This Week at Our House # 29

 The refrigerator broke in transit and never made it to our house. I called and waited and called until I found out that another would not arrive until Aug 22nd or later. So we opted for a different one that will hopefully get to our house safe and sound and working great by August 4th.

I worked and worked and worked on my homeschool curriculum. It is up on kindle, but I need to get it ready for a paper version, and that will begin on Tuesday.

We went to the beach on Tuesday. It was hot, hot, hot, and the water was like a warm bathtub, as is common here in July. I got tubes on clearance for $1 a piece. They were awesomely fun, but made Kate sea sick. Sam played in the water for the first time, ever, because he really liked using the tube and riding in the waves on the most shallow end of the shore.

Ruth's working and working hard illustrating. Kate is figuring out what she is going to do next. Johnny broke a window and now has another house project to help me with. Adam reads a lot of scriptures now and I think that is great. Anya and Rachel did a lot of laundry and babysitting because I worked so much. Kate is reading a big fantasy novel to Anya and Joseph. Joseph loves it and Anya does not. Joseph and Josh complained a lot because all they want to do is play computer games. It's probably good school starts in two weeks. Arwen got scriptures from her grandmother and carried them around with her since then. Suzy prays to "help us bless the food," and Sam prays, "I want food." Gideon keeps us all on our toes and cleaning up. We've eaten too many ramen noodles and cans of chili. We look forward to more fresh and frozen food in three more weeks.

We need to clean pictures off of the hard drive before I can get them off from the camera and on the blog. I'm waiting on John to fix that.

This Week at House #27 and # 28

I have been so busy writing homeschool curriculum. I have finished the writing. I'll need to edit, format and rearrange some before getting it up on amazon for sale.

We went to the beach not this week, but the week before. It was so beautiful, I wrote a poem about it:

We'll remember today and talk about the water
how it shone like emeralds beneath an indigo sky

Thunder emptied the beach, except for us
we drove through the storm
I can't say that we bravely went in the rain
swimming, fell out of our heads and off our lips
anyway, ice cream cones called

We parked and the last of the rain
dripped down from the tired clouds
waves rolled and we swam
out into the billows--
warmed from days of hot summer sun

The fury of the sky calmed, the sea moved quietly
we stroked, and kicked, and floated
til our lips quivered and our toes looked purple
and ice cream cones called out loud

Ruth finished the pictures in my next children's book. We need to get the formatting of that done now.

We're getting a refrigerator in 4 more days. That will be a relief. We miss regular healthy meals.

Kate got a pigeon. It came in the mail. The post office forgot to ship it out. It was supposed to be sent overnight. They had it for three days. It miraculously lived. The pigeon loves Ruth.

Ruth sent this to me:
Susan was having her doll make my doll food and asked what my doll
wanted her to make. I told her to make dessert.
She handed me the food and happily said "Here's disease!"

Joseph wrote this really cute story:
It started one year ago. The apocalypse. It started with an entire country mysteriously being destroyed. No one knew what happened. Then a few weeks later, we found out. Giant chickens. We tried shooting them the bullets all deflected off, we tried bombing them it did nothing, we even tried nuking them it still did nothing they seemed to be immortal. They destroyed town cities and even countries. No one knew what to do. The chickens roamed through everywhere some people tried moving to very cold places like Alaska. But the chickens were even there. They roamed every island. Not even small ones were safe. They even lived in the sea no one knew what caused them. But there was a legend of a man called “The Chicken Lord” who knew everything about chickens maybe, he knew there, weakness or maybe he was the reason they came.

Anya and Rachel have email homeschool penpals. That is going very well. They need outside the home communication.

Arwen has been counting down the days until her birthday and Joseph's birthday.

Joshua wakes up first and tells me his dreams most mornings. He is obsessed with computer games, but is embarrassed if he dreams about them.

Adam made cookies for the neighbors; Johnny bakes treats for the family several times a week.

Sam lost most of his pacifiers so he talks now, and he says mature-ish things that surprise us. I bought him a preschool book and he likes to do school work. He asks to do school work. So he gets to start preschool this year.

Gideon is tall and strong and rough and adorable and time consuming. He loves to be outside. He loves to hold kittens and ducks. He loves to play in water and mud.