Weekly Wrap-Up - August 7

You've already heard about our cat explosion. Which was probably the most exciting thing (at least for the girls) this week, but here are a few more happenings from this week (and last weekend).

When we left Pittsburgh last Friday, we went to my parents' house for Grandpa's memorial service (Sabbath afternoon). It was a nice weekend of seeing family, and some old friends, and remembering Grandpa. I think Grandma really enjoyed hearing all the nice things people had to say about Grandpa at the memorial service.

I wasn't sure how the big girls would do at the memorial service. They've never been to a "funeral" of any sort, and are sometimes much to vocal (or non-verberally expressive, or both) about things being "boring" and such, and I was pretty sure Little Bit wouldn't be real into sitting quietly, so I opted to just go straight to the mothers' room. I'd planned to take all 3 girls with me and that way the big girls could help keep Little Bit entertained or quietly read or play on their ipods if they were bored. But they asked to sit with Mama & Papa instead, so they did, and Rodney & I took Little Bit to the mother's room.  Turns out the girls loved all the stories about Grandpa. In addition to a life sketch, which is, of course, a story, the pastor's . . . hmmm, is it called a sermon? I don't remember, anyway, the sermon-like part, whatever it's called, was also mostly stories of the pastor's memories of Grandpa and such. And then they opened it up to let anyone share memories, which, again, ended up being mostly fun stories people had about Grandpa.So it all worked out fine. Sunday morning we spent some more time visiting with family and then headed home.

This week we've been getting back to school after our week of field trips. And catching up on fun stuff like laundry and cleaning and such.

It's been hot, but not so hot as to be unbearable, so the girls have spent quite abit of time outside trying to make friends with the cats.

They're enjoying the history, Little Bit loves that I read her stories now for "her school". She also thought it was pretty cool when I pulled out the watercolors for the big girls to do one of their crafts for history, and gave her a paint brush and paper too. I think she ended up soaking the paper till it fell apart, but she loved it.

We were excited to spend an afternoon with our "adopted grandma" and neighbor, Miss Judy. She'd been gone and then we'd been gone so it had been 2 or 3 weeks since we saw her. Was soo nice to see her again and get caught up. We also did some planning with her. She'll be watching the girls' friend, L, next week so we're planning all kinds of fun field trips with Miss Judy and L next week, should be a busy week.

I also introduced the art appreciation course I found for the girls. Wasn't sure what they'd think of it, they've never shown an interest in art appreciation per se, though I figured I could "sell" it by pointing out that some of the lessons include actually DOING art stuff, but didn't even have to. They enjoyed learning about Picasso and seeing some of his paintings and talking about them. I think Picasso was a good first painter for them, his stuff is SOO varied, that caught their attention :)

And I guess that was about it. It was a busy week, but mostly boring things like laundry and unpacking. We had fun with school but nothing of any great note.