"Mom Homework" for anyone who is falling behind or not quite getting it in school. Also, if the kids receive less than 80% on an assignment or test, they have to fix the one's that were incorrect.
I don't know why we never knew this until just a few weeks ago, but the library carries piano books with sheet music! They have various levels and Elisabeth has been the most excited since she's in a place now where she can sight read just about anything so she was able to try out some Imagine Dragons, Taylor Swift, Annie, Sound of Music and more.
Homework and snacks after school.
Nora and I often spend time cooking up some sort of snack for when the kids get home from school. I'd much rather cook, clean, or read books with Nora, instead of playing barbies so we do this a lot. I think we were making sweet potato muffins.
Sunday, while Scott and I were doing some food prep together, all the kids went upstairs together for at least 1/2 hour and then they came down together, looking like this and did a five minute performance of the story of Abraham and Isaac. It was awesome! Charles was Abraham, Annabelle was Isaac, Jane was the angel, Nora the ram and Elisabeth the narrator. I took a short video too :).
Nora's sweet primary teacher brought her over this cake for her 'birthday'. She likes to bring a cake to the kids on their birthdays, but Nora's birthday is not until April which means she won't be her teacher then since she moves up to an older class, and since we didn't move in until July, her teacher felt like she missed it and wanted her to have a cake :). Nora was so happy when they showed up on the porch and announced it was 'a cake for Nora' that she gave her the biggest, strongest hug ever.
This is our Scripture Basket, which holds a copy of the Book of Mormon for everyone in the family, plus our family principle journal. We pass it around each night and everyone grabs their book and we read together; and someone writes down the principles/lessons we find within the scriptures.
Nora and I spent most of Halloween at the kids school attending their Halloween festivities and parties so we both got dressed up, me and Professor McGonagall and Nora as Rainbow Dash. Their parade started at 930am which we were there for,
and then Annabelle had her party at 1030am which we attended and I ran an activity. We went home for lunch and came back about an hour and a half later for Charles' class Halloween party, of which I am the room mom so I did a lot, and once we finished up with that we went to Jane's Halloween party until school ended. For Charles' party we played Halloween Bingo, they did a Halloween craft and we did the toilet paper mummy game (and we did a halloween pictionary on the dry erase board since the mummy game went so fast). In the future I'll probably do Halloween pictionary, Halloween scattegories, and bingo plus a craft.
That night Maddie and Abby came over and helped Elisabeth hand out candy to the neighbors, while Scott and I took Jane and Nora out. Charles went with his friend Beau and Annabelle went with a few friends her age. We let them have whatever they wanted that night, then they each picked about 10 to save for the weekends. With the remaining candy, we froze a lot of the chocolate which we'll use for stockings, and then we took a lot of the other candy and saved it for gingerbread houses (thanks Lindsay for the idea! Brilliant!); and we did throw some away.
The kids had Crazy Hair Day at elementary school last week. We had some fun coming up with some crazy do's!
I learned about this book from a friends instagram post and decided to check it out from our local library and take Nora through the lessons.
She's 4 and we mostly do at-home preschool stuff (she has another preschool she goes to for an hour and half a couple of times a week, but it's free and with younger friends and we often have to miss, so we always do 15 minutes of one-on-one school time at home each day as well.) She can knows all her letters and sounds, can write most all upper and lower case, can write her name, and we do some numbers too and now, with the help of this book, we're working on putting sounds together to make words. She doesn't love school time but most people don't love to work but we do it anyway :). And she knows once she's done with her lesson (which takes about 15 min), she can have some free time so that helps with the motivation.
I often find notes like this taped to food that someone wants saved for themselves. It's usually Charles who leaves notes on things like the last of the granola that says, "saved for Charles" etc, so I thought it was funny when I saw this note protecting Annabelle's food (leftover enchiladas)that she wanted to bring for lunch the following day :).
I've been making these Teff wraps for lunch recently (I found them at Sprouts), and I'll often fill them with tomatoes, avocado, lettuce, and then sometimes sprouts or beans and hummus.
Here's the menu for last week. Notice I have a kids name next to each meal which means it's their day to help me in the kitchen with dinner. I schedule them on a day when they're least busy so that we're not setting ourselves up for failure.
Here's Annabelle helping me make Hawaiin Haystacks (which we changed last minute because we had lots of leftover rice and quinoa we needed to use).
