December 2020 in Review

I veer wildly between thinking, “Thank God 2020 is almost over,” and “How is it already December?” With that last thought being the thought most of the time. This fall in particular feels like it flew by.

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Week 1

The pictures are ever so slightly out of order.

We started the week adding the next piece to our outdoor nativity, which meant we spent it cold and goofing off. Including the picture of Batman trying to poke me with a literal 10 foot pole.

I pulled out our Wandering Wisemen and they’ve been looking for the newborn king with limited results. It’s fun to see where the kids put them when it’s their turn.

We finished up the Westward Expansion unit, with the kids adding their own illustration for the Monroe Doctrine since I hadn’t put one it, much to my surprise.

Leezard likes to sleep on the stairs. She frequently sleeps on positions like this, and it looks so incredibly painful, and then one day as we were going through our history lesson, Leezard started snoring and it was rather loud and distracting.

Up at the top, the boys are working to upgrade my computer with Jeff overseeing them, as they worked to pull the different parts out, one of them snapped (I think Jeff was the one actually holding it at the moment it did), and so I was pretty much without a computer for a week. It’s amazing how much you don’t realize you use something until it doesn’t function. I had a bunch of files I was going to upload to my subscriber page, and didn’t because of the files were on my desk top. I couldn’t work on posts because all of the pictures were over here. The template for my history quizzes is on my desk top, and the geography notebooks are on my desk top. You see how it goes.

And finally, Texas has finally hit gorgeous fall leaves. It makes me smile because every December is when we get those gorgeous fall colors everyone up North talks about, but there are also a large number of trees that don’t lose their leaves.

 

Week 2

Superman is taking an online programming class with MyTek, he’s enjoying it quite a lot, and I like that it’s online and he can attend live or watch later. He prefers later because he’s figured out he doesn’t like live classes as much. This amuses me because all of them will hopefully be taking classes online next semester…

We got a new car after our last one was wrecked. Two weeks of having just one car showed me how much we rely on having two cars. For the most part it’s not a big deal, but a couple of days a week there are times where having two cars is amazingly helpful, and requires much less juggling.

It’s been colder here recently, and so we’ve had the fire going in our family room, it’s not an unusual site to see one of the kids sitting there and reading. What is amusing to me is to see Leezard sitting there and watching me with a “what, I get cold too” look.

The bottom half are getting ready for Christmas pictures. We finally got the tree up. We got an artificial tree this year after a lot of discussion on exactly where and how we wanted to set up a tree. Finally, we decided to put the tree up upstairs way out of reach of Leezard. After the tree was all set up, we spent the rest of the night decorating Christmas presents, and painting all the different ways. Then we started making all of our favorite Christmas cookies.

 

Week 3

From the pictures, this wasn’t a busy week, but the weekend was what made it so insanely busy. We went straight from Princess’ birthday party (which the only thing I did was provide food and send out the invitations), to shopping for Angel Tree with my D-group (discipleship group), that’s the top left drawing because yet again I did not get ta picture. The top right picture is the awesome presents we got for our 12 year old girl. The girls went above and beyond with what they brought, some brought their own money, others brought the money their parents had given them, and they had a blast searching out just the right things for her to get.

Then we had people coming over for gaming Saturday afternoon, and by people, I really mean one friend… Sunday was our youth group Christmas party, and Princess and Batman both made cookies. Which is that second picture over there.

Oh wait, the bottom picture probably happened at the beginning of the week. My brother was able to see Wonder Woman 84 early when a fan of his let him know it was showing at a theater in South Austin, so the two of us went to see it together. It was a lot of fun.

 

Week 4

The next weekend we headed up to Dallas for Christmas with my in-laws. We played lots of card games and attempted to show them Disciple Detective, which sadly they didn’t like. The boys each got an awesome new board game. Superman got World of Warcraft Smallworld and Batman got a Lord of the Rings game, which I can’t remember exactly which one.

We finished decorating our traditional Santa cookies on Christmas Eve Eve, but I realized after I’d baked them we were out of mini chocolate chips, so we added blue gel icing for the eyes, but they ended up looking scary as all get out.

The kids had decorated some of the presents with their cousins, which made for a few very odd decorations, but it also meant they got decorations they loved, like the Among Us themed present up above.

Our Christmas celebrations were so much fun. Jeff got me these amazing socks saying, “If you can read this… bring me a cup of tea.” I LOVE them.

We got a whole slew of games, Jeff got me two expansions to Clank and Star Trek Flux. Peter got a Roman gladiator two-player game. I bought Jeff a game based on Death on the Nile, which we haven’t had a chance to play yet.

Princess got an iPad and a subscription to Skillshare so she can learn all of the awesome materials she wants to learn.

And the other couple of pictures are of family. I found matching Christmas pajamas, including one for Leezard, who really didn’t mind wearing it like we thought she would. The picture makes me smile. Right above it is a picture of all the cousins together.

December week 5

Let me tell you a story. Leezard loves to chase cars. This is not a safe thing, and our dog trainer said the best way to cure her of it is to desensitize her to them. So, I took the dog out to sit by the side of the road and watch the cars drive by. Only we weren’t far enough away, and it went horribly and she tore up my notebook, which is a minor thing, I know, but it made me sad, and by the end of it I was just way too sore, and it was a horrible plan. I tried again another time in a different location, and that went so much better.

We get fall here in Texas in December, the leaves really start to fall some point mid-December, and it always makes me laugh because I think about blogging and how people post all their fall stuff in August or maybe September if they’re posting a little late, and for us August is still summer. It’s insanely hot then, but December, December we get the most amazing fall leaves, and this past week the kids raked up all of the leaves into a ginormous pile almost as tall as all of them.

I finally have almost all of the quilt blocks for my Murder Mystery Quilt done. I even got the bonus block, the sphinx done, and I’ve got a few of the colors wrong on that one and it makes me sad because it is so incredibly hard to do it. Maybe I’ll make a second block…

That bottom middle was my theory on how it all goes together, and having just got the final announcement of how it all goes together, I was correct. While I wasn’t enamored of making lots and lots of blocks that were variations on triangles, I love the end results.

We ended 2020 watching one of my favorite TV mini-series, 10th Kingdom. Disappointingly the kids didn’t love it as much as I do, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching it with them.

 

All of 2020 in review!

That’s a bookend!

 

• January 2020
• February 2020
• March 2020
• April 2020
• May 2020
• June 2020
• July 2020
• August 2020
• September 2020
• October 2020
• November 2020
• December 2020 (you are here)

 

10th grade so far

 

• August 2020
• September 2020
• October 2020
• November 2020
• December 2020 (you are here)