Thanksgiving, finally...

And...I am back in blogging business...where were we? 

Thanksgiving 2012

I was dig-my-heels-in determined to get some pictures of the kids "all dressed up,"

We traveled to Chattanooga for the day to meet my family in the art district for "Thanksgiving brunch."

And, because so much time has passed, I think I will just post the pictures and move on...Christmas is really what's on my mind now, after all, but I really want these things on the record books.

 every picture I have of me with my children is awkward.  Always.

 

One final note, Chattanooga is so beautiful.  I left Thanksgiving day wishing we could move there. 



Help!!

Okay, I just tried to blog about Thanksgiving, but blogger said I am out of space for pictures.  What?!!!!  Can anyone help me with this issue?  What do I do?!!!!

My Stinkers

Just for the record books...

This is the difference between my two children and their eating habits.  Today, they both asked for snacks.  Ada asked for leftover vegetable beef soup and John asked for "canny."  And, let's just be honest, I gave them each what they asked for ;)

p.s. Ada woke up the morning of Halloween and asked when we were going to carve our pumpkin, so we painted pumpkins this year.  Hey, it got the job done...

May I suggest Algebra with a side of Jane Eyre?

Lately, my high school tutoring student, is working her way through Algebra, which is not at all my specialtyy.  Except that I do have a soft spot in my heart for math.  Not crazy advanced math, but nice, neat Algebra.  Polite, plug a formula into it and come out with the right answer, Algebra.  Can I just say, fellow moms, or anyone who often feels like life would be much easier with formulas and some concrete black and white answers, that Algebra is just the thing you need!!!  There is something so therapeutic about being able to find the right answer.  About a formula that works every time.  If only it worked that way in parenting ;)

And, speaking of high school flash backs, I decided to read Jane Eyre last week.  I know that I was supposed to read it my senior year of high school, and as I stood in front of my book shelf, scanning the books, hoping to find something that I hadn't read yet, Jane Eyre popped out at me.  I have been attempting to go back and read all those books from high school and college that I was supposed to read but that I opted for the cliff notes instead.  It turns out that Jane Eyre is SO GOOD.  Now that is the way to write a story ;)  And now I wish I could go back all those years and hear what my senior English teacher had to say about the book.  Did I write a paper on it?  How did I get by without reading these books?!!  And can I also just say, that when I was the English teacher myself, I would think to myself that if I , who ended up majoring in English, didn't read the books that were assigned to me, then it was some serious wishful thinking to believe that these students in my class who weren't even pretending to be interested in literature were reading anything that I was assigning!!  All of that to say, if you're looking for a great story, Charlotte Bronte provides it in Jane Eyre.

I think I might revisit Faulkner next.  My first summer of graduate school, I took a seminar on Faulkner.  Just Faulkner, on Thursday afternoons, for four hours.  I remember wading my way through his writing, so sleepy, and only getting sleepier as I tried to make sense of what he was saying.  It left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and now I want to try it again.  It changes everything when it's not required, doesn't it?

(the pictures have nothing to do with this post, but I just thought I'd add a little color to the post.  We are loving fall, and I am not quite ready to say good-bye and move on to the Christmas season. I haven't soaked it up as much as I wanted to.  Oh well, at least it will come again next year...)

Wishy-Washy

Do you know that every Friday, I spend so much energy trying to decide whether I should go to Publix or Kroger.  Which one has the best deals this week?  Best coupon match-ups?  Do we need better deals on meat or pantry fillers?  Ahhhhhhhhh...that is me screaming in my head.  Or out loud.  It drives me crazy every week. 

Soooo, deciding where to go from here is next to impossible for me.  And by where to go, I mean where to live, where to move our lives to; it's freaking me out.  Scott and I have these conversations over and over and over again.  And then we have them again.  I start to panic.  I start to ask strings of questions very quickly, one after another.  And he calmly repeats the same lines to me.  The reasonable decisions that we have made together, already.  He sometimes says, "I thought we had talked about this already..."  And we have.  Lots of times. 

