A Nature Hike
This week was kind of rough. It was our second week of homeschooling and errands and appointments kept getting in the way!
Maybe part of it was that the week also started with a holiday. The house was a mess, but we didn't make much progress on cleaning. But we did make a family Nature Hike a priority. We hiked on a friend's property and looked at Douglas fir cones, Horsetail Ferns, Penny Royal, and lots of Poison Oak with BIG leaves. Miraculously, I didn't get any!
I started a Nature Journal during the summer. I want everyone in the family to develop the habit of nature journaling. But Oreo decided to draw a space alien, and 2Flowers was more interested in picking huckleberries.
Drawing is lots of work when you're not very good at it! Lost Boy wrangled Davey so that I could have the space and time to work in peace.
Foraging for Sustenance
The rest of the week was grocery shopping, which is a bit of an ordeal because the nearest Winco is thirty minutes away. But we can buy almost twice as much food and supplies at Winco as we can at Safeway, so it is worth the drive. But the timing is very tricky. We needed to run some pressing errands in town and didn't have time to for the grocery trip before Oreo got out of kindergarten, so we had to take him with us.I try to avoid taking Oreo grocery shopping. When the two Bigs are together and bored, or tired, or hungry, or anything, they pester each other and act out and start chasing each other around, or hitting each other, or licking each other (Honestly! Was I like this as a kid?!). Sometimes I'll put off grocery shopping for several days trying to find a way around taking the kids, or at least taking all of them.
But we desperately needed to stock up. So I took them all. And my angel neighbor happened to be shopping in the same aisle at one point and said she could take one of the kids home with her! So 2Flowers went, because the neighbors have a cat.
The boys survived.
Lessons
The rest of the week was a bit of a blur. A dentist appointment. A Hashi's flare (Because I ate three mini corn tortillas at dinner on Wednesday, hoping that I could reintroduce them. Nope.) Trying to figure out which lessons we still needed to cover when the whole week felt kind of wonky.
We did pretty well at math.
We are going to use Teaching Textbooks, but we don't have our subscription set up yet. So 2Flowers has been reading Fred (and loving it, even though it's all too easy for her so far). On Friday she wanted to play Uno, but we couldn't find it. We played Mills Bourne instead and it turned out to be a good brain exercise for her.
It also helped us make progress on my main goal for homeschool this year:
It poured into our relationship.
