End of November, Early December 2022 Photos

 

This is the first 2000 piece puzzle that our kids have done. They finished it quickly, and enjoyed the work. 

This is a goose egg that went into our orange rolls on Thanksgiving. It was so dark and rich and equals 4 chicken eggs.

Anya in the morning chatting with her sisters. 

Rachel in the morning chatting with her sisters.

Rachel and Anya and Arwen in bed together. 

The parakeets, AnnaBanana, and Charles

Sam picked out this Christmas tree and we were lucky because it was the last one in the store. He really loved the flocking and now that we have it, I am actually liking it better than the traditional fake tree. 

I kind of liked this picture of Joseph. 

This is Johnny taking spinning Eliza.

Eliza knows about the camera now and she will smile when it is pointed at her. 

Gideon has spent hours and hours building with legos and he has gotten pretty good. In the bottom picture you can see the little ship that he built of his own design. 

All of these beautiful leaves are in our own yard. We have such a beautiful yard. I feel blessed every time I walk out into it. 

I just like these pictures. I think that they were watching a movie here. We do not have an actual tv, but we have computers and watch more tv than we should through those. 

The above picture is another reason why I love where we live. We can see so many more stars here than in any other place we have lived. 

Joseph was playing around with putting different colors over the flash of the camera. 

The kids caught this mouse. We have always had a mouse problem.

I washed all of this laundry in the bathtub and we hung it out over two lines to dry and when the kids brought it in to fold and put away, they were so astonished at how much laundry that we had, that they photographed it. 

The local church stake put together a beautiful nativity display for the community to come and veiw.

The kids found this hideous thing in the house and let it out free.

Eliza climbed up and fetched John's dark chocolate bar and this is how we found her. 

This is our house, 15 degrees from true north. 

Thanksgiving 2022

  

We had Thanksgiving, as usual, and as will be usual, at home alone. We are too big of a family to have Thanksgiving away from home and we have too small of a house to have company join us. But with 15 people, Thanksgiving is never small. We quadrupled the jello salad, that for years only John ate, and it was about the first thing to go. The turkey was moist, but I miss my flavor injector and I think that I will replace it. The orange rolls got a little overdone, so a few days after Thanksgiving, I made another batch. They're best right out of the oven, and we have so much other food on Thanksgiving, that it was nice to have them as soon as they came out of the oven as well as when I was actually hungry, and I believe others agreed to that because the later batch that I made went really fast. On the whole, we do enjoy this feast and entrance into the Christmas season. And I can say with an honest heart that I am thankful for my family. 

Ruth could not get a seat around the table and sat at the bar instead. 

Eliza made a mess of my dinner, as she was seated on my lap, and then when I put her down, she was very sad, so I ended up nursing her on the couch while the Thanksgiving meal continued. 

Joseph, Joshua, and Arwen had an eating contest, since they made it a contest of who could stay eating the longest, rather than who could eat the most, Arwen won out by simply eating slowly.

The house got pretty hot. The oven was working overtime and someone and turned the thermostat off from auto, so it would heat or cool depending on the temperature, to heat. It was 80 degrees inside not too long before dinner. 

We always put the turkey carcass out for the animals, wild and domestic, and this is the site that greeted us the next day. These are vultures and the large tree they are sitting in rises up close to where we put the carcass. 

Samuel Tales

 I got this in an email from John and it seemed worthy enough to be immortalized by this blog. 

I was telling Sam and Susan about Christmas, and that Mary was
pregnant and Joseph was upset. Here was the conversation:

Sam: How does god make people?
Sam: Could you show us a picture?
Susan: Yah (agreeing that she would like to see a picture)

Eliza Stories

 At not quite 16 months, I told Eliza to go and get her diaper and she understood me and got her diaper and brought it straight to me. 

Eliza was upset with me and fussing loudly. I asked her if she wanted to see Ruth. She sat up and calmly said "oo, oo," and then went to Ruth. 

Homeschool Update

 We are more than a third through the school year and I thought that it was time to give an update kid to kid about how school is going. 

