Mom & Pop Home School

So, stuff’s been happening even though I haven’t been writing about it. Here’s a nutshell synoposis:

Mom and the young’uns drove up to Grandma and Grandpa D’s house in Montana to spend a few days and celebrate Cricket’s birthday. We were going to go for Easter, but Mom and Pop were too sick to drive. (I tell ya, this illness kicks  you in the backside but good!) Pop stayed home to catch up on some work projects. Cricket was quite disappointed to miss the Easter trip, so I gave him the option of visiting grandparents  for his birthday (which happened to fall in the middle of Sunshine’s spring break from school), or staying home and having a party with friends. He picked travel, so off we went. We also got to spend some time with Uncle D and Aunt R’s family who are currently residing temporarily in Grandma and Grandpa’s basement, and Aunt W (aka Auntie Odd here)–and her little dogs too! Highlights of the trip:

• Mom took a couple of serious wrong turns on the way there and we got there MUCH later than intended (also partly due to a late start because of waiting for a call from the clinic about a perscription refill…but that’s another story). I may never live that down. My children think it’s humorous that I could not even find my way to my own parents’ house without getting lost. In my defense, my parents moved during that decade plus that I spent living in Georgia and not able to visit often. They live in an entirely different state now than they did then. So there! Also, Pop usually drives when we go to visit. And let’s face it, one stretch of endless highway in Idaho looks pretty much like another.
• The children had a lovely time playing with Duke and Duchess, Aunt W’s miniature pinschers, and with Darth, a large, frightening looking mixed breed dog belonging to the basement dwellers–who’s really a big, scary looking teddy bear; I have seen few dogs so tolerant of children. I’m still not quite ready to get a dog.
• Aunt W developed a case of shingles while we were there. This is not the sister who had it on her eyeball a month or so ago, this is the other sister. Fortunately (if anything about shingles can be said to be fortunate) it turned out that her doctor is involved in a study of a new shingles medication, and since she has agreed to participate in the study they’re going to pay her to get treatment rather than the other way around. Hey, if she’s gotta be sick and miserable it’s nice that she can get paid for it at least. Poor soul.
• Grandma D finished a quilt for Cricket. It was going to be a birthday/baptism present when he turned 8, but it didn’t work out. Grandma is making a quilt for each grandchild at their baptism that has objects embroidered on it that are important to the child at that point in her life. Cousins have had things like airplanes and girls in dresses and sunbonnets. Cricket’s is not quite so straightforward–and also much cooler if you ask me (but it’s possible I’m slightly biased). It’s a maze with a number of embroidered crickets of different species. And also a horse, a sheep, and a penguin. (The last three were added because they are animals that have also been important to him, and they represent the three years it took Grandma to make the quilt.) I hear a solar system quilt is next in the offing, as cousin T is turning 8 at the end of June. We have such an awesome grandma!
• We had a joint birthday party for Cricket and his cousin C, of the basement tribe, with whom he shares a birthday. A good time (and a Mom-made cheesecake, which was fabulous if I do say so myself) was had by all. And aunt R made some fabulous caramel swirl brownies. Mmmm…

The next week, Grandma and Grandpa D came and stayed with us for a few days. Uncle J and Aunt A both graduated from BYU, and we all got to participate in the festivities. We also got to celebrate Grandma’s birthday on the 24th, and then Aunt A’s birthday on the 25th. I don’t think I mentioned it before, but Aunt A is the family member who is currently expecting a baby in early fall. We got to see ultrasound pictures. Aaaawww! And Aunt A won a game of musical chairs at her birthday party because NOBODY wanted to be the one to shove the pregnant lady off a chair! It was just the grown-ups playing because the children had all gone off on their own and were playing another game in the gym at the church where the party was held. Cricket too! He played with the other kids for hours, and had no meltdowns or other social “incidents”, even when he tripped over a chair and crashed down a short flight of stairs. He had a welt by his eye for a couple of days (yikes!!), but he said the other kids helped him get untangled, and he was fine. I was SO impressed with his ability to handle it!!! (My baby is growing up!)

While Grandma and Grandpa were here they helped us pick up the blocks to build the garden beds in the backyard and get them all laid out. Yay! It feels so good to get that done! Only two of them are filled with the soil mix, but the others will come along in due time. Cricket built a vertical frame out of electrical conduit for me, and it’s all set up now with pea seeds planted next to it that will grow up the string trellis that’s stretched across it. Cricket also helped me build the grids for the boxes out of wood lath (it’s a “square foot garden“). And I got some drip hoses hooked up to the sprinkler system. Sunshine and I planted seeds today–peas, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and a little Swiss chard. Also, the yellow pear tomato plant that’s been sitting on the kitchen counter in the sun waiting to go outside. I put a Wall of Water thingy around it this evening when I heard it’s supposed to snow. Again. Sigh. Sunshine was SOOO excited! She wants a whole garden box all to herself–which I don’t really have a problem with once we get all of them filled and ready to plant, but I want the first one to be “mine”. I let her help plant, though, and she has a couple of squares all for her very own. Into one of them we transplanted her “pet lettuce weed”, a stray lettuce plant that was growing in the still “undeveloped” part of the yard (aka weed patch). It has some friend radishes.

A couple of days after Grandma and Grandpa went home, we discovered that when Grandpa unplugged the garage chest freezer to plug in a saw he was using to cut rebar (to pound into the ground to hold up the vertical support trellis) he forgot to plug it back in. We had a few minutes of panic, and we’ll be eating previously unscheduled steaks and chicken several times this week, but the things in the middle were still frozen, and even the things around the edges that were partially thawed were certainly still colder than they would have been in the fridge. This makes us feel good about our freezer’s ability to keep things cold. And now it’s been cleaned out and reorganized, which needed doing anyway. I just wasn’t planning on doing it at bedtime…lol.

So that’s what’s been going on around here. Nothing Earth-shattering.

School is winding down for Sunshine. Only a few weeks left. But since Cricket and I have missed so much school this year we’re going to keep going on into the summer. We’ll be adding in Sunshine too, which should be interesting. I’m working out what to do. I think we need a change of pace for a bit, so I think we’ll set aside the world history for a while and come back to it later. I’ve found some fun (I think) American history stuff to use for a while. It’s set up for multiple ages, which will be good on two levels, I think. One is that we should be able to include Sunshine pretty easily. The other is that because Cricket is all over the map developmentally I’m thinking this will allow me to assign reading on one level, while giving writing assignments on a lower grade level. I should be getting the manual sorta soon, and I’m really looking forward to it! I’ll probably buy the resources as needed, and use the library as much as we can to keep costs down. But it really looks like fun and uses a lot of resources I had looked at and thought of buying anyway. This will save me trying to figure out how to schedule them.