Things Change

The first item to change is my age, today is my birthday. No big plans for today, except very minimal school for Emilie and Olivia. Bella's lessons don’t take long and I will be able to really focus on her today. My mother and gramma are coming up from Austin, not for my birthday, that is just a nice coincidence.

Tomorrow the girls are in the Veteran's Day parade, on 2 different floats. We will be going out to eat lunch with mom and gramma and the girls.

The trees are starting to change and the smell of fall is in the air. I love autumn, it is my favorite season. The girls have been spending more time outside this week, which is nice since we had nearly nonstop rain for 2 weeks. We did school outside yesterday.

Emilie and Olivia went to the Powerhouse Wednesday with a friend. They all loved it. Live youth band, lots of friendly nice kids. The girls didn’t feel excluded, but excepted. The knots of kids, enlarged, (they stepped back to make room for others) not turning their backs to keep others out. They enjoyed the lesson, Emilie really likes to have a good lesson. I’m thinking about letting them go once a month. I don’t feel it is right to abandon our church, but I do want them to have spiritual growth, feel a part of a group, witness other youth living for God, & witness youth’s authentic worship.

Bella told me this week, that this year in school is “really good, better than last year.” So I must be doing something right! When I asked her what she likes best, she listed everything except math, and she isn’t to fond of Language Arts.

After 8 weeks of LLATL with the “sisters”, we dropped it. None of us liked it, very little grammar work, not much creative writing. So I started back the Language Arts in our unit study- Learning Adventures. I know it was a “God Thing” that we started it back when we did, because when I opened it up, it was the beginning a whole new unit on newspaper writing. That coordinates with their literature section- reading a biography on Ben Franklin. The Fine Arts lessons are about cartooning. Both the girls love to draw and both are really good at manga, so that has been enjoyable for them.

This week we started reading the New Testament on a 90 day plan. Not sure if we will finish in 90 days but we are working on this. Emilie has read a lot of the NT herself, but not front to back all the way through. I’m excitied about this.