This Week at Our House #41

1. We survived our first North Carolina hurricane. It was only a category 1 by the time it got our way. We had a lot of wind and whole lot of rain. Many people lost electricity and had mild flooding, but we had neither. We just didn't go anywhere during the worst of the storm. Our van is not that great to drive in wind, rain, or snow. People talked about how the roads were flooded and cars were spinning off into the road side ditches. John had his 45th birthday on Friday. He asked for and received a gps watch for exercise. Kate and I made homemade chocolate pudding and homemade angel food cake that we served with ice cream. It all turned out well and John had a nice birthday. The kids reminded him that he is now half way to 90.
2. The week was not busy other than the regular things we always have to do. I did not have lots of places to go. We had originally planned on visiting Kitty Hawk, NC for a homeschool field trip on Saturday, but cancelled that because of the hurricane. On the whole, it was a pleasant and restful week.
3. Ruth is swamped with homework and has officially decided to prepare for a mission after her first year at BYUI has ended. 
4. Kate needs to start getting her stuff ready to apply to college. She will be applying to BYU and BYUI. 
5. Johnny keeps forgetting that he is 15 now and will correct people and tell them that he is only 14.
6. Adam went to the store to get the things he needs to make homemade charcoal. He will do that as part of school this week. Then he will use his charcoal to make a water filter. That is just the sort of thing Adam likes to do.
7. Rachel met a kid named Grant during her activity days on Tuesday. She said that since his name was Grant, he could Grant wishes. He said he could only grant one, so Rachel wished for a million wishes. Then she began to wish. She wished for perfect teeth, to never sweat, to have perfect skin, to have green-blue eyes, to never grow arm pit hair, and to never have armpit sweat marks. Grant stopped her and told her she could not wish for that much. Rachel said that he did not have that power because he didn't have a swirly.
8. Anya was grounded from computer usage for a long time because she did not know anything about the Savior, religion, or the scriptures-- which ought to be impossible growing up in our house. We tried a number of things to get her to listen to family scripture study and to pay attention when she reads her scriptures. It took a long time, but now she is doing it and doing an exceptional job. Anya is officially ungrounded. Another side benefit of forcing her to pay attention to what she reads in the scriptures is that she is reading a lot more and on her own. She has read several books this week and it wasn't so hard to get her to read her school book.
9. Joseph loved playing outside during the hurricane, but it made him cold. He took 3 showers on Saturday and I said no to two others that he requested. 
10. Joshua whines to much. I wish I had a magic stop the whining potion.
11. Arwen is very excited about Halloween. She reminds me everyday that she still needs a costume, though she changes her mind about what she wants to be nearly everyday. The last couple of days, she has been asking me how many days until Halloween. 
12. I took the dress up down from the attic and Susan has been dressing up as a princess every day since then. She mostly refuses to wear regular clothes.

Tender Mercies

1. Home school is much cheaper than I would have expected. We no longer have hundreds of dollars in school fees, we no longer have to buy the kids new clothes all of the time, there are no expensive school projects unless we choose it. The books, workbooks, pencils, paper, crayons, and glue are not that much. And how much a thing costs has always been a big deal for our family.

This Week's Pictures

Early part of the hurricane. We got a lot of rain.

the neighbor's yard flooded early in the day

You can see how the wind was bending the stop sign and all of the water in the ditch

Later in the day, the water was coming up to the neighbor's house

the wind was blowing so hard this tree was bending all over. In the morning it had less than half its leaves