This Week at Our House #22 and #23

The year continues to fly by and the nation and the world continue to spin out of of control. Two weeks ago a black man was brutally murdered at the hands of three policemen. They stared proudly and defiantly into the cameras filming them. Riots rose from that, beginning in the Minneapolis, where the incident took place and spread like a deadly virus across the country. Stores were looted, buildings burned, cops were injured and cops injured more. All social distancing and corona virus rules were basically thrown out.

In our little part of the world, things have remained peaceful. The worst things taking place, are at a 2 hour drive from us. I think that is a nice thing about living in the country. The wars start in the city.

Riots, national guard, tanks rolling through neighborhoods, brutality from police, rioting and looting, and all sorts of behavior from others continued for another week. We have been lucky enough for things to be peaceful in our area and cities.

Memorial day, the local governments opened the beaches. That was the same day the police killed that man. But we had a lot more rain. My gardens were flooded. When the sun came out, I played in the water in the yard with the kids. One day, it rained four inches in less than an hour.

A week later, this past Monday, I took the kids to the beach for the first time. The water was nice, but the air and wind were cold. We stayed an hour. It was nice to be back. I will take the kids again this coming week.

Tuesday, Adam and I fixed the drainage problems in my garden. Many of my tomato plants died, but I have 6 that have grown into huge bushes and are out of room to expand. I am waiting for some root hormone to come and I will be able to take clippings from my healthy plants to replace the ones that died. I am looking forward to seeing how that comes out.

Our flowers are prettier this summer than they ever have been. The yard is such a blessing.

I got all the chickens outside and in the yard. We would expect the big hens to fight the little chicks, but the little chicks fight each other more. The kids have enjoyed playing out with all of the ducks and chicks.

Ruth is working on illustrating one of my books.

Kate has been drawing a lot of coloring pages for our girls. They LOVE them, so we are going to start a website and will have people pay a yearly fee to full access to all of Kate's coloring pages. I think that will take at least 6 months to get up and running.

Johnny is studying math and computer programming still. He is also now officially hired to do the formatting on some language arts homeschool high school curriculum I am writing. I am spending 3 hours a day, 6 days a week on that, and it will take me until mid-July to finish.

I have told Adam that he is now hired to start learning web developing with me to get Kate's website up and running. It will be a part of homeschool for him. I will not be able to get started on that right away anyway. Adam draws a ton now, all day long.

Rachel has been waking up early. This is a very new and nice thing. One morning Kate woke up because she thought something was wrong when she heard Rachel's voice earlier in the morning.

Anya is enjoying her summer vacation reading and playing as is Joseph.

Joshua lives and breathes for computer games. I can get any chore done if I let Josh play a computer game for an hour.

Arwen's so funny and goofy and she will object to me saying this, but she purposely does things to be funny.

Suzy is always wondering about the time and the day of the week. She has also started asking me about words and what they say, so I think she will be ready to learn how to read when we start school.

Sam loves the cats and kittens. He usually has one in his hand.

Gideon is about  a year ahead of most of my kids. He can do a lot, though he doesn't say much yet. He's not even a year and a half yet. Gideon loves to be outside. He spends most of his time outside or trying to get outside.