Fall break is here at last! Unfortunately, I set far too many goals for this break, as I tend to overestimate what I can accomplish in any given day. My #1 goal was to catch up on sleep, but sleeping in has been rather elusive thus far. When I stayed home full time with less demanding part-time jobs here and there and people asked me what I did all day, I never knew quite how to answer. What did consume all my time? Now that I have shoved many of those mysterious activities aside for the past 2.5 months, I realize how much I really did accomplish when I was home full time. It's too overwhelming to imagine myself catching up on all those postponed chores in only two weeks with the kids at home full time.
The kids and I spent the first week purging, selling, and donating to make room for birthday and Christmas gifts. It blows my mind that we have only been in this house for less than 10 months, and we had already completely filled up a house that is 50% larger than our previous home and twice as big as the nice home in which I was raised. I loathe shopping, so I'm not sure where all the stuff comes from, especially considering how much I strive to be a minimalist. It felt so good to remove so much stuff last week, but it is always a battle when your children like to hoard.
One of our projects involved cleaning, sorting, and selling the hundreds of golf balls my dad delivered to us recently. We have quite the little family business. He finds the golf balls, the kids cleaning and presort then, and I classify, sort, advertise and sell. The problem with hiring child labor to sort out all the mint golf balls from the Grade A & B is that their young eyes and hands are very sensitive, so they find imperfections that our customers and I would never notice. When we say "mint condition" around here, we mean it!
When we weren't purging and cleaning the house, the kids enjoyed play dates while I suffered through some extremely frustrating and disturbing doctor appointments. While I did receive an unexpected scare at the first appointment, I was at least pleased to see continued improvements in my blood work results from normal/healthy to exceptionally healthy.
I may not be the picture of health in some ways, but following that initial appointment last week, I have discovered some surprising "health tips" (tongue-in-cheek) by accident, stubbornness, and lack of self control:
Learning to recognize patterns in lower elementary grades is a skill that benefits a student for life because when we know what to expect, we are not surprised by trials. Over the past few months, our family has observed the following repeating pattern:
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I am so thankful for God's grace which sustains us and for the way He knows us completely, not just externally but at the core of our being. (Gift #776) Recently, my daughter asked me to describe the difference between "cute" and "pretty" and then asked me which term best described me. I told her I was neither, but she insisted, "Dad would not have married you had you not been at least one or the other." While I assured her yet again of the same truth she's heard over and over at home, at church, and at school that true beauty (1 Peter 3:4) is so much more than skin deep, for the Lord looks not at the outward appearance but at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), I could tell by her question that the culture's emphasis on external appearance is still very loud in her mind. And I realized that when we as mothers allow self-deprecating comments to slip out, we show ourselves gullible to the same lies of the world that try to distort a woman's understanding of her exquisite beauty and infinite worth.
The kids and I spent the first week purging, selling, and donating to make room for birthday and Christmas gifts. It blows my mind that we have only been in this house for less than 10 months, and we had already completely filled up a house that is 50% larger than our previous home and twice as big as the nice home in which I was raised. I loathe shopping, so I'm not sure where all the stuff comes from, especially considering how much I strive to be a minimalist. It felt so good to remove so much stuff last week, but it is always a battle when your children like to hoard.
One of our projects involved cleaning, sorting, and selling the hundreds of golf balls my dad delivered to us recently. We have quite the little family business. He finds the golf balls, the kids cleaning and presort then, and I classify, sort, advertise and sell. The problem with hiring child labor to sort out all the mint golf balls from the Grade A & B is that their young eyes and hands are very sensitive, so they find imperfections that our customers and I would never notice. When we say "mint condition" around here, we mean it!
When we weren't purging and cleaning the house, the kids enjoyed play dates while I suffered through some extremely frustrating and disturbing doctor appointments. While I did receive an unexpected scare at the first appointment, I was at least pleased to see continued improvements in my blood work results from normal/healthy to exceptionally healthy.
