March 2021 in review

I’m finishing this up right before I’ve got it scheduled to go out. The start of the month seemed so calm, and we had spring break in the middle of this, and then these last two weeks or so and I’m suddenly wondering how the end of the month happened. But, it was a good month, even if I feel like I’m in a tailspin trying to get myself together.

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Week 1

The boys’ birthday was on Thursday, they’re 16 now and that’s kind of throwing me off. It’s weird to think about.

But, the month started off with Princess’ big event for American Heritage Girls. She’s been working on this for 8 months and it kept getting pushed back and pushed back, and finally happened now. She put together encouragement boxes for different missionaries. It was a lot of work, and I’m proud of her for persevering.

On the boys’ birthday we went to mini-golf, and since it was during school hours, we were the only people in the place, so we got to goof off as much as we wanted. I gave the boys books for their birthdays, and Superman has already finished the first book I gave him and he convinced Jeff to go pick up the rest of the series, and is now powering through those books too.

Friday we were going to watch Uncle Tom’s Cabin after reading the book, only I discovered all of the versions that had been streaming when I looked it up in February was no longer streaming in the United States, and all of the video versions looked to be rather dubious, and would have cost insanely large amounts of money for a movie I didn’t plan to rewatch. We ended up watching Amazing Grace in combination with our Uncle Tom’s Cabin snacks.

Finally, I finished my quilt block of the month for the Murder Mystery Quilt I’m taking part of, and wow was it so hard to get all of those seams lined upright. It’s not perfect, but it’s as close as I want to try and correct.

March week 2

These next two weeks of March are all about the geography. I’m attempting to finish off Europe, and most of the countries left we don’t have that many resources on. So, it’s lots of watch the Geography now video and then cook a meal and I’ll have to admit I’m sometimes getting the meals mixed up.

I gave Superman, seen reading and pacing up above, the sequel to Mortal Engines and the first Maze Runner book for his birthday. He loved the Maze Runner series so much, he went out and got the other books in the series. We watched the first two movies on Sunday, the 14th, and he got progressively more annoyed as it went further and further from what happened in the books.

I felt his pain.

But, that weekend, the boys went up to Dallas to visit their grandparents, and Princess and I first had the Awkward Unicorns over to watch the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which we didn’t finish, then spent the rest of the weekend watching way too much Gilmore Girls.

Oh, and my kids are so done with their sign language professor. The last quiz video was blurry, and they all sent emails on Tuesday, well before the due date, and before either of her two weekly “office hour” sessions, they also let her know some of the other assignments, that required interaction, weren’t up yet.

She didn’t respond until Sunday afternoon, the day it was due, and she basically said, “I can’t fix the video quality, it’s probably on your end (I watched the video, it wasn’t, it was her video that was blurry).” Then put up most of the assignments to get turned in, but didn’t get the other ones finished.

It’s rather annoying to have this going on when I had a great sign language teacher in my college days.

It’s really frustrating to me to see it handled so very poorly, and know this is their introduction to college.

March Week 3

This week was Spring Break for us, but I still made the kids do geography, which means we cooked lots of new things (or repeated things I’d forgotten we made before): Bulgarian Meatball soup, Croatian nut bread (remade from before, more successfully), Bosnian one-pot chicken, and I”m trying to remember who that strawberry dish was, it was one we’d made before, but I don’t remember without looking it up, oh and Steaks San Marino

As we completed our geography lessons, Leezard liked to help, sometimes chewing on my lap desk, which is not so helpful.

I spent Saturday driving down to San Antonio for a baby shower and dealing with absolutely horrid traffic that made me an hour and a half late. The shower itself was fun, and then the drive back up was slightly better, only slightly.

We finished up the week with a fire in the backyard, with Princess playing her ukelele for us as we burned through more of the wood from trimming the trees.

March Week 4 and change

As I was planning out different recipes for the countries we were learning about, I somehow picked out three different meatball recipes. This means I have three different pictures that are ever so slightly different arrangements of meatballs.

We finished all of our writing curriculum for the year, and I’ve got a fun new curriculum I need to review, so it’s a bit of an answer to prayer to have some good framework for planning. That top left corner is me working on planning at my local Barnes and Noble.

Spring has finally sprung here, and I’ve been taking pictures of flowers, this particular one I saw as I picked Princess up from her AHG meeting. I’m quite sure the neighbors thought I was strange walking slowly up to get just the right picture, but I really didn’t care.

Or, that’s what I told myself.

Leezard continues to be a canine-wrecking ball in so many ways. She doesn’t understand she is not the “small” puppy she once was, and continues to walk under tables she doesn’t fit under (bottom left picture) and therefore knocks stuff over. Or she decides she wants water from MY cup, and then spills it all over. It gets messy.

And that bottom middle picture is me finally sitting down and writing out the book list for Princess to read. Every time I bring up a book, I say, “Oh, you should read that,” and her eyes roll and she says, “Write the list down.”

I finally did. She was not appreciative as I was hoping she would be <sarcasm>.

In case you want to see a bigger picture of the list:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Ticia (@ticiam)

And finally, on Tuesday, March 30, we finally went on a field trip to Newman Castle. I say finally because our co-op has gone before, but we were sick the day of the field trip and couldn’t go.

While this wasn’t a super educational field trip for the kids, we already knew most of the material he told us, it was so cool to tour a castle.

The owner decided he wanted to build a castle and make a moat on his land, and then he proceeded to spend 20 years building it. He owns a bakery in town, and after working all day at the bakery, he would go out to his land and work at slowly building his castle out of cinder blocks and stucco. Then he carved the furniture in the house, and built himself a trebuchet.

Yes, a trebuchet!

We walked through all the rooms, climbed up spiral staircases and various ladders to get up towers (including a bell tower with a rather scary ladder up to the roof, but I bravely climbed it, that’s the bottom center picture of me).

Afterward I was talking with Jeff on the field trip and how it wasn’t necessarily educational, and he pointed out a very important lesson this trip taught the kids.

Follow your dreams. 

He had a dream, and he worked to make it happen, and then he decided to share his dream with everyone else.

That’s a pretty good lesson to share with teens. If you have a dream work to make it happen.

Oh, and just because it’s cool, here’s a video of the teen boys from our co-op working together to raise the drawbridge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Ticia (@ticiam)

 

That’s pretty cool.

 

How was your March?