It’s a cold day outside – granted, practically balmy compared to the -16°F (with ice! and snow!) we had here at my parents’ the last few days, but it is windy – and I am snuggled onto my grandmother’s couch while the family fun goes on next door and the girls rest upstairs in preparation for more fun this evening. I told them “only an hour” almost two hours ago, but they’re so quiet, and the house is so cozy with the furnace roaring, and the thought of crossing the driveway to get back to my parents’ house is so bleak, that I’ve not yet fetched them.
Today Mom watched the kids while Carl and I ran some errands in town. You know you’ve been parents for a while when running errands childless feels like a date. We closed our old bank account, visited Dad at the hardware store, and went to the Co-op and grocery store. When we got back to the house, Mom had helped Joy knit one row in a doll blanket, and helped Gracie make a bead necklace for Aunt Zizzy. We always did fun crafts with Grammie when we would visit her. It’s fantastic to see my kids doing the same with their grandmother.
I’ve been reading Project-Based Homeschooling and getting all sorts of great ideas from it. I need to hurry up and finish it so Carl can read it before I have to return it to the library. I think it was Melissa Wiley I saw recommend it on Twitter. I’m so glad I did!
The US Figure Skating Championships start tomorrow. So does Downton Abbey (though I won’t be watching it until Monday evening, after we’ve returned home). The Bobsled, Skeleton, and Luge races are heating up. We’re moving closer to the Olympics! And, of course, SHERLOCK RETURNS on January 19.
I’m making lists of books I want to read this year. Trying to put more non-fiction on there, since that (to my surprise) is what I loved most out of all my plethora of books I read in the last two years. I keep getting disappointed by most of my fiction reads. (But not Jinx, which Maureen recommended and I promptly bought, devoured, and loved. I’m already planning a re-read so I can really savor it – I was so eager to find out what would happen next that I know I missed a lot of the beauty of the writing itself).
Joy just came downstairs and told me Gracie is asleep, which means I need to go wake her up so she will sleep tonight. Poor little chickadee! All this traveling about to visit family has been wonderfully fun, but exhausting. I have a hunch we’ll all be happy to settle back into a routine when we return home.
May this first weekend of 2014 be full of peace and rest for you all, my friends.
It’s sort of warm here (as in it’s above freezing), but it’s so damp and windy that it doesn’t feel that way. It’s going to get extremely cold tonight, and it’s going to snow some. Bart and I are supposed to work nursery tomorrow, but I’m betting church will be canceled.
We’re sort of stepping back into routine after Christmas and Bart’s vacation time. I think we’re all ready for routine. L is very happy to be back to normal, but Monday we’re going to really start working on potty training, so the routine is going to be upset a little bit.
Good luck with the potty-training! It went horribly with one of mine, and phenomenally well with the other, so I have no tips or advice. Obviously nothing I did had anything to do with how they did with it!