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| Play date with our son's best friend from school last year who now homeschools |
I may not be the picture of health in some ways, but following that initial appointment last week, I have discovered some surprising "health tips" (tongue-in-cheek) by accident, stubbornness, and lack of self control:
- To reduce arm pain, lift weights. The pain in my arm the day after I reluctantly submitted to receiving a vaccination (following the medical team's disrespectful, high-pressure bullying) was so severe that merely lifting my arms to brush my hair felt intolerable. Yet, I was determined to follow my workout schedule in the correct order, and that day's schedule called for upper body work. My arm was in agony before I started but did not hurt at all during or after the workout, and I did not take any pain medicine whatsoever.
- To lower your triglyceride levels, trade low fat carbohydrates for rich, high protein and/or high fat (but not trans-fat) foods. Before I got married, I followed a strictly low-fat, mostly vegetarian, low-sugar diet and ran at least 50 miles a week. Over the years, my husband has introduced me to bacon, rich desserts, and red meat. I eventually had to give up running for orthopedic reasons and also gave up low-sugar, low-fat foods. Now I eat several ounces of chocolate (a lingering vice) at least 6 times a day, snack mostly on high-fat unprocessed cashews, and enjoy plenty of meat & produce. As a result, my cholesterol and triglycerides levels have been improving every year with my triglycerides now down to an all time low of 37 from 111 when we first got married. Eliminating processed foods and reducing gluten intake were likely the key factors.
Learning to recognize patterns in lower elementary grades is a skill that benefits a student for life because when we know what to expect, we are not surprised by trials. Over the past few months, our family has observed the following repeating pattern:
New day > new minor problem > see doctor or repairman who finds more problems > grow in faith (repeat)As we keep repeating this cycle, we can acknowledge experientially that "His grace is sufficient!" (2 Corinthians 12:9)
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I am so thankful for God's grace which sustains us and for the way He knows us completely, not just externally but at the core of our being. (Gift #776) Recently, my daughter asked me to describe the difference between "cute" and "pretty" and then asked me which term best described me. I told her I was neither, but she insisted, "Dad would not have married you had you not been at least one or the other." While I assured her yet again of the same truth she's heard over and over at home, at church, and at school that true beauty (1 Peter 3:4) is so much more than skin deep, for the Lord looks not at the outward appearance but at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), I could tell by her question that the culture's emphasis on external appearance is still very loud in her mind. And I realized that when we as mothers allow self-deprecating comments to slip out, we show ourselves gullible to the same lies of the world that try to distort a woman's understanding of her exquisite beauty and infinite worth.
At least she isn't interested in changing her outward appearance yet. When we walked by the Sparkles boutique during a recent trip to the beach and a sales clerk tried to convince us to buy her a princess style makeover (like those offered at the Bippity-Boppity-Boo boutique in Disney World), she answered confidently, "No, thank you. Sweat is my make-up."
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The kids have done quite a bit of reading over fall break which showed me yet another way our kids are opposites. The 7-year-old usually reads no more than one book a day during school breaks, but he analyzes every detail thoroughly and reports the total number of spelling and grammar errors found within each book and sometimes compares the error tallies between authors. My daughter, on the other hand, reads up to 6 books a day during fall break, but she gets too caught up in the primary ideas to ever notice silly little mistakes or insignificant details. Besides, she can usually make up much more interesting details of her own. In this respect, my son is more like me while my speed reading daughter is more like her dad.
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Except for some rain (a gift in my book since it saves me the chore and expense of watering the lawn), we've had very nice, mild weather over fall break. (Gift #778) I have enjoyed having extra time each morning for quiet times outside. (Gift #779) Muffin usually joins me. I can't help but love a friend who is so eager to jump right in with me during my Bible study.
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Both of our parents' celebrated wedding anniversaries during fall break. My parents celebrated 52 years on the the 7th, and my husband's parents celebrated 42 years on the 13th. His parents got married on Friday the 13th, and his mom says that day has brought them 42 years of wonderful luck. We are blessed to have parents so committed to one another and to their families. We have an amazing support system through them. (Gift #780)
We offered to take my parents out to a really nice restaurant, but after trying to call and make reservations for several days we learned the chef was undergoing chemotherapy, so they were only offering take-out. So we ended up at a less fancy venue, but that was probably a better option with our kids in tow.
With the rain and shorter days, getting to the lake at sunset is becoming more of a challenge, but I have still made lake sunsets a priority for this fall break.
