Happy 20th Birthday, Kate

This amazing girl, is all grown up and entering her third decade. She is not where she wants to be in her life right now, but she is happy and productive. Kate is one of my very best friends. She has been for many years now. I go to her for advice, as she is very wise. I love to play card games with her and read books with her and discuss the gospel with her. Kate is a talented artist and writer. She is full of knowledge in a great many subjects. I could not be happier with this beautiful daughter the Lord gave to our family.

This Week at Our House # 34 A Sunday Birthday

We had a quiet week with little going on. We got school in without much trouble. Things that we had that would have made us more busy, got cancelled. The only things of note were Friday, I took Rachel, Anya, Arwen, and Susan to the beach for a swim, and today is Kate's birthday.

This week was the first week that I ever left Gideon for more than an hour. He did fine, but he seems a little more sensitive and watches me a little more closely. I left him with Ruth while I did my big weekly grocery shopping trip. Ruth seemed weathered when I got back. Gideon hadn't been crying, but he clung to her for the whole 3 hours.

Friday, I left Gideon for another 3 hours while I went to the beach. Kate watched him. I think Gideon was a little less clingy because Kate had finished everything that needed to be done for dinner. I had put meat in the crockpot and Kate got everything else prepared.

I asked Kate if she feels bad that she is no longer a teenager and she said, "I don't think I ever was a teenager." She is right. I said that we did not have teenagers, we had young adults, and Kate lived up to that. Then we discussed how we really didn't feel like we could call Rachel a young adult yet, but she is not exactly a teenager either. She is still just a kid. Though I was glad to

remember that back in the day, I said, "be young adults, please," and they were.

Gideon has been shaking his head no, which is cute, but I was not sure if he meant "no". Now I know that Gideon not only means no, but he definitely understands the word. I was going through Hiragana flashcards (one of the Japanese alphabets) and saying the sounds out loud. Gideon thought that was funny and crawled up to me. When I got to the symbol that is pronounced no. Gideon began shaking his head no.

After that I watched him more closely. I noticed that he shook his head no to a lady at church when she held her arms out to take him. He shook his head no when I offered him a piece of a pumpkin cookie and he shook his head no when Sam started to take away his toy. Gideon also very clearly says "Hi", though it comes out more like a "ha" but his meaning is unmistakable. That makes Gideon my youngest child to ever say a word. Johnny said hi to people at just 8 months. Gideon started between 5 and 6 months. Ruth understood what no meant by 8 months, but she did not use it herself until much later. So I am pretty sure Gideon is my youngest child to ever gesture no and mean it. That started probably around 6 and a half months.

Adam has very thoroughly joined my crew of historians. He transcribes church historical documents every single day and he is loving it. When asked what he likes to do now, Adam tells people that he likes to draw. I have a whole crew of artists too. John, Ruth, Kate, Johnny, Adam, Rachel, Anya, sometimes Joseph, Joshua, and Arwen all spend significant time drawing. I have to keep our paper locked up, so we don't spend too much money on it.

I had Rachel and Anya clean the bathrooms this week. I usually wash them, while having other people wipe them down through the week as I notice a need. That posed an interesting problem. I am speedy at bathroom cleaning, but my kids are not. Rachel and Anya had both toilets blocked up with cleaner for about 2 hours. I will ask them to do it again because they need to speed up. But it was funny, how many people were going around stressed and worried about getting to the bathroom on time. When it was my turn, I just washed the toilet, then used it. Then I told everyone which toilet was available.

We are back to doing our story club. Joseph is an excellent writer. He likes his stories. They are interesting, and he is starting to write them well. All week long Joseph will beg people to read his story, but when we have story club, he runs away and tells other people to read it. When we call him back, he lays on the floor with a pillow over his head. He can handle sharing his story one person at a time, but he is too embarrassed to share it to the whole family together.

Rachel said that her favorite part of

school is her weekly vocabulary. Rachel and Adam have a list of about 20 unusual words. Rachel has been writing the funniest sentences and short stories using the words involving a gang she named, "The Insidious Knives". Her sentences and her stories have been very enjoyable to read.

Arwen said some funny things to me on the way to the beach. She looked at a big house and mentioned how she wanted a big house with lots of beautiful flowers, chickens fenced in the back, and no woods. She said

that she thinks woods are ugly. Then she told me that she wished she was the kind of kid who got everything right in school. She basically does, though. I think of Arwen as one of my easier kids to teach.

Anya is no longer afraid of swimming at the beach. She goes right in and swims with Rachel and enjoys it.

Joshua is always bringing bugs into the house. This week he brought in a large grass hopper and a very large dragon fly. He found ants from different sides of the house, put them together and they fought each other and tried to eat each other. I had thought all the ants that get inside were friends, but that is obviously not true. I have told the kids not to kill spiders, with the exception of black widows, because they eat other bugs. There is a spot under the table where a spider resides, so Josh has now determined he does not have to pick up there in case he accidentally kills the spider. There is a wolf spider the size of a silver dollar that lives in the laundry room, and while

Josh will pick up any number of large bugs, he will not go into the laundry room alone because he is afraid of that spider.

Susan is doing well with school. Her drawing and handwriting has improved immensely. She loves the little alphabet games and stories that are part of her schooling. She is learning letters a through f.

