Tuesday: book

Every year our church recommends a book for the church to read around this time.  At first I didn't pick it up.  Then last year I read it because our Bible Study was reading it.  This year I read it on my own.  I usually only read fiction in my free reading time, so, I'll admit, I felt pretty proud of myself.

I read this book in a slightly different way from normal, and it really worked well for me.  Instead of trying to read a large chunk once every other week I read a little bit every day or so.  This helped me think about what was in the book a lot more and it didn't feel like such a daunting task.

I'll have to do it that way next time too.

Old news: legos

I never gave a summary of our Lego creations.

I made a robot army.

Isaac played with a bunch of things, but also made assorted creations out of banana pipes.

Ben made a cool boat.

And we had dumped out all the bins this time and found a lot of non-Lego items.  It surprised me, because last year we made a point of taking out all the non-Lego items.  And there were still a ton left.

Sunday: last day

Today was our last day with family.  It was sad to leave, but I'll also get to see Nathan before too long so it wasn't as bad as normal.

After a yummy breakfast we went to a playground and to see the original fort of Fort Wayne.

Saturday: presents

Today started out with bagels and eggs.  Afterwards we opened presents...so many wonderful things!  It's fun to fund things under the tree that I had forgotten I had put in the list for me and the kids.

We played with the toys quite a bit.  A cash register was popular with both boys.  Isaac really liked a circuit building toy and Joshua really liked his remote.  Some of the other toys just stayed out away...they will be a lot of fun another day.

Joshua was a bit out of it, so he took an early nap.  After everyone was up from naps we went for a walk because it was about 70 degrees out.

We frosted our cookies, ate dinner, and played with the toys again.  A lovely and relaxing day.

Friday: family

Today we were with our family.  We got good donuts, played, took naps, and went to a playground because it was rather warm.  In the evening dad and pat showed up and we cut out cookies.

Wednesday: life

Ahh life.  Today was a bit busy.  (Busy enough that I didn't take a nap even!)

We did some errands and got Isaac some ink for some stamps that Cheryl had found.  He loved them!

After the picture we made a dinosaur party.  Isaac drew balloons and a cake with candles.  It's fun seeing that he can actually drawing things now.  He doesn't seem to realize that a drawing should really be a single moment in time and tends to make the pictures do things, like have the candles blown out or bites out of the cake.  But it's fun and who really cares?

Then he found the sheep.  Christmas magic is still at work!  Today there were four sheep and yesterday there were only three.  So it's getting closer to Christmas.

I ended up at Hope to talk with a student and realized that we had about a half hour to kill.  Luckily, Dad saved the day by providing some colored pencils and rings.  Joshua loved throwing the rings in the (empty) trash!  I wasn't going to take a video, but then he kept doing it over and over and over, so I figured I might as well.

Tuesday: found

1. Today I found one of Joshua's lovies.  It had been at daycare.  I've been looking for it since Wednesday, so it must have dropped out of the bag Tuesday night.  (Or, more likely, out of his hands.)  It was then put in the wrong cubby at daycare, and I just happened to notice it as I was putting away his things.  We were about two hours away from buying a new one...we have one and a half other ones that work for him, but having two good ones is nice.  (The half one was a desparate night one night when we realized one had been left at day care and one was missing.  I had the right materials in the closet, and so made one.  It's terribly put together, but it has the right feel.

2. Later today I found out that there had been a change to Moodle, the class site where the students upload most of their work.  Today there was an exam and there was an extra large file to upload. Moodle had worked fine in the past.  Of course, it didn't work fine today.  Students can't email me the file because it is too big.  Blah blah blah.  They ended up putting their work in a public folder and then I transferred the files into a private folder so I could delete the ones in the public folder.  Then I had to put them on flash drives for the graders.  It sounds so simple now, but trying to figure something out and trying to figure out why this was happening was a pain.  But hey, I came up with a solution, even if it wasn't a very good solution...that's half the battle, right?  (Also, I think the problem is fixed.  But it took someone with more background in the class 20 minutes of discussion with IT as to why it should be fixed.)