Ordinary Time

How can Christmas be just over a week away?!?!? More than anything, that sums up my week. When we drove into the city on Wednesday, all the electric sign boards above the expressways flashed this notice, "Don we now our fastened seat belts, fa la la la la la la la la". Someone at IDOT is feeling festive... and has a sense of humor. Thursday was a very bad day.  L. has become a reading machine. She will read for an hour or so, and then come and find me to tell me how many chapters she has read. L. also has three chapter books going at once. She is becoming a true reader. Other people have been doing quite a bit of reading as well during our school break. I'm incredibly frustrated at not being able to share what I have been working on. Tomorrow we will be decorating gingerbread houses. It will be nice to leave my studio and spend time with my children. J. is reading the last Anne of Green Gables books to the girls at night. Y. is particularly smitten with Anne. I be...

It was one of those days where multiple children careened off the ledge and dragged me with them. It was a long day. Long. So long that when J. called to say he was heading home and asked if any dinner had been started (because he knew it had been a long day), I couldn't even take the call because I was dealing with the most recent casualty. J. offered to bring dinner from a restaurant, but this is not the time of year to splurge on something like that. Knowing I had thawed chicken, I figured I could punt. TM and D. pitched in and started doing so food prep. In the meantime, A. texted our group family text to ask what was for dinner when she got out of work. Another child replied, "cubicle chicken," meaning cubed chicken, which was what D. was doing at the moment. At dinner I joked that from now on, we should call the dish, "Cubicle Chicken." So here is my recipe for Cubicle Chicken in case you need to punt in the dinner plans and have thawed chicken. Really...

Today we headed down to the Museum of Science and Industry again. This time we met our friends the P. family and the W. family, with the goal of seeing the different international Christmas trees that are displayed. (Really, it was a chance to see each other and catch up, but it was fun to see the trees, too.) Going to the museum with a lot of older children is a much different from going to the museum with a lot of very young children. The older children version is a lot more relaxing. We three moms took our time looking at each tree. The children looked at the trees but were done a lot sooner than the moms. This means that for the second half of our tree viewing time, the three moms were orbited by rotating and revolving children who would ply us with questions as they made their pass. Are you done yet? I'm hungry. When are we having lunch? Aren't you done yet? You've been looking at the trees forever! I'm dying of hunger! Don't feel too badly for them. ...

Is anyone else's to do list for Christmas going the wrong direction? I knocked out several items off my list yesterday and today, but I seem to have added more than I finished. This cannot keep up! I'm also a little bit frustrated that I cannot show you the things that I have accomplished. Since many of my children read this blog, I cannot show anything ahead of time. Consequently, I don't really have anything to write. I usually write about what I have been doing, but can't do that. Being holed up in my studio for hours on end is not conducive to interesting blog posts. So, to spare you from endless post about nothing, such as this one, I'm writing to warn you that until that to do list gets a little more under control, blogging here may be spotty. Looking at my recent stats, though, it seems that blog reading is becoming increasingly spotty as well, so maybe this all works for the best. But I am curious. For those who read blogs, do you read as much? Do you sp...

One of our traditions for Advent is to sing carols around the piano after dinner on the Sundays when we light our Advent candles. Usually this is me playing the piano and everyone else singing. This seems to be a changing a little this year. TM has been playing violin (teaching himself, he does not want a teacher at this point) and Duncan has been playing cello (from knowing nothing to playing the more accessible Bach cello suites in one year). I'm impressed with what both boys can do. When we sang around the piano, they each brought their instruments and played along. It was a little rough (though admittedly not much rougher than some of my playing since I am sorely out of practice), but had some real potential. The three of us have identified a few pieces we want to work on to be an actual trio. It will be fun, and I think we can actually work up something rather serviceable. If we could convince P. to join us on guitar it would be great, but I'm not sure we can. You neve...

On top of all the sewing I cannot talk about, I finished a dress for L. tonight. I made the long-sleeved version. L. chose the pattern and looked through my stash of fabric and picked the fabric. Her choice did not really surprise me as all of her favorite dresses tend to be blue with little or no detail on them. It's a good thing I can sew, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to find ready-to-wear dresses for her that she will wear. Here's the front: The back has a zipper. It's okay, but I could tell that I was pretty out of practice for installing zippers. The pattern went together pretty easily, and I will probably be making other dresses from it since there were a couple of other girls who decided they liked it. There are box pleats which are at the bottom of the princess seams on the bodice. As I was making it, I was looking at those pleats thinking I would need to do something to secure them since I didn't like how they were flapping abo...

Every so often the resources I have found for our country studies deserve a post of their own. This is the case with what we have done with Kenya. While we have enjoyed most of the books we've read about the countries we've visited, these really stood out. Need I add that you don't need to be formally studying Kenya to enjoy these? They are just good stories to boot. The books we've read are: Kenya (from the Enchantment of the World series)  by Micheal Burgan -  Over the past year and a half, we've read a lot of middle/grade school non-fiction books about various countries. They are written by different authors, but all follow essentially the same script. Some are better than others. I can completely sympathize with the writers who write these books, because having done it , it can be a soul killing activity. Thus, I can truly appreciate a writer who makes the formulaic interesting. This book on Kenya was definitely one of the better written of all we've rea...