2019 Memories

I’m slowly organizing my blog a bit better, this is all my memory type posts from 2019 to give them a home.

There are almost certainly affiliate links dumped in here somewhere.

January

Princess and I headed over to one of her friends from American Heritage Girls to make a hat for the Mad Hatter tea party, you can barely see it, but it’s super fun and over the top. The top two left-hand pictures are from that outing. The top right picture is a common sight right now of Princess cuddled up by the fire and reading. The pillow she’s resting on is a t-shirt made into a pillow she got from a friend for her birthday it says, “I’m not arguing, I’m explaining why I’m right.”

The middle two pictures are of Superman working on his engineering curriculum. Of all the different things I tried out this year, our 42 Electronics engineering curriculum has been the best plan (follow that link for my review, I like it even more now). He built a raspberry pi computer and got the whole thing set up. It’s pretty impressive, now he’s working on programming mods for Minecraft.

The kids had their first ever experience with standardized testing this week. I tried out the Affordable Homeschool Testing, and I quite enjoyed the experience, and I’m working through the results. I’ll be writing about it more later, but for right now I’ll be having the kids take this test again later.

February

We started the week with Disciple Now, a weekend retreat for the youth group, and afterward, I had the 7th-grade girls over to watch movies, and it was hilarious to see their reactions to You’ve Got Mail and the differences in technology.

We got a smattering of snow, just enough to be cold, but not enough to do anything.

Then everyone got sick. We were sick for a week straight, so I took the chance to read lots of books. I read most of that pile while sick, White Chocolate Moments is the only book there I didn’t read. I love Diana Wynne Jones, so I happily read through Darklord of Derkholm, and then got out the sequel Year of the Griffin, and then powered through Eight Days of Luke. Then I made Jeff get them on  Audible, only I couldn’t buy Eight Days of Luke because I can’t find an audiobook version of it. I’m super bummed because it’s a fun version of Norse mythology, unlike Magnus Chase whose main character drives me nuts.

Jeff, the only healthy person in our house on Valentine’s Day gave all of us the cutest caramel apple bears. Isn’t it so cute?

In the top corner, there’s a picture of baby turtles with raspberries on them. I’m having fun exchanging memes and random pictures with Princess through text messages. That’s an unexpected joy of my child having a cell phone. Of course it also allows me to tease the kids with random things that amuse me.

And the final picture is Jeff gluing figures together from Forbidden Fortress. He’s gone through several bottles of the gel glue. I’ve made a lot of Hobby Lobby runs for more as I drop the boys off at Kung Fu.

March

I’m writing this week without the benefit of my reminder pictures while I’m up in Iowa. I had to login to my blog because of an URGENT update, so I thought I’d take a minute.

This was the weekend of going to Great Homeschool Conventions Fort Worth. I went to every single teaching high school session I could find, and by the last session I went to, I felt like I knew more than the person presenting. Now, I probably didn’t really, but it was some amazing material and I have pages and pages of notes.

And like happens at many conventions, I got to meet some amazing people. I met Dr. Wyle, who wrote the original Apologia stuff and now has an elementary curriculum. He spent a good 30 minutes looking at an electronic microscope to help me figure out if the kids could use it for Biology next year. I loved the sessions I went to that he taught.

I spent a lot of time talking to the owners of a Christian Fantasy bookstore, Realmmakers. The authors sold there are all Christians who happen to write fantasy. I spent all of my spending money for myself there, and got a couple of books signed by authors. I’m about halfway through my second book from that bookstore. I also met another fantasy author who had an amazing session on writing and word-crafting that I absolutely adored. I’ve been talking to everyone about it.

Finally, I spent a fair amount of time talking to the people from Write Shop, before deciding to buy their writing curriculum for next year to work on fine tuning my kids’ paper writing skills.

As to actual school work… The kids are working on finishing up their “What I want to do” papers, and ended up having to do a lot of revisions. A LOT of revisions.

We’re slowly working our way through English history this month, and talked a bit about early historical events.

I was home for two days, and then we drove down to Galveston to meet Jeff’s parents.  It was crazy cold. Okay, it wasn’t really cold, but it wasn’t weather that leaves you wanting to play in the water.

Or, I don’t want to. My kids happily played in the water as I sat wrapped up in a coat on the beach.

We went to Moody Aquarium again and discovered why we never go anywhere during Spring Break because it’s horribly busy, but I was able to get a recreation of a picture I first took when the kids were super little.

We also revisited the scene of our first ER visit. It was quite amusing to think of that. That’s that store in the picture up there.

April

This is actually one of two collages, apparently, I saved all of my pictures for the last week of April, and all my busyness.

