Weekly Wrap-Up: Richly Blessed

This past summer, I posted on Facebook about how busy I was with all the things on my schedule for that week; and a friend (whose schedule makes mine look like a walk in the park) commented, "How richly blessed you are to be able to be involved with so many wonderful opportunities!"

I needed that reminder.  This week was the same, except I had a cold and lost my voice for a couple of days, which was my carte blanche to whine.  If you want to read my lament, here it is.  But everything turned out fine.  I just went to bed early every night, and the house is sort of a mess.  C'est la vie!

A minor but interesting highlight: we had a first-time visitor to our bird feeder today, a common grackle.  I tried to get a photo, but it kept hopping higher into a tree.  So this one will have to do.  I was fairly certain it was a grackle, with its eye-catching iridescence and yellow eyes.  A quick look at my Stokes guide confirmed my guess.  I hope it visits again!

Academically speaking, we are still a bit behind in some of our readings, science, and Latin.  Since it doesn't look as if life is going to slow down for us any time soon, I'm going to have to grab the bull by the horns to keep us on track each day:  I'm instituting the use of a timer.  Typically, I've allowed each child to work at her own pace until she finished an assignment before moving on to the next subject.  There's only so many hours in a day, however, and we've ended up falling short of time.  With the timer, the children will be allowed so many minutes per subject.  What they don't finish can be completed after lesson hours (a.k.a., homework) and with little input from me, as I'll be busy with household management duties then.

There were also some victories.  Tiny Girl finished Heidi, and Miss Priss finished Almost Home.  We finished watching Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower, which I highly recommend.  You can read my full review here.  We made a few entries into our timeline book, an activity in which I tend to procrastinate.  We participated in Sketch Tuesday.  Both did well with math and grammar this week.  We finished up Mind Benders book A1 and moved into A2, and the girls have asked to increase the number of puzzles for each day.  They are both doing really well with their piano pieces for the Christmas recital.

In our extracurricular activities, we are richly blessed indeed.  Tiny Girl had a good riding lesson on Monday and is excited about working more on jumping courses.  Miss Priss enjoyed her second tumbling class on Tuesday even more than the first, and she is really buoyed up by her success therein.  We also had piano lessons and an ortho appointment on Tuesday.  Our church's children's activities on Wednesday nights continue to be a highlight.  Both girls have special parts in the upcoming children's Christmas musical: Miss Priss is one of three narrators, with speaking parts throughout, and Tiny Girl is a soloist (in French!) and part of an ensemble.  So we practiced those this week as well.  Thursday, our Girl Scout troop met, and we worked on our Hunger 101 project.  And today, they had Timothy Ministry classes, and we are going to the barn later.  Tomorrow is Miss Priss's eleventh birthday party with a spa theme here at home.  I am serving in the capacity of chief aesthetician.  We still have quite a bit to do to prepare for that.  Good times!

Hop on over to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to read more wrap-ups.  Have a great weekend!