Thanksgiving Week

I am not counting this as one of our school weeks, because we did very limited school. Next week will be the same, since it is Nutcracker week. So, I will be combining both weeks to make up week fourteen. We did have some lovely moments and quality experiences I would like to record.

Dean's dreams came true this week. We finally had enough money saved up to purchase all of the parts of a gaming computer. Dear husband and Dean spent about six hours building the computer. Now, Dean can play with his friends and brother without the computer constantly crashing without  having a proper graphics card. I am delighted that he learned some skills, and we saved hundreds of dollars doing it ourselves.

Recently, Grandma taught us all about Banksy (the British street artist), and the kids made their own similar drawings. First, they created and cut out their own stencils on mylar and then painted on canvas board. Banksy is an anonymous artist, and we really enjoyed learning more about him (or her). Banksy's art appears around the world, but he carefully guards his identity.

We also had a lesson with Grandma on linoleum block printing. The kids carved their own blocks and then printed their own printed cards. This was pretty cool, too. Anne decided to skip this lesson, because she needed to work on our Christmas gifts for her teachers. She wrapped her homemade candles with yarn.

Anne finally finished her research paper on Wooodstock. She will be doing several more research papers this year. She will be allowed to pick all the topics she wishes to research this year.

I promised the kids we would have gentler books for family time through Christmas, since they found Christy to be traumatic. This week we listened to an audio book called A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck. We had listened to the two earlier books in the series years ago and laughed our way through this one, just as we had the previous two. However, it was filled with some rich lessons and some light reinforcement on the importance of living a hard-working and honest life.

Lastly, we had a lovely Thanksgiving at home. In the evening, we went downtown to look at the lights and take a few photographs. I really wanted to finish giving out our homeless kits so we could make new ones with a more winter focus in mind. We took our four remaining kits and handed them out to a few homeless people who were settling in for the night in doorways. Dear husband even got out of the car and gave a kit to a man and talked to him for a few minutes. He is generally very shy about doing things like that, since he wasn't raised doing any hands-on charity work. I guess living with me for the past 20+ years is having an impact ~ haha.

Blessings, Dawn