Seven Quick Takes

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~1~

I thought I'd be able to say that everything had slowed by now, but only work has slowed down. Regular life has filled in all that free time. My mom injured her knee about 10 days ago and between the accident and today she's had x-rays, an MRI, a diagnosis of arthritis (which they found on the MRI but has nothing to do with her injury) and she has surgery scheduled for next Wednesday. So I'm taking care of her garden and driving her to appointments since she can't drive and will be doing all that until she's able to get around again. Two of my sisters have taken over her household work, so I think we've got everything covered.

 

~2~

The other thing eating up my free time is garage sale-ing! (Is there a more correct spelling for that? I'm sure there is!) We spent yesterday and this morning at the garage sales- we are now about 70 books richer- picture books, chapter books, readers- most of them from the reading lists I've looked at in the Real Learning book, early Sonlightcores (K and younger) and other sources. Last year I stumbled across a Sonlight K guide for a quarter! What are the chances that I might come across any other cores?

 

~3~

Ender hasn't been able to keep his hands out of the ripening strawberries. He's eaten pretty much all of them one at a time as soon as they are ripe enough. I think maybe next year we will need to plant more strawberries so the rest of us have a chance at them!

 

~4~

Does anyone have a brilliant system for handling laundry? I'll be the first to admit that laundry is my least favorite household responsibility. For the longest time I've run 1 load a day during the week and then on Saturday I have to run 2-4 loads depending on how many towels/sheets/work clothes need washing. It's really Superman's work clothes that bog me down. I've been thinking about letting laundry pile up and only running loads 2 days a week, but I'm thinking that I won't like being tied to the house like that for 2 whole days. I've also thought about going back to doing each person's laundry on a certain day of the week (it makes putting clothes away so much easier- no sorting!) but then we'd have to get back in the habit of keeping each person's dirty clothes in their room until their laundry day. Any thoughts?

 

~5~

I'm reading A Homemade Lifeby Molly Wizenberg, AKA Orangette. I'm about a third of the way through, and my favorite part so far? One of the recipes calls for a good baguette and a piece of great chocolate to put inside that baguette. Delicious.

 

~6~

I'm obsessed with a certain color palette lately- it all started with a certain sister of mine linking me to Hello Betty fabric with a flippant note about how I *might* like it. Now I'm thinking about these colors ALL. THE. TIME. Perhaps I shall provide Superman with a little link as a birthday hint.

 

~7~

This week I hosted the first Craft Night of the summer at my house. It's a BYO drink and snack kind of thing, and everyone brings whatever they're working on. We have knitters, crocheters, embroidery, applique, scrapbooking, someone used the time to cut out pattern pieces for a skirt . . . seems like a little of everything. The rules are simple - work on your current project, talk a bit, laugh a lot, and invite your friends to come the next week.

My Little Ring Bearer

The wedding went well last weekend- I finally had a chance last night to get all the pictures downloaded from my camera! Ender did a great job, partly because the photographer did a really great job of getting the pictures with the kids very quickly and made it pretty easy on them. I love photographers that understand that making the flower girl and ring bearer wait around for hours makes for cranky kids therefore bad pictures!



These are the men of my family (minus Ezra who wasn't there yet) : My brother-in-law on the far left, followed by Ender and my 5 brothers, my husband, then my dad on the far right.

The little ring-bearer:

And after pictures were FINALLY over!:

Good Folks Apron

I made this apron for my newest sister-in-law Abby. I used Simplicity 4282 view B for pieces and made a few changes along the way- a little longer ties, no rick-rack (because Abby isn't into that kind of thing) and not as much of the bias tape as the pattern called for. These are her chosen colors, and the fabric is from Anna Maria  Horner's Good Folks line.

Please ignore the fact that the poor apron hadn't been properly ironed before picture taking began.

Reading: First, Middle, Last

We have been working on organizing words lately. We start by organizing our words into columns based on the starting letter, then by the middle letter, then by the last letter. We used the free pink series cards found here, and a moveable alphabet of lowercase letters.

 

We started out with a word bank of 12 words:

 

 

Then we sorted them into different columns. I took pictures while we were sorting by middle letters. First we sorted into columns:

 

 

After sorting the columns Ender added the correct letter from the moveable alphabet to the top of each column.

 

 

After all that Ender read the words in each column and we also talked about how many words were in each column, which had the most, which had the least, and and which ones had the same amount.