November 2022 month in review

I know I say it pretty much every month, but it amazes me it’s already November.

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Week 1

My pictures don’t really tell the tale of what all happened that week.

Like, I completely forgot The Artist works on Thursday mornings, until she came in at 8:25 with “We need to leave now,” and I was still in pajamas. That was a quick putting clothes on to take her to work.

I know there were a bunch of things that had me laughing, but I stupidly did not write it down. So, we’ll just go with the pictures.

We started off November with around 8 kids for game club. The boys were happy they had enough to split into two groups of players. I know they played Smash Up (Smash Up review), but I don’t remember what else they played.

Jeff and I went to see Black Adam together it was a nice solid movie, though there were some definite problems with time in the movie. How did Amanda Waller know Black Adam had escaped and prepared a team to take him down, with less than a few hours after he’d escaped. You know a previously mythical figure?

But it was fun, so I’m not complaining too much.

Sunday, I was supposed to go out with all of my high school girls and then at the last minute they all had things come up (sick, problems with car, schedule conflicts), so The Artist and I got some mother-daughter time.

Each week I bring a pot of tea, some sugar cubes, and various different tea cups (that’s them in the dishwasher) as we talk about the lesson from youth group. It’s a cool way to show I value them as I take the time to bring up actual glass cups rather than paper cups, and pick out teas they would like, and bring sugar cubes. Sugar cubes make everything better.

Oh no! It’s December 1 and I haven’t written anything beyond this. Time to get writing.

Week 2

Hmmm… Apparently I didn’t make a collage for this week even. That’s a problem. Let me go back and get that done…

To make things even worse I have practically no pictures for this week.

Creating a story form these pictures.

The week started off with lots of dishes. So many dishes that attempted to take over our house. Thankfully after many battles I was able to overcome it. Let’s take a moment of silence for all of the fallen soldiers in the dirty dishes war. In memoriam: Dawn detergent and Cascade dishwasher tabs.

Last year I discovered the author H.L. Burke and have slowly bought all of her books in ebook. In the meantime I told all of the kids I wanted them to read the first book in her YA superhero series, and I would talk about it with them. The Artist liked the first book so much she wanted to read the rest of it, so I’ve been picking up paperbacks of all of them. At the time of the picture she was on the third book in the series, Power Through. Since then I’ve bought the final book in the series and dropped occasional hints to her of the sequel series which has started coming out. The first book for that just came out yesterday, Captured by a Supervillain. The author is currently writing the second book in that series and she’s releasing random bits and pieces in her Discord server which greatly amuses me.

The Bible verse is interesting to me. At the time I read it, it really spoke to me and gave me hope, but for reasons that I couldn’t put into words, and reading it now out of context it’s hard to even remember why. I find it interesting how God can speak to you with the weirdest verses or moments.

Then I’ve been updating pictures for various lessons, and creating one page books of several of my stories, and I needed another picture for Isaiah, so that’s that bottom lower corner.

Week 3

Most of the pictures are from The Artist’s 16th birthday celebration with her brothers and cousins. We did a scavenger hunt as part of a one-shot game. They had to solve riddles and figure out where to go for various different things.

I also forced my kids, scratch that, two of my kids, to watch Super Book, a Christian anime from my childhood. None of them were appropriately impressed by the wonder of the show.

Week 4

I think this is the only week where I have pictures that are at all vaguely related to schoolwork. High school work is just not as interesting to take pictures of for the most part.

We hosted Thanksgiving with my family. Batman cooked the turkey again and I happily cooked just the stuffing, which in this case meant I got up an hour or so before him to get the stuffing all ready and then I went back to sleep. He had to stay up and baste the turkey occasionally. It of course finished a few hours early, much to everyone’s frustration.

The day after Thanksgiving, the kids and I went to the Renaissance Festival. We had lots of fun dressing steampunk together and generally enjoyed going to lots of different shows and such stuff.

One of my high school girls had surgery so I made her a stuffed cat as a “get well” present, The Artist added a sweater for the cat which made it absolutely perfect.

We decorated the Christmas tree and discovered our tree topper was broken so we bought a new one Wednesday night, this picture is from adding the brand new tree topper and generally annoying their sister.

Always a favorite of the boys.

We had a field trip on Monday to the fire station, Batman asked several questions about what it takes and was reinforced in his plan to join the military and train to be a medic.

Okay, this is storytime. We studied Pakistan and the day before I made our recipe form it (that bottom picture). I carefully followed the directions and pureed the mixture and then tried to form it into meatballs. But, you can’t form it into meatballs because it’s way too watery. I tried adding in bread crumbs, still too watery. Then I thought, I can kind of form it and maybe I can fry out the moisture.

That was a lie.

Next, I thought to just bake out the moisture. At the end of all my attempts, I still had a disgusting-looking mush that looked like dog food.

Nothing like the picture. It had a good flavor, but the texture was… less than desirable.

Yeah, that did not go well. On the one hand I’m tempted to try the recipe again and make a few changes, but on the other hand I also don’t know that I liked the flavor enough to try again…

Sigh….