I want some guarantee that it's all going to go smoothly and that things are going to line up so nice and neat and crystal clear. 

Sometimes I just want to turn my mind off for a minute.  Just shut off all the analyzing about every stinking thing. 

And sometimes to do that, I turn on mindless television.  And sometimes I begin to recite scripture in my head.  Scripture that has nothing to do with the thing I am worrying about.  Just scripture--truth.  And my mind begins to slow down. 

During this month of Thanksgiving, I am most of all thankful for a sovereign God who is not wishy-washy.  A God who is in complete control of the entire universe.  I am thankful that I can rest in Him.

Kindergarten. On it goes.

 Look who has discovered painting.  You are looking at John's painting of our family--John pointed out each member to me as if it was so obvious.

This post is really about this little chick-a-dee, who sits in that chair on a daily basis and paints.  She loves to paint and to draw and to color and use markers and the list goes on and on.  What does she not love?  Reading.

In fact, today she said, "Can we just skip reading and only do math and handwriting.  I hate reading."  Ouch!  And so I asked, "why do you hate reading?!!!"  She said, "because it's so hard and because you get so frustrated with me."  Oh my word, dagger straight to my heart.  And it's true, I do get so frustrated.  The vowels, oh the vowels.  She can't get them straight.  So, on this particular day, I hang my head in defeat.  But after talking to other homeschool moms, we are just going to take a couple of days to regroup, focusing on math and handwriting ;), and maybe the hate--so much hate--towards reading will go away.  I can't handle the horror of it.  It's reading for goodness sake.

But, we will press on.  We are farther than we were six months ago, so we are making progress.  The main prayer, that I would keep my mouth shut when I am frustrated.  Give me patience, Lord, and kindness, and wisdom.  How desperate I am for his grace--as always.

A Few Quick Halloween Pictures

So I just went back and looked at my Halloween posts from the last few years, and every year I am hardly able to get a picture of the kids.  I always forget, or the camera doesn't cooperate, or the kids don't cooperate.  This year is no different.  But, for family's sake, here are maybe two pictures that I snapped, with a flash, in my dark kitchen, at the end of the night, when all of us were exhausted.  But, at least we have it on record, right? 

It's Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, minus her ruby slippers (she had already taken them off).  John did not wear his hood all night, so no one could even tell he was a lion (the same lion costume he wore last Halloween).  I talked him into wearing the hood for the picture when I told him he could roar like a lion; he quickly jumped on it, then.  I should have thought of that earlier!

Our costumes are usually determined by whatever Ellie, Luke, and Andrew (the cousins) have been the previous year or years.  That lion costume is a size 4t, though, so we may have another year or two of wear ahead of us ;) 

Ada was fired up about Halloween this year, and she asked at, oh, about 8 am if she could go ahead and put on her costume.  The answer was no.  She then proceeded to bounce through most of the day (literally).  We trick-or-treated with friends in a neighborhood with more houses than ours, and it was mostly a success.  There was one house, that was overly decorated for Halloween, if you know what I mean ;), and the lady answered the door with a very scary mask on.  She quickly took it off, when she realized our group consisted of really young kids (Ada was the oldest), but the image was cemented in Ada's brain.  We had to add that to our list of things we have to pray about.  When we pray, Ada prays for no bad dreams every single night, and she asks Scott and I to pray for the same thing, and then she gives us a specific list of things she doesn't want to dream about that we all have to list in our prayers.  It's become a sort of joke between Scott and me, especially when a new one is added.  Recently Charlotte's Web was added to that list.  How could Charlotte's Web produce a bad dream?  Wilbur's impending death, I suppose?  All of that to say, the masked lady was added to the prayer list tonight.  It gets longer all the time.

So, another Halloween in the books.  And I just snagged a reese's cup from one of the candy "buckets" so a great night for all of us ;)