Oh the Possibilities

Well, last week's weekly wrap up was rather short and I published it in the middle of the week. So, this week I'll pick up where I left off. Thursday and Friday we spent the days running errands and looking into possible houses to move into. Each house we looked at had something that we couldn't handle come into it. One house was so run down it would have been better demolished than tried to be rebuilt, we don't have that kind of money. The middle house we went to look at was beautiful, in a beautiful country setting, with almost everything we were looking for ... except their down payment was more than we're comfortably able to part with at this time. And the final house, looked for on Friday, had already been taken off of the market. So, this leaves us to follow our original plan of moving our current mobile home to another community, saving some money for the next 3-4 years, and then finally going house shopping again. We're not sure which area or state we're thinking of moving to when that happens but we're open to any and all options.

Saturday and Sunday we spent much of our time outdoors and some of the time watching movies together on Netflix with the entire family. Nothing out of the ordinary to talk about on either day but it was our favorite type of weekend. Low key and surrounding ourselves with our family with lots of giggles and tons of fun.

Scarf for Noni

Hat for me

So, what did we do during the week? Well, we took the week off of lessons. We're going to be trying a new schedule where we do 3 weeks on and one week off most of every month. That way we get some down time. Homeschooling year round gives us the option of doing this without running into any issues with hours of education needed. And we're still requiring reading and any reports or projects to be worked on those weeks. So, that doesn't mean they're really "off" weeks but more of an exploratory week in which we'll work on new skills, dive into new genre of books, get around to those projects we've been putting off no matter if they're house projects or individual projects. It seems like it'll be a good way to add a little unschooling to our homeschooling agenda. Provide more freedom for the campers to explore new ideas and things that interest them. Which means one of these weeks I'm sure we'll be building a volcano or a robot ... the list goes on and on.

This means that I'm not going to break the rest of this post down by days and what we did on each day. I might mention a day just for perspective but not a whole lot of each day we did x,y, and z. And as I bet all of you can guess I spent a good deal of time crocheting this week.

Monday we chose as our library day. Many many books were taken out along with many DVDs. Much of the week was spent watching videos, reading books, and looking up things online that interested each child.

Peanut's inspired art work.

YCJ's

ECJ's

On Wednesday they watched a DVD documentary series on the Italian Renaissance great artists of music and art. They then decided to draw pictures inspired by what they had just watched. It melted my heart to find them enjoying the art that had been shown. In my opinion the DVD documentary series was pretty dry and I thought they'd loose interest rather quickly but they did not.



Other than that, working on a few crafts, and watching some Netflix together it's been a really relaxing interest led week. I crocheted for more hours than I thought I would and am currently working on a service vest for Moragon to wear out when she's with Daddy. Buying them the right size from online when she weighs about 180 pounds is rather trying and expensive.

Ear warmer for
YCJ

Ear warmer for
Peanut

The campers played outside a lot this week too, even though it's been a bit chilly. Mainly in the 60s with gusty breezes. But, being the outdoorsy types they'd rather be out in the sunshine soaking it up than inside curled up with a book. The ground is too cold to sit on right now or I'm sure YCJ would have taken her new book outside with her to read while sitting under a tree as she did several times this summer. The local schools had a half day Thursday which meant that their neighborhood friends were all home early and could play with them and we've had a new homeschool family move in just down the street from us.


I couldn't list for you everything the campers learned or didn't learn this week. Math was covered while cooking and grocery shopping, they read every single day, observed nature at it's finest while raking leaves with Daddy, crafted with Mom, and cuddled with the dogs. Some weeks you just need to hang back and let them be them. This was one of those weeks. We've had unschooling weeks where they've learned more, we've also had unschooling weeks where they've learned less. I'm glad we called one for this week, they enjoyed themselves and we were all able to relax and get some me time in between all of the family time.

A box of gifted yarn for me from a good
friend! Absolutely love it and I will
be making some preemie stuff for
a young lady I know who's baby will
be delivered at 29-30 weeks! Such a blessing!!!!

Don't for one  minute think that every second of this week was sunshine and happiness with rainbows. We're a bunch of strong personalities in this house and we often bump heads. Teenagers opening accounts that they shouldn't have and didn't ask permission about, dogs making themselves known along with a loud mouth cat, and the election! ECJ spent until about one am watching the news feed on CNN and Daddy stayed up to watch it all. I fell asleep shortly after one and decided to stay asleep until morning. I won't get into political views here but ECJ should be more prepared in four years to follow along with the election, and make an informed decision when it comes time for him to vote. It'll be the first year that he'll be able to vote and I am very glad that he took such an interest in it this year. He'll remember this election for a long time and so in four years, though we might not vote the same way, he'll make an informed adult choice when he votes and I couldn't ask for more.

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