Wrap Up: Wk. 7 (Break Week!)

Wow. We did not get very much done this week.

Yes, I know, it was a break week. Still, I thought I could visit with my parents, deep clean Em's room and pull out her winter clothes, write a decent midterm essay, go to the apple orchard, carve pumpkins, cook tons of exciting new recipes with the kids, decorate for halloween, figure out El's costume.

Here's how it all ended up working out: "visit with my parents, deep clean Em's room and pull out her winter clothes, write a decent midterm essay, go to the apple orchard, carve pumpkins, cook tons of exciting new recipes with the kids, decorate for Halloween, figure out El's costume."

We did discover a very cool architecture website and El spent several hours designing homes on it. Em and I made Chicken Barley Chili that turned out delicious. She also made PB&J sandwich rolls, which I thought were adorable but for some reason she didn't like them (? I don't understand why. This child practically lives off of PB&J.) Lots of playing outside and making giant leaf piles with the neighbor kids (first 1/2 of the week), lots of board games (rainy second 1/2 of the week.) El had his first weekly speech session of the year so he got to visit his old public school. Em's class (she's my afterschooler, remember) walked to the fire station (and everybody had to very quickly move out of the way when they got a call. Have you ever seen 25 6-year-olds do anything very quickly in an organized manner? It's not really possible. Luckily the emergency call turned out to be no big deal.)

Also of note this week:

• What the heck is beestar.org? I don't really know, but it's free and it's math, so I signed El up. I'll let you know next week if it is worth our time. (This poor child will have math coming out of his ears by Christmas.)
• Speaking of Christmas, October is THE TIME to purchase anything that will be "hard-to-find" come Christmas season. Lego minifigures were sold out everywhere by last November, so I did make any necessary minifigure Christmas present purchases this week.
• Em wrote a story for our library's Young Author Challenge. The title of her book is "Zombie Children Mannequins." I would write a description, but I'm pretty sure the book is shorter than any description I could write, so here it is in it's entirety (at the end of each page is an illustration):

p.1 Once upon a time, there were mannequins and lightning struck them so they came alive
p.2 and they went into a haunted house and once they came out they were zombies and they were really scary.
p.3 They came out and everyone ran away from them.
p.4 But they went back to the haunted house and turned back into normal kid
p.5 and got adopted!

There was a 50 word minimum and I think she just barely eked in above that. I asked her if she was going to write "The End" at the end and she looked at me, horrified, and stated: "Mom. Real books don't say 'the end' at the end."

In a few days, our trees went from 90% full of leaves to about 5% full of leaves. It was a great week to be a kid with a rake.

Working on "Zombie Children Mannequins" for the local library's Young Author Contest. Standing in front of her is her Lego creation "Robot Mom with Awesome Big Socks."