decided to go to the hotel for one more night. We went to Applebees and ate supper and headed back to the hotel. It ended up being a quiet Halloween for us but we still did something for the Lambs. We ate breakfast at the hotel and headed back to the house where they started unloading the truck again about 8:30am.

October 29, 2010

Seventh Week of School Report

Here's what we accomplished this week:
Math: Worked on MUS lesson 4. The concept here is adding 0 to a number. Math is gradually getting more difficult for Lamb 1-not impossible, but he was surprised that he had to (gasp!) think this week!
Handwriting: Lamb 1 practiced writing his first and last name some more. He is improving.
Phonics: We reviewed vowels and the consonants we did before. We learned the consonants h, j, k, and l.
Religion: Memorized John 14:3 (for Sunday School), worked on memorizing the third and fourth commandments and the hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God. We were excited to sing A Mighty Fortress in church on Sunday. The Lambs did a very nice job singing this hymn in church. I was afraid they would act silly or act like they didn't know it, but they sang nice and loud! We did a little Bible stories about Abraham, but not very much this week.
Science: We read more science books on fall topics like leaves and pumpkins. We also read some science books about our bodies (heart, lungs, etc.)
Reading: We finished How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. Read a few stories from My Book House and a few poems, recited Time to Rise by R.L. Stevenson daily.
Latin: Worked on Lesson 3 and 4 from Prima Latina.
Art: Play doh with babysitter on Tuesday.
On Tuesday our babysitter came and we had ECFE so we didn't do school. The ECFE theme was colors. I think the Lambs favorite part of ECFE was the snack had fruit loops and they rarely get sugar cereal like that. We got out the Halloween costumes this week. I was glad their costumes from last year fit them and I had a costume for Lamb 3 that fits him too. Lamb 1 and 2 are the same as last year (Eeyore and Pooh) and I'm excited that Lamb 3 is going to be Roo. I got these costumes at Once Upon a Child and have collected them over the years. I was so glad the costumes still fit the Lambs! We made fall cut out cookies this week too (apples, pumpkins, turkeys, and leaves). They continue to work on the sewer system in our town so the Lambs have not had nearly enough time outside to satisfy them. The Lambs played with Lincoln Logs a lot this week. They were never really interested in them before this. Lamb 1 has become quite good at building with them. Lamb 2 and 3 try to build with them and it is successful if no one knocks down another Lamb's buildings! On Friday we took a day off of school and went shopping in Sioux Falls. I think I'll save what we did on Friday for another blog post. We didn't quite fit in as much school as I would have liked, but they also learned by watching the construction in our town and making cookies with me. We're going to try to fit a lot of school in early in the week because on Friday and Saturday we will be busy going to an open house at the veterinarian's new office building and trick or treating activities in the neighboring town. I can't believe October is almost over. The days just fly by!