Easter, our church had three services, and the kids got to volunteer. The top is a picture of Batman helping with parking. Next to it is Princess enjoying a tea party with her cousin. Followed up by a picture of our rather mixed results Syria meal. Now the chocolate cake Batman cooked for his friend’s birthday, that was a HUGE hit.

Next up you can see the kids and I on Easter Sunday, we accidentally got there 45 minutes early so I had more than enough time to take a few pictures with the kids. In the middle is Superman working on his 42 Electronics. He put together his raspberry pi a few months ago, and now he’s working on programming it now. This really is emphasizing how little I know about programming as he asks me to help and I have no clue what to do.

Working our way across the bottom, is me wearing a knight’s helmet, those things are surprisingly heavy, I hadn’t realized how heavy it was. Then Batman with another meal he made, but I don’t remember what it was.

I just hopped over to Learnly, to see if he had uploaded that, but nope, he hasn’t, so I definitely can’t tell you just what that yummy meal was.

The kids discovered the awesomeness of clearanced Easter candy, and they very carefully figured out how much they can buy for $10. As you can see, she’s very excited about her candy.

The last two pictures are of us playing some print and play games from Cheap*** Games, which we once had in their original black and white games, but lost at some point. You can either download the free version from their website, OR buy the deluxe editions of Unexploded Cow and Killing Dr. Lucky. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed those games. I kind of want to buy the deluxe versions, but at the same time I have a hard time paying for the fancy version when I first spent less than $10 for the games. But those expansions for Killing Dr. Lucky sure look amusing.

May

This week consisted of lots of finishing up materials. We’re also working on reading To Kill a Mockingbird, so every couple of days we’re meeting and discussing the next 40 pages. It’s interesting to see the kids slowly growing in their ability to critique a book.

However, the picture worthy events, are not what you’re probably expecting:

1. Superman got an impressive head wound that resulted in 9 stitches and every Mom in our homeschool group worried because of the sheer amount of blood covering him, and the pole he ran into vibrating from the force of him hitting it.
2. Jeff and I saw “What We Left Behind” for a Fathom Event, and it was a lot of fun, though I did find Ira Steven Behr a bit too much, and would have preferred to hear more from the actors or other people. That may be because I’ve seen several videos of Deep Space 9 panels, and he tends to talk over the other people and take over the panel.
3. The boys are both quite proud to be officially taller than me. Superman also officially weighs more than me, and he quite loves it.
4. Princess had her Court of Awards for American Heritage Girls, she bridged over from Explorer to Pioneer, and got her level award. It was pretty spectacular.
5. The boys participated in their first ever kung fu tournament, and between them got all of the possible awards to get in their different categories they competed in: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and bravery award. They were mightily amused by that.

June

The last two weeks kind of run together and the pictures all look rather similar. Lots of holding the new baby, my kids playing on their computers as the boys desperately worked to finish their math, they got behind. I’ve got a full review of Teaching Textbooks in a few weeks.

As we drove up I got a large amount of our schoolwork planned out, and a general idea of the writing assignments from WriteShop. They’ve got some interesting assignments.

As is usual when we go up to Tara and Josh’s house, we played a lot of games. We played Mysterium (Tara’s game, and here’s my review), Oregon Trail (our game, my review), Last Night on Earth (Josh’s game, and I opted out, I don’t do zombies), and an epic 2 day game of Shadows of Brimstone (I still have no review of this game, which I should for how often it comes up).

We also watched all of season 1 of Cobra Kai, and all of season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You watch a lot of TV when one of the people you’re visiting is nursing her baby. It was a lot of fun.

The kids all learned how to change a diaper, with lots of cries of “this is so gross,” feed a bottle, and soothe a crying baby. My Instagram feed was filled with the new baby cousin for the entire two weeks. Here are links to my specific favorite pictures from the week (I don’t want to embed ALL of them): Batman cuddling baby cousin (he was constantly asking to hold the baby, he’s going to be a great Dad), Batman soothing baby cousin and helping the baby kick everyone, Batman changing the diaper, my sketch of a Princess picture holding cousin in an outfit she made

I somehow never put a picture up of Superman by himself with the baby.

We also played through our family campaign, at some point I need to see if I can get Jeff to write about how he syncretized several different mythologies into one. It might also just make a great history post to look at the different mythologies and the parallels between them.

July

This would be the reason I got nothing done this week. Starting at the top from left to right.

I started working on an update to my books made into a movie by grade level, I’m separating out the high school into different grades because I have 30 books per grade level now. It’s slow going.

The kids had friends over, and had a great laugh carrying their friends and pretending they were parrots sitting on their shoulders.

I don’t know, my kids are weird.

I took Princess out for her pre-school conference to discuss her plans for the year for her independent project. I put that picture up on my personal FB page, and got a lot of, “What happened, when did she suddenly get 5 years older, which amused me.”

