Week 16 and 17 ~ Enjoying the Season

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King -- I suppose I say this all the time, but the last two weeks have been a whirlwind. I can't believe Thanksgiving was just last week! It seems like ages ago. Maybe it is just that we are now in full Nutcracker mode. This week is defiantly overshadowed by the Nutcracker. We will log 20+ hours at the theater this week. The last two weeks have had many ups and one big down (which I will get to later in this post).

A Sailor and a stuffed cat

My little candy cane!

A Guard who was in a rush to get to a costume change!

Last week we had our first snow! The kids were delighted to wake up last week to an inch of snow. They were out in it as soon as the sun came up. Our dog Boomer loves to run super fast in the snow. He is always a blur in my pictures.

Thanksgiving found us very thankful indeed for our many blessings. We decided to go with a traditional feast since Tom Sawyer is handling wheat in small quantities. He did eat too much stuffing, though, so is gluten-free this week. The menu was as follows: orange juice punch, stuffing, veggie platter, sweet potato and apple pies, turkey (decorated by Tom Sawyer), rolls, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce. Note to self...making the cranberry sauce, pies and bread for the stuffing several days in advance helped tremendously on turkey day.

We have a new therapist for Goldilocks. A few weeks ago, I took Goldilocks for an intake at a mental health center in our area. We have been looking on our own for a new female therapist for awhile with very little luck, until we found this organization that specializes in finding good matches for kids. They found us a match within two weeks. We have only met her once, but she seems great. I really am looking forward to some more support with helping Goldilocks meet her highest potential.

We are busy decking our halls. We found a sweet little tree this year at Home Depot. The kids decorated it on the first of December. We also put up two nativities and started our advent books and wreath. This week the kids' favorite advent things were making and eating latkes, plus decorating the tree. My favorite thing was sitting with my kids in the dark looking at our Christmas tree and nativity.

Tom Sawyer was shot with a pump rifle BB gun by the neighbor boy! He was shot at close range while riding his bike. It left an ugly welt on his leg and chipped the paint off his bike. The boy wasn't angry at him; he just was using my son as target practice. This kid and his chums, who also were firing BB guns at dogs and cars, have no concept of gun safety! The police took more than TWO hours to show up! Oy!! Living in the South is sometimes hard for me. Where I grew up, being shot with anything would have been a criminal offense. Here, the police think most boys are going to get shot with a BB gun (by mistake) at least once in their childhoods. They weren't even sure if it was against the law or not!! Since Tom Sawyer was threatened and then shot (the boy said, "I'm going to shoot you," and then shot him!), they agreed to go talk some sense into the kids and their parents, but since they took so long to arrive, when they went to speak to the boy who actually shot Tom Sawyer, he was no longer at home. I don't think the police ever bothered to come back. Did I mention that this boy's older brother shot Tom Sawyer (supposedly by mistake) with a BB gun this past summer? So, here we are again in a neighborhood where the kids are not appropriate playmates. I guess we are just going to have to isolate and import our playmates from elsewhere. I am so thankful for a really large fenced yard. We will be working on making it more tween/teen friendly for our kids over the next year. The hardest part is the bike riding...since riding in our neighborhood means risking being shot!

This month's poetry tea was all about Christmas. We read Christmas Trees by Robert Frost, Christmas Eve in Our Village by Phyllis McGinley, and A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore. We also enjoyed eating off of our Norman Rockwell plates and looking at his illustrations in the Norman Rockwell's Christmas Book.

We are officially Christmas schooling. The kids begin their day with CNN student news, one subject (history, science, or geography) and working on a page or two from each section of their Flash Kids full curriculum workbooks. Then it is on to Christmas school! We finished Mary's Christmas Carol mini unit study. It was wonderful. The kids and I also discovered Pentatonix on YouTube. They are an awesome acapella group that has many Christmas songs. We were able to find almost all of the songs in Mary's study on the Pentatonix channel. We also did our Advent books with activities each day. We delivered this week's Christmas charity of shoe boxes to Meals on Wheels. The biggest part of our Christmas schooling is the Nutcracker. This week, our studies are very heavy in music, theater training and social skills for the upcoming performances on Friday and Saturday.

Lastly, we squeezed in a library program. The girls loved making rubber band bracelets at the library this week. It is really easy and fun finger weaving. 

Well, I wasn't kidding that it has been a whirlwind the last two weeks. Thanks for hanging in there.

Blessings, Dawn