We had to cancel our initial fall break plans of traveling to the mountains during fall break due to a tight schedule and limited funds following the many medical surprises last month, but we did sneak in a quick trip to the beach to visit family. While there we checked off one more item on my bucket list of things to do with the kids. We spent the first day at WonderWorks. I feared it would be nothing more than an overpriced kids' museum, but it had over a hundred interactive stations with rides comparable to what one might find at Disney World. We think it was worth the money (Gift #782). The 6D simulator was my favorite. My husband liked the 360 Extreme bike ride, while the kids seemed to enjoy the 3-story ropes course best of all. Here are some pictures from our full day at the upside down building at Broadway at the Beach in Myrtle Beach, SC.
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| WonderWorks Website Photo |
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| Experiencing hurricane force winds |
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| "Strike a Pose" Silhouette Maker |
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| Creating an animated film |
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| Our competitive daughter beat everyone in the basketball toss. |
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| Using the robotic arm to collect moon samples |
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| Our gymnast on a different body shows us what she'll probably look like in 8 years. |
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| I guess a backwards clock face is to be expected in an upside down building. |
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| That's our boy! |
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| The kids performed virtual plastic surgery on Pappy's face. |
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| All the staircases were painted in this style. |
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| He tried the easy pulley system with 3 or 4 pulleys. |
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| Easy Peasy |
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| I tried the hard pulley system with only one pulley and got rope burn. |
360 Extreme Bikes
Our daughter looks sick in all these photos, but she insists that she enjoyed the ride as much as her dad did.
Ropes Course
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| WonderWorks Website Photo |
Anti-Gravity Simulator
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| A snapshot of the video taken inside the capsule. |
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| The tilt of their heads indicates which direction the capsule was turning at the time. |
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| Our daughter rode with a stranger because her dad could not stomach it twice. |
We took a break from WonderWorks for lunch at Johnny Rockets where the kids absolutely loved their super-sized adult meals. The prices were quite high for such low quality ingredients, but we must have been paying for the entertainment as the handsome international waiters sang and danced to at least three 50's tunes while we were there.
We left Johnny Rockets completely stuffed, but we had already made plans to meet a friend I haven't seen since high school (except for a few times in college when we might have passed one another on campus) and his three boys. We've been offering him some spiritual support during a tough life season, so he offered to treat us to Ben & Jerry's as a way of saying thank you. The kids were thrilled and made room in their full bellies for the delicious goodness. Catching up with an old friend and seeing him moving toward the narrow, infinitely better path was a gift indeed. (Gift #783)
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| Enjoying Ben & Jerry's ice-cream with Bill's boys |
BEACH!
We returned to the house where we were staying around 5:00 pm where I briefly collapsed with fatigue only to get up again, change into a swimsuit, and head for the beach. The weather was unseasonably warm and beautiful that day (Gift #784), so we had to take advantage of the fun beach opportunity. Our hosts live about five blocks from the beach, so we decided to walk. The kids still had not tired out yet, so they kept up a good pace to the beach. After riding the waves, however, they were finally showing signs of weariness. They plodded back ever so slowly from the beach.
Our son tried to take a mushy photo of my husband and me on the beach as the sun began to set, but our 10-year-old photo bomber struck again.
The kids rode the waves with their dad while I worked a little on my lesson plans.
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| Teachers always have work to do even on fall break! |
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| The view from my towel when I looked away from my books |
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| My sunset view. :( |
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| At least the water reflected some of the sunset hues. |
Our son had oral surgery (2nd attempt) scheduled on Monday, but after a few hours and multiple attempts to insert a variety of spacers including spacers our orthodontist custom made for our son using a design he found from Canada, he could only get one spacer properly inserted. So, the orthodontist resorted to putting braces on the other teeth to hopefully do what the spacer would have done. That was our third visit to this orthodontist to fix this one problem with two of his teeth, but unfortunately, the spacer fell out as soon as he woke up the next morning, so now we must return for a fourth time for yet another procedure. We are thankful that the orthodontist is a like minded Christian we can trust whose children also attend our kids' school. (Gift #785) He did not charge us for any of his additional time and did not collect fees until the problem was adequately addressed, or so he thought. I doubt he'll charge us for the next visit.
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| During the procedure |
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| After |
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