I over heard a funny conversation between Arwen and Susan. Susan asked, "Arwen are you my cousin?"
Arwen said, "no-o".
Susan said, "That is ok Arwen. You can just be my cousin."

Susan looked at our trees and said, "Oh there are a lot of red leaves, and green leaves. Dinosaurs eat leaves!" And a moment later while looking at our neighbor's horses she said, "Horses! I like to feed horses apples because horses like apples." We have no red leaves on our trees right now, and she has never fed a horse.

Ah, I have one more Susan story. We were listening to thunder. Last year whenever the sky got dark and began to thunder, Susan would run scared and say, "a dragon is coming," so I asked Susan if a dragon was coming and she said, "No a

storm is coming. I know it is only a storm now."

Samuel has been potty trained for sometime now, except that he is afraid of the toilet and insists on using a potty chair. This week, he started using the toilet some. The past two days, he has pooped in the toilet, but he tends to use way too much toilet paper.

More Pictures

Arwen's drawing

Josh's drawing

Anya's drawing

Adam's drawing

Ruth's drawings

Kate's drawings

This Week at Our House #33 Getting Used to a New School Schedule

 I am sitting here wondering what I should write because I cannot think of much. It rained a lot this week, so we spent a lot of time indoors and almost no time on house repairs. School went well enough. We are getting used to the schedule and getting better at getting in all of our work at a faster pace.

Ruth and Kate help out where they can with meals and such, but they are busy with their own work. John finished writing software that makes the photos of Kate's drawings look like the background is perfectly white and there are no odd color or light changes caused by the drawing being photographed. I think Kate will have her little book ready to self-publish soon.

Johnny was sick all week. He missed his dentist appointment, so I had to reschedule that for him. He seemed to be doing better Saturday, but is still not all well.

Adam surprised me. He realized that since his entire 9th grade course is online, he can read and write and complete all of his assignments early if he wants more time off. The only thing he cannot do that with is math, because I give him a lesson. Adam doubled up his work on Wednesday and took Thursday off. He plans to work ahead a lot more now that he knows he could possibly finish the semester or year early.

Rachel is slowly learning the art of sarcasm. She is a quiet teen, which surprises me since she was our most talkative child. But when she does say something, it is pretty clever. Rachel sat and stared at her science book for a couple of hours on Tuesday. On Wednesday, when I found out that she had not done her assignment, I sat down with her and helped her get it done.

Anya seems to have gotten into the groove of her schooling with no hiccups. She is reading the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt and enjoying it a lot. I think that is the one book that has prompted her to say that her school stuff is interesting.

Joseph has begun to read ahead in history. He realized that if he reads as much as he can each day, instead of just the assigned pages, he will be finished with history for the school year sooner. When I went with my sister to the used home school supply store, I picked up a bunch of books that I loved reading or that are historical fiction and said that if they read them on their own time, they could get a treat. Joseph is the first to take me up on this. I hope others will follow.

Joshua seems to like the new curriculum. Although, it is hard for him, he likes the timed word lists because it is competitive. Up until now, I would not have said that Josh has a competitive bone in his body. I think that has changed, and I think it is good to a point too, because it pushes him to work hard.

Arwen is doing very well for the most part. Unlike last year, she finishes her math quickly. Arwen's hang up this year seems to be writing. She took an hour and a half to copy 4 sentences, and she took two hours to write a two sentence story for our story club. She lost the page she wrote the story on, so no one ever read it. I did see that she had completed it, though.

Suzy is enjoying kindergarten. She loves the little drawing videos, our little paper feed the elephant alphabet game and using a computer to do alphabet games. When she woke up Monday morning she said, "Is today school?" I said it was. She hopped out of bed and said, "Oh good. I like school."

I think Samuel is doing less damage on the whole. It seems that fewer things are missing and fewer things

are turning up broken. He is also talking a lot more. He speaks in complete sentences and has for a while now. Sometimes he is hard to understand because of his pacifier, but there is no point in me taking that away, until I take Gideon's away.

Gideon is a big, strong, baby boy. He is 7 months today. He has been scooting around on his belly for 8 weeks, and now he is crawling on his hands and knees. He stands up to things. He has been sitting himself up for 6 to 7 weeks. He is eating some solid foods. He loves food, but he will not swallow anything chunky yet. I bought him some gogo fruits and vegetables to assist me with having something soft for him, but apparently all the other kids loved them and ate them for snacks. When Gideon sees something he likes, he bounces up and down and coos. When Gideon does not know where I am, he crawls through the house crying. Today, he crawled through a a mass of legos and into the 4 oldest girls' room, saw everyone, stopped crying and said, "Oh, Hi." Not quite that clearly, but we all understood him and all cooed back because it was soooo cute.

The week was fine, and all of the rain will mean a lower electric bill and that is good. July's utilities were quite high. Speaking of utilities, I went in to pay the water bill because I had to go to the county office for another reason and their website didn't work when I went to pay earlier in the month. We talked about the fact that my water bill was higher. They were sending someone to come out and check our street because we were not the only one's on this street with a surprising jump in water usage. They asked how many people live in the home. When I told them, they immediately said, "You do really well!" They said our water usage is average. That made me feel good. I try to keep our utilities low.

More Pictures sent from my sister in law

Playing a Game

A rare picture of me at the beach