Sept. Misc

Here was some of our family fun from back in September...

Children's Museum

When Jaden and Cody were young, our family had an annual membership to this museum and visited regularly. The boys have outgrown the museum now, though, so we hardly ever visit anymore. Once school started, I figured the children's museum would be a perfect outing for Adley on one of her days off school. She loved it!

Sliding down the fireman's pole was what Adley talked most about afterwards. She went down this thing so many times!

Checking out at the "grocery store" was also a hit for Adley. 

The museum had installed a new computerized checkout system since we last visited. Adley loved finding each item in her cart on the computer.  Thankfully, the museum wasn't too busy, so Adley could take her time at this station. So fun!

The museum always has a daily craft for kids to complete. Adley enjoyed making this fun pumpkin hat!

Football Excitement

Jaden and Cody are getting to be huge football fans. Each fall, they LOVE watching Sunday football games on TV and checking out their fantasy team scores. Jason thought this would be a perfect year to take the boys to their first in-person football game. Since each of our boys have chosen a different Texas college team to root for, Jason thought they'd enjoy a UH vs. Tech game. Not surprisingly, the boys (and Jason!) had an amazing time!

Even though they didn't stay for the entire (late) game, they loved the game play, the excitement of the crowd,

hearing the band,

and of course, sampling some stadium snacks!

School Re-Start

These boys definitely had the craziest start to their 4th grade school year. After attending school for only a day and a half, our family had to quarantine at home, due to our close contact with my brother who tested positive for COVID. Five days later, I received a positive COVID test too, and our family's quarantine started all over again. Ugh! These poor boys missed out on a lot of initial classroom routines, and they had to complete a ton of make-up work at home. Thankfully, Cody and Jaden are homebodies and didn't really mind missing school at all. They did a great job staying on top of their pile of homework, too. We learned there's a LOT in 4th grade! When they finally were allowed to head back to school a week and a half later, I talked them into taking another first day of school "take two!" photo. It was nice finally getting back into the school routine again.

Pastors' Wives Retreat

Each fall, the Texas district of our church body holds a retreat for pastors' wives at Camp Lonestar. I had never attended a district retreat before, but my mom and I both decided to go to this one. We had a wonderful time rooming together and enjoyed meeting some other ladies from around the state, too.

We attended seminars, Bible studies, played games, went on walks, sang around the campfire, and had a group worship service. What a relaxing weekend! Mom and I even tried out axe throwing and archery.

On our last night out of two, the group had a spa night. We all put on facial masks, made body scrubs and lip gloss, sipped wine, and painted our nails. I loved having the excuse this weekend to spend some extra time with my dear mom!

STEM Class Project

With Adley in school this year, I have two days a week with the house to myself. What an odd feeling! I decided I should use this time productively and take some education classes. I had let my teaching license lapse after Jaden and Cody were born, so I needed to take 60 renewal credits to get it reinstated. Thankfully, I found out I could take all the required classes online. One of the classes I took in September had me do a project with foil boats. Adley enjoyed helping me count pennies into each of my boats, predicting how many each would hold until it sank. The boys loved hearing that their mom had homework to do too!

And that's a wrap for September!

 

Around the World Part V

With Adley in school two days a week now, our country learning adventures have slowed down a bit. Adley's still excited about the activities, though, so we squeeze them in whenever we can! Here are the first two countries we "journeyed to" at the start of the school year.

AUSTRALIA

We kicked off our learning about the country "down under" by looking at its flag. We talked briefly about the constellation of the Southern Cross.

Australia is well-known for all of its unique animals, so we played an animal graphing game next. Some of the animals on this die were ones Adley had never heard of (echidna, dingo, etc), so we practiced saying the animal names out loud each time she rolled.

We've done rolling/graphing games like this before, so Adley started off right away color-coding her graph.

Our next activity was making a boomerang-- a paper one that supposedly truly worked! I had the HARDEST time following several of the directions for this folding project, so it was mainly a boomerang that I folded and then handed off to Adley. I finally got it right on my third or fourth attempt. Whew!

Adley's role in the boomerang creation was decorating it with aboriginal symbols. She did a great job with this!

Adley was proud of her decorated boomerang but couldn't really get the hang of how to throw it. Cody, however, was excited about trying and actually got the boomerang to return to him. I was impressed that this paper creation could somewhat work!

One of the recipes we tried was anzac biscuits. These sweet treats date back to WWI when army wives were looking for ways to send goodies to their husbands overseas. The recipe doesn't contain eggs, so the cookies, named after the Australian and New Zealand army corps, shipped well. Adley's verdict? Only so-so.

Grammy and Papa had visited Australia a number of years ago, so Adley and I spent a morning at their house, learning about Australia from these real world travelers! Grammy showed Adley some fun photos, mainly of animals, from their vacation.

I brought over some craft supplies for a couple Australia activities. Adley watched a youtube video with some silly songs about the platypus and then made her own paper bag platypus.

While Adley was occupied with something else (I think watching the platypus video again), Grammy surprised Adley by cutting out paper eggs and laying them under the platypus. Adley was thrilled to see that her platypus had laid eggs!

Then, Adley made a model of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Grammy showed Adley where she and Papa had walked along this bridge.

Grammy and Papa shared some books with Adley about wombats.

After our Australian activities were complete, Grammy and Papa served us lunch. We ended the meal by trying out some Australian lamingtons that I had made. These cake pieces rolled in chocolate and coconut earned two thumbs up from Adley!

We loved learning about Australia from Grammy and Papa. Isn't it cute that they wore their Australia shirts for the occasion?

Another day, Adley did some animal dot painting. She was especially patient with her first animal, the kangaroo.

Since the paint was out anyway, we used it to decorate some aboriginal clapping sticks.

Adley used the sticks to join in on some tribal clapping rhythms.

Adley made a little kangaroo pouch to go around her neck, colored a little joey to stick inside, and practiced hopping around the house.

You can't really learn about Australia without talking about the iconic Sydney Opera House. What an amazing structure!

Our last activity was learning about coral reefs. After reading a few library books about this wonder of creation, Adley made a sponge painting of a coral reef.

As you can see, much of our literature about Australia was related to its animals. We read some really cute animal books! One non-animal book, however, was a wordless picture book called Mirror. It was set up as a side-by-side story of two boys, one living in Australia and the other in Morocco. Since we had recently done activities from Morocco, it was a great time to read this book!

RUSSIA

Next up.... Russia! Making a set of matryoshka dolls was our first activity. These origami nesting dolls were easy to make and turned out so cute! Adley asked me to draw in the designs and let her just color the dolls.

Then, we cut out a bunch of matryoshka dolls and played some pattern games.

Since Russia is known for ballet, we made some snowflake ballerinas. While doing this activity, Adley watched some performances and then just listened to songs from the Nutcracker Ballet.

When done, Adley taped these pretty ballerinas to the door of her room and left them there for quite some time!

We made two Russian recipes-- Russian oladi (pancakes) wrapped with fruit,

and Russian tea cakes!

Another day we made the Russian flag (easy-peasy)...

...and learned a Russian polka dance (quite fun!).

We also watched a video of some guys doing a Russian squat dance-- so amazing!

Then, we made some Faberge eggs...

...and a model of St. Basil's Cathedral.

Such a cool-looking craft!

Last, we read a book about the Russian artist Kandinsky and made a version of his famous Squares with Concentric Circles.

Here are the Russian picture books we read. We love our wonderful library system that has so many cultural books like these available for us!

Another two countries added to Adley's travel book!