Catching Up

My January Chalkboard Drawing: The Mitten (by Jan Brett)

Christmas snow makes the best snowmen!

My son *LOVED* the wooden castle block set I got for him!

A little handwork: lacing cards (The Very Hungry Caterpillar themed)

My son was so proud of himself when he finished this lacing card! 

Another January chalkboard, can you guess what book we're reading this week?

We had some very wet, heavy snow last night. The next few pics are of the amazing scene we saw when we awoke this morning!

Phew, I think I've somewhat caught up with the pics I wanted to share!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The holiday was a perfect combination of busy times sprinkled with quiet family time.   We haven't been quite ready yet to resume homeschooling, but as you can see above, I did encourage my son to do some handwork and we have read a few stories as well. It's nice to take a little bit of a break from the rhythm of homeschool for a bit, but at the same time I have been keeping a basic rhythm going.  We still get outside every day, for example, especially after lunch. We have stories in the mid-morning, quiet time in the afternoon (when we come inside from play), and some kind of movement after quiet time. 

I am planning to have circle time again starting on Friday so that we can re-introduce ourselves to including it into our morning before the homeschool rhythm returns to full-swing on Monday. The kids are still enjoying their new toys that they received for the holidays, so the livingroom is a bit less ordered than I would typically like. I plan to return the livingroom to it's former order this weekend.  My husband likes to observe 12 days after Christmas, so the tree will have to wait to come down until the following weekend, but I am slowly taking the other holiday decor down a little more each day. 

I am planning to do two weeks of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs since this week has been very slow and informal with the story. Some of my childcare clients have been on vacation, so it's just been us and my before/after school kiddo this week. It has created a more subdued environment for the most part. Today I took the kids to a local school so we could all go sledding. What a great time we had!!!  The temps were around 34F/1C and the sun was bright and warm (relatively speaking). In other words, it was a perfect sledding day! The hill was undesturbed from the new snowfall last night, so we were able to create our own trails down the hill. What a blast!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In other news: I spent several hours this past weekend doing some deep cleaning and organizing upstairs. I ended up taking a large contractor's-sized trash bag full of items to a local donation center. The thing is that I have only just begun this organization project!

I may have mentioned (several times!) that the shipping container we're using to move abroad with is a small one, so the items we're bringing with us need to pretty much fit inside of it. We may be able to throw a few boxes of items into the post to mail it to ourselves at our new destination, but for the most part we want the vast majority of our stuff to fit into this container. It will be about 5' x 8' x 7', so you can see where we need to be a bit choosy what we bring! We're including a few bookshelves (which will be crammed full of stuff within the shipping container), but otherwise there will be no room for any additional furniture. 

If I have any hope of whittling down our possessions to fit inside of the container, then I need to keep getting rid of things!  It's handy that all of our furniture is old and run down so that it will not be a huge heartbreak to leave them behind when we leave. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's nearly the new year, and as we quickly approach 2014, I cannot help but reflect back on what a year it has been. Altho our outer appearances may seem somewhat the same to the typical observer, we've certainly had a busy and event-ful year! I feel so incredibly blessed to be living the life we're living! 

I hope your year has been as magical and wonderful as our has.