We played Shadows of Brimstone, which I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to write aobut it, because a review of how to play would be a massive 2000 word tome, but how we organize this massive game, that is something I can totally do. Also, I’m rather proud of our solutions (we have all 3 core sets, about 7 different expansions and uncountable mission packs and villain expansions).

We went out to eat at Joe’s Crabshack for my birthday, which was…. terrible. We had a horrible waiter, and when I got frustrated and went in search of someone to get us more drinks, he gave bad excuses. As you can tell, a few days later, I’m still frustrated with him.

Finally, we went back to the Austin Aquarium for Sleeping with the Sharks, we got to spend the night there and interact with ALL of the animals. So, we got to “hold,” hold is a generous term because it just runs like crazy, the kinkajou, and have the lemurs climb on us, and actually really feed the sharks. It was pretty amazing. If we hadn’t won this I would never have thought to do it, but it was totally awesome and well worth going. I loved every second of it.

Well, not the rooster who decided 4 AM was the time to crow about every 5 minutes. You know, just enough time between them for me to start falling asleep.

If you want to see more, check out my Instagram, I saved all of my stories into an Aquarium Instagram Story.

August

I think I may be slightly off on the weeks here, but oh well.

I got my birthday present from Tara, and it’s amazing. It’s a Beauty and the Beast tea chest, and it arrived at just the perfect time because I was in the process of reworking my kitchen desk into a tea area. It makes me so happy. After I took this picture (you can see it as that big picture) I added a small heart shaped bowl with a bunch of tea diffusers including my brand new sloth diffuser, you can see it down at the bottom with the Moriar tea cup. This whole area makes me smile now.

But actual events? The boys had the second level of black belt testing, and they did amazing, and both of them got their new black belts, well actually it’s not a new black belt, so much as some new bits added to their current uniform.

I got together with my friend from high school and we celebrated our mutual summer birthdays and got a special dessert, which was insanely delicious!

We watched Starship Troopers while Princess was over at a friend’s house, which was a very good decision on our part. It is made much more watchable while listening to the Rifftrax. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the Rifftrax live, because that would have solved the whole shower scene problems.

Our monthly field trip with our homeschool co-op was down to the Austin Science and Nature Center. It really is interesting how different their reaction is to it versus when they were four.

Superman had to fix his laptop, so he helped Jeff with that, which was a fun break from his usual 42 Electronics work (my review of 42 Electronics).

And finally we finished up the Father’s Day campaign I started with everyone weeks ago. I found a fun D&D5e magazine, Rolled and Told (the link is to the compendum of the first 6 months)  that has a couple of quick dungeon crawls in each issue, and this one featured twin dragons.

Finally, we subscribed to Artist’s Toolbox for the month because of the Famous Artists lessons she’s adding in now. We had a big laugh over our attempts to draw the Mona Lisa using chalk pastels. It was a lot of fun.

September

The first week of September held lots of amusing memories. Starting top left, with the funny story of my cut finger.

I’m a discussion group leader for my church’s Precept Bible Study, and the leader of the other group called me to talk and see how things went the first week. While I was on the phone with her, I was trying to put away various things, and then I was pushing in something on my Prep Deck, when I sliced open my finger.  Here’s the status update I posted:

I was on the phone with a friend, and trying to put stuff away in the kitchen, and I reached to put something down correctly in the Prep Deck, when I cut my finger and suddenly my finger is covered in blood.
“Uh oh, I cut myself,” I said, “Boy over there come clean the thing I bled all over on.”
So I started walking over to the medicine cabinet, and said, “There’s blood everywhere. This could be a problem.”
At this point I’m leaving a small trail of blood on the floor.
So my friend said, “I’m gonna let you go so you can deal with that, and I have to get my kid….”

So I get to the first aid kit and I’ve got a small puddle of blood in my hand, and I grab a cotton ball and stick it on there while I look for the disinfectant.
I find that, but I’ve bled through the cotton ball, and when I pull it off, there’s cotton ball stuck to my finger, and I have to get one of the kids to come help me get it together.

We spent the next few minutes searching for the antibiotic ointment and finally raided the first aid kit in the car.

I think I’ll finish this later, I’ve bled through another band aid, so I’m going to go get stitches.

This was the later status update I shared over on my Blog Facebook page (if you don’t follow me there, you should, there’s lots of great stuff there):

Yesterday I gave myself a truly impressive cut for the sheer amount of blood my finger contained.
It’s amazing how much my reaction created my kids reaction. I was laughing and treating it like a grand adventure, and that’s how the kids reacted.
Later that night my daughter retold the story at youth group complete with an imitation of me. Apparently it was hilarious.
Your circumstances do not make your experience, how you view it makes the experience.
And if you’re wondering, I surprisingly did not need stitches, it is now well testified I am not a snitch (snitches get stitches as I heard in some story).

