Weekly update - Dec. 10, 2022

We're going to do the weekly update tonight instead of yesterday. Yesterday was a train wreck and I'll save you my rant about doctors until after I have processed it all and can be more reasonable. Suffice it to say, my children were just about to break out the popcorn listening to my end of a half hour conversation with  said doctor this morning. Life has been much, much better today and I am hopeful that I might be able to pull off some sort of Christmas by, well, Christmas.

• Last night K. made dinner... chicken korma and an Afghani salad. It was part of his independent study he is doing this year about Afghanistan. He did a good job.
• Thinking about this, I don't really understand why parents are so eager to find cooking classes for their children to learn how to cook. If the parents themselves do not know how to cook, that's one thing, but if they do... I have never overtly taught my children to cook, just enlisted them to help with dinner as a matter of routine. (Or encouraged them to figure out their own breakfasts and lunches if they didn't like the options I had provided.) All of them are quite adept in the kitchen by this point. 
• I'm realizing tonight's installment of the weekly update may be a bit kvetchier than normal as I seem to have used up what little filter I have. See the comment in the introduction.
• The cats are very much enjoying sleeping in puddles of sunshine these days. The much lower sun comes right in all the windows which run along the south side of the house.

Midnight

• I think we are all finally over whatever illness we were passing around. Y. was the last to be knocked out, but woke this morning feeling fully recovered. That was good since she had an 8am Mandarin tutoring session she needed to log in to.
• The cats are trouble. They love the Christmas tree, not to climb, but to sniff and run under. Every morning we come down to the tree skirt, ornaments, and the nativity dolls strewn around the room. 
• I can see in the blog stats which posts have been looked at recently. Every so often I will come across one that I had either forgotten about or couldn't find. Today I came across one with pictures of P.'s foot high mohawk. 
• I don't think there will be any Fiber Monday posts until after Christmas because while I have been working on things, I have nothing I can show yet.
• It turned out to be a week off of school between various people being sick and R. really struggling. Every summer I optimistically plan things for December, and every December I wonder what on earth I was thinking. After 26 years of doing this, you would think I would have figured out that December just really needs to be set aside for alternative learning... ideally a stack of various documentaries would be just about perfect.
• Let's play a game. Can you spot the chicken? That would be the chicken desperately pretending to be a table saw.

This is Jodie. As in Buffy and Jodie, the chickens that came to us as little tiny chicks last spring. (I know, don't name the chickens. But Buffy is a Buff Orpington, so Buffy fit. And if you have a Buffy, then her best friend needs to be Jodie. And if you understand that reference, then that tells me a lot about how old your are.) Anyway, Buffy and Jodie used to live in the smaller, second coop. But the due to a variety of circumstances, including white ducks who are bullies, they are now in the big coop with the rest of the chickens and the white ducks have been separated to the smaller coop. It makes for a more peaceful poultry world. But Jodie, for whatever reason, does not like to roost in the big coop. Every night we have to go and search for her to discover where she has decided to roost that night. Sometimes we find her, sometimes we forget or can't and discover a lone chicken wandering around in the morning. This is highly disturbing to H., who will go and carefully catch Jodie and put her in the coop. This evening we spotted Jodie disguising herself as a table saw.

• Today I dusted our bedroom. I was tired of children writing notes and making designs in the dust.
• We have finished with our homeschool co-op until February. I love that we take most of December and all of January off. It's just the right sort of break I need in the middle of the year.
• L.'s Christmas list has a few items such as patches for her favorite band and clay, but the rest goes like this: puppy, puppy, puppy, puppy, puppy, or a kitten. It's very similar to last year's and I'm afraid will be equally unsuccessful. 
• H. has made a Christmas list this year, completely unprompted. This is the first time this has occurred to her to do.
• Due to the combination of R.'s challenges and the weather, my business has had zero income for the month. (I will not panic. I will not panic. I will not panic.)
• D. is beginning finals week and will be home next weekend.
• J. and Y. have finished Death on the Nile and are now onto a new Agatha Christie book.

And that's about all for the week. The rest was a lot of sitting on the couch and catching up on laundry. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.