Adam is a senior, but he is still completing two of his junior year classes, so he is behind and won't likely graduate in June. In order to graduate he must complete the following courses: essay writing, ap chemistry, computer programming, calculus, ap physics, and American Heritage. Currently he is working to finish ap chemistry and computer programming before he begins ap physics and calculus. I will probably have him quickly do American Heritage over the Christmas vacation, so that is out of his way. Adam is smart. He gets good grades and he now is maintaining the stuff that he is learning, but he is very slow about things, even though he works steadily for hours everyday. When Adam does graduate, and probably before, I am going to have him work on video editing for a youtube channel for me as well as having him writing a website for our products, and probably doing some illustration. I am also considering putting him on an advertising end of things. 

Rachel is a junior in high school. She is currently taking essay writing, American Heritage, Spanish, and she is border line between Algebra 2 and pre-calculus. I think she may have crossed the line into pre-cal, but her book covers all algebra 2 and almost all of pre-cal. I have another pre-cal book too, though, that is smaller and more in depth that I will have her complete before calculus. She still has PE and chemistry to complete before she finishes off her junior year. I have not decided on what she needs to do for her senior year yet. But I plan to keep Rachel on as a student another year. She will not be ready to face the world just after she turns 18 in 2024. 

Anya is a freshman and my star student. Anya does all of her work everyday and she never complains and she gets good grades and generally seems to like learning things. Anya is an excellent writer. She has written some really good poems recently and she writes very interesting sentences and uses words well. I am very happy with Anya. I was pretty sure, we would be working for her to be an illustrator, but she has a lot of talent with writing and she might want to go that way instead. Right now Anya is doing an illustrations course, language arts, algebra 2, and Spanish. She has already completed biology, and she will still complete p.e. and American Heritage. 

Joseph is in 8th grade. I had originally bumped him up a grade because he has always done all of the same work as Anya, sometimes even pulling ahead, but over time, I have learned that it isn't the right thing to rush my kids into adulthood. So for 8th grade, Joseph has completed physics; he is working on algebra 2, language arts, and American Heritage. He will still have to complete PE and Spanish. I will have to put his geometry and algebra 2 courses on his high school transcripts, but I will have him take the high level sciences and histories over again. 

Joshua is in the 6th grade. He is reading much better, but he still struggles with words, especially when he gets frustrated. Joshua generally finishes all that he has to do every day. He is mostly an easy student, except for reading. He is currently taking a geography class, language arts, art, and pre-algebra. When he finishes his geography course, he will take an earth science class, and he will also complete a typing class and pe before the end of the school year. I am not sure he will be ready to move to algebra one for his 7th grade year. He is going very slowly through his book, sometimes taking a week or more for one lesson to really get settled in and solidified. But that is the nice thing about homeschool, you can work at your own pace and actually learn the material.

Arwen is in the 5th grade. She has a typical elementary school schedule. Sometimes Arwen works very slowly and sometimes she gets her work done quickly. Arwen does not like her geography class. I am not sure why, but she seems to really struggle reading a question and looking on a map to find the answer.

Susan is in second grade, technically, she is supposed to be in third grade, but her reading is at a second grade level, so that is where she is doing everything, including math. She is just starting to learn her times tables. But at a second grade level, Susan is doing very well. She is generally very easy to teach and willing to do all of her school work, which she completes in about an hour and a half. I hope, at some point, to bump her back up to the technical grade that she is supposed to be in, but right now, I will take it one school year at a time. 

Sam is in kindergarten and he is learning to read and doing very well. He is sounding out 3 letter words very well and can do his easy readers without any trouble. He can count well and add and subtract and he really enjoys the little science and history books that we read together. Sam is on the same curriculum that Susan did last year and the year before. I think that Sam will be reading fairly well on his own in another year. I think that he will only be about one grade level behind Susan. 

Gideon loves his school time with me. He needed speech therapy. He mouth and tongue muscles were quite week. It's great that now we can understand him very well. With Gideon, he repeats things that I say while looking at pictures, and we sing a lot of nursery songs together. Recently, Gideon has been writing his letters. I have not even shown them to him, he has picked them up from looking at books. Of course, that makes me really happy. Gideon has a good attention span. He can spend an hour coloring one picture or doing one of his own drawings. 

Eliza loves Gideon's school time, so when she sees me sitting with Gideon, she runs over and sits on my lap and joins in. Eliza is 15 months and has about 6 words.