Week 13 ~ Life Goes On!

In My Life ~ We survived the move and are getting settled into our new home.  We are still deep in boxes.  How could we own so much?!  I got rid of lots before we moved and have carted eight more boxes to Goodwill in the last week.  The goal is to get rid of at least a third of our belongings!  I think we are well on our way to accomplishing this goal.  We also are happy to announce that our former home is under contract!!!  We did not get as high a price as we had hoped for, but it is enough to let us do the most important repairs in this home, replenish what we have taken from our small savings and buy a "new to us" second vehicle.  All in all, we have no complaints.  Now we are just praying that nothing goes wrong and the contract holds.  We hope to close on the 17th of December.

In Our Homeschool ~ We restarted school this week and are working hard on memorizing the multiplication tables.  Hopefully, everyone will have them down in the next few weeks.  We are also starting a unit study on the The Secret Garden.  We found a secret garden of our very own right next to the carport!  I thought it was just an overgrown, weedy mess, but there were little paths and a bench tucked back in there.  We are very excited to bring it back to life!  We are watching Manor House on YouTube, which was a PBS special a few years ago.  It is a wonderful example of what life was like on a manor around the end of the Victorian Era.

Special Events ~ We are very busy with Nutcracker rehearsals.  We are hopeful that we will make it back from Timothy's surgery in time for the kids to perform in at least one, if not all, of the performances.  Goldilocks took part in the homeschool choir, and they had a lovely concert this past week.  It was very impressive.  Their choir director is amazing.

Around the House ~ Besides digging my way out of boxes, I am enjoying getting to know my new home.  It is so much more user friendly.  The huge laundry room in the basement has built-in clothes lines to hang up all of our clothes (we still do not have a working dryer).  We live and school in the kitchen/dining room.  It is so nice to have a place to relax and school away from the front door and windows.  I don't feel like people are going to show up at the door and see our mess at any second.  We did get all of the most critical electrical problems taken care of and hope to put more light fixtures in after our home sells.  We also look forward to enjoying our family room some day.  However, the concrete has a strange glue on it and I am not sure it is safe, so for now we spend very little time down there.  I think it will be a wonderful play space after we lay a floor down.

Clockwise ~ The alto section at choir; planting daffodils in the secret garden; a secret bench; mulling apple cider; my little cook loves the new kitchen, too; and collecting oyster shells found in the secret garden, which we will lay as edging along the path.

I am joining homegrown learners.

Blessings, Dawn