Okay, now to the rest of the week. We finally got the shelf up and now Jeff’s birthday present from over a year ago finally has an official home, it’s this super cool boat for gaming.

We celebrated the cousins birthday, and I got a hilarious picture of my brother taking a selfie like a junior high girl. Princess organized the entire thing, it ws rather fun.

The first Tuesday of each month (so yesterday), we have a game club for our homeschool co-op, and the last couple of times the boys have been playing Small World, which works better with larger groups than many games we own. It makes me smile to see this giant mob of boys playing each month. There are now more than can realistically all play together on one game, but it’s fun to watch them try.

I work with the 8th grade girls at my church, for the purposes of church, Princess is in 8th grade (it’s complicated), and we decided to have an impromptu movie night one week, and they decided to watch the Pirates who Don’t Do Anything because we’d been joking about it. I was greatly amused by a bunch of 12/13 year olds choosing to watch a movie intended for preschoolers.

November

Hmmm….. Most of these pictures are from the very end of week 3 and transitioning into week 4, but cute baby pictures. What can I say, I took a million pictures of cute baby.

While Tara and Josh were down here we celebrated Christmas with them. We gave baby a Buffy the Vampire Slayer picture book because Tara is a ginormous Buffy fan. She immediately had to read it to her, which was cute as can be.

The kids all had fun carrying the baby around, but Batman in particular had fun posing her on people’s shoulder.

The kids were also wildly amused by her being in the chewing on everything stage. My glasses, Batman’s hat, a Shakespeare script…..

We made edible finger paint and decorated our wrapping paper with the baby (I should probably come up with a nickname for her beyond baby). It was quite hilarious to see Josh’s reaction (on Facebook) to his daughter eating paint.

I made some fun potions out of various fruit juices for Jeff’s campaign, and a few of them are still sitting in the frig, I need to wash those out.

And Superman wanted to be a character from World of Warcraft for Halloween, so I spent FOREVER making him a tabard.

Where forever means 10 hours about, so not really forever, but a good long amount of time.

It did turn out pretty good. He made his first ever costume piece by making his own bracers. I had to restrain myself from stepping in and showing how he could make them a bit sturdier and looking a bit more cool.

November is theoretically a bit more calm, but Princess and I are participating in NaNoWriMo, so I’m theoretically writing like a mad woman.

November

Okay, this is a actually just the rest of November.

These pictures are not in the least bit in chronlogical order, but going around more or less clockwise starting in the top left.

We went to the Renaissance Festival on Black Friday, which was lots of fun, though tiring. The middle picture with Princess looking out the window in the car is us riding down there.

On top of that, after getting back from Ren Fest we watched Home Alone 2 and decorated Christmas presents.

Finishing up the top row, it’s my baby neice and I. My brother’s baby is totally her Mom’s girl, and so she was barely tolerating being held by Aunt Ticia.

The middle row, we finished reading/acting out Henry V, so we watched the Hollow Crown rendition of it, and still think the live version by Penefold theater was better.

We went on a double date with my brother and his wife to see the Galaxy Quest documentary, Never Surrender, while my kids babysat. Afterwards, we all went back to their house and watched Galaxy Quest.

Superman finished up the first course of 42 Electronics, and I just purchased the second course for him to start in January.

And two random shots of me, then more of Batman baking. He made the recipes for our four countries we studied in November. Princess’ birthday cake, and then finally the book she got for her birthday, Neverland’s Key.

December

Because of the oddities of this December, we had a lot of Christmas traditions that we didn’t get done until way late in December, like decorating Santa cookies. We finally got them decorated less than a week before Christmas, which was a huge disappointment to me, but it all turned out okay in the end.

We had our annual Christmas with our various families locally and up in Dallas. It was cool to see Princess working on teaching her Nana origami. She has been going crazy for origami and got large amounts of paper given to her, both official origami paper, and unofficial scrapbook paper.

It’s been interesting to see how each child has reacted to Mac’s cancer. Batman has been cuddling Mac quite a lot, and is surprisingly upset about it. He asked for a picture of Mac to have, has ordered a baseball cap with a schnauzer embroidered on it, and wanted a Mac ornament. Princess also wanted a Mac ornament, but oddly Superman didn’t want one. However he was disappointed when his siblings got one in their stocking, but he didn’t. So we had to make an emergency run to the Hallmark store to get him an ornament

He’s really deteriorated over this month. He doesn’t really walk anymore, and he used to love taking miles long walks. He can’t really jump now, we’ve got a doggy stairs (on loan from my Mom) for him to climb up onto the couch. We’re trying to get him to eat, but he’s not really eating.

I don’t have pictures, but we spent New Year’s Eve watching the Firefly series, we got through most of the show, but didn’t quite finish it before.

And with that, we finish out the year! Happy New Year!