Elisabeth had her Halloween piano recital last Friday night so I went with Annabelle and Charles, while Scott took Nora and Jane to pick up their race bibs in Provo. Most of our recitals are at music stores so it was fun to have it at someone's house this year.
Here's our gypsy! She wanted me to buy her a costume but I told her that when I was younger, I often had to come up with my own using what I had at home around the house and I suggested she do the same. So we looked around on Pinterest and felt like we could come up with the makings for a gypsy costume and I think it turned out wonderfully!
Saturday morning was the Haunted Half in Provo which Scott ran! It was his first half marathon and he did great. He finished in 2:1:57; he was hoping for a little faster time but he was having a lot of pain in a toe after mile 8 and had to ease up a bit, but that's still a great time running a 9:19 pace.
An hour after Scott started his half, Charles and Elisabeth ran a 5k at the same Haunted race. They did great finishing at 32:34 for Elisabeth and 33:01 for Charles.
Once Scott and the kids were all done it was time for the 1/2 mile kids course which Annabelle, Jane and Nora did.
And they loved it! They also loved that they got t-shirt, gloves, bags, and medals!
I took one for the team and sat this one out because someone needed to stay with the children while Scott ran :), and I was happy to do it.
My little girls love to get their nails painted, but Elisabeth and I rarely do our nails, so when we got the shellac out last week and painted them together, I had to take a picture to remember the moment :).
The weather has cooled off a bit, but it's not very cold yet, more like high 60's most days, and one day Nora asked if we could make popsicles, so we did! These yogurt pops were amazing!
Here we are during family night last week, carving our pumpkins.
Some days were even in the 70s last week, so after just a few days, our pumpkins began to shrivel up and mold. Too bad.
While some family members carved, others scooped out the guts, and other separated the seeds. Then we washed, boiled, dried and roasted them. Yum! You can find the recipe on my food blog here.
Last week we took my Webelos on a tour of our fire station for part of our First Responder requirement. They were in heaven looking at the the various trucks and the tools on those trucks, learning about what they do.
Becca and Bella came to visit this past week! They got in Wednesday evening and took off again Sunday morning after Sacrament meeting. The kids had a sleepover every night with Bella (which was always contingent upon them sleeping well the night before).
Thursday I sang in a funeral for a dear lady who was the leader of our book club, so I was gone for a couple of hours, and then we mostly just hung out the rest of that day. Friday we went to Salt Lake City and hiked Ensign Peak, then we went to Temple Square to see the updated history museum, and then we met Scott for lunch at Wheeler Farm.
Temple Square
On the way home we stopped at Sprouts for some grocery's, so we didn't make it home until around 3pm, and we'd left at 930am, so everyone was pretty tired and ready to just hang out at home for the rest of the day.
Saturday morning Scott and I went for a 6.2 mile run (we finished in 50 minutes so about 8 minute miles, just a little over), and then Becca and I went to a yoga class at my gym, which was so relaxing. We watched Charles' flag football game at noon and later that afternoon we went to Gardener Village's Witchfest, and Elisabeth and Charles each brought a friend. They had a scavenger hunt sheet we'd printed out at home, with a list of about 20 different statue witches they were supposed to find, and once they found them all they could turn in their sheet at the bakery and get a cookie for 50 cents (normally 1.50). They all enjoyed being on a witch hunt, and we enjoyed going during the day, way more than last year when we went at night! At night the environment is a lot less family-friendly with it's very loud music, lots of teens and adults decked out in costumes and kind of scary, and SUPER crowded so much so that we lost the kids once even though we were being very diligent; it's just you were brushing arms with people everywhere you went it was that crowded, and then the noise on top of it just made it a little insane. But this day-time adventure was a lot more fun.
That night Becca and I went out to dinner at Omar's Rawtopia restaurant. Becca has been vegan and gluten-free for a long time but just over the past couple of weeks has been doing all raw foods, so this was pretty exciting! She doesn't have any raw food restaurants in Idaho and it was fun for her to be able to try all different dishes. We ended up sharing all of our dishes which included hummus sushi rolls, a falafel salad, and crackers with a dip, and we finished it off with these three raw yummy desserts: pumpkin pie (becca's fave), berry cheesecake (my fave) and vanilla pudding.
