Weekly Wrap-Up - February 10

Another week of unpacking and such.  The garage is finally starting to look like I'm making progress, woo-hoo!!! I still have a LOT of boxes to go through, but at least it doesn't feel quite so gridlocked anymore . . . there's room to start sorting and stacking the things that do NOT need to come in the house, and that makes everything much more manageable. Now if it would just WARM UP abit, that would make sorting through those boxes so much nicer.

Despite the fact that I've been busy with unpacking, and we haven't done much of our normal school stuff, the girls are still learning . . .

Sassy looked over my shoulder as I was glancing at Pinterest, and saw this pin which, of course, led to "Mommy, do we have balloons? And string? And a straw? . . . conveniently I'd recently unpacked a package of balloons AND knew where I'd put them. There were some fast food restaurant straws in the glove box of my car, and I knit, therefore I pretty much ALWAYS can put my hands on some yarn.  That, some duct tape (thanks to Papa) and a couple chairs, and they were in business! The directions suggested a 6 ft piece of string. They very quickly determined that was WAY too short, and went with "as long as will fit in the house! So, with Sassy in the kitchen (left) and MiniMe right up against the front window in the living room, they had a BLAST with their balloon rockets! In fact, there's still a chair leaning against the wall with the yarn and balloon rockets still tied to it LOL.

I was pretty proud of myself for managing to "catch" the balloon in "flight" LOL.

We had a couple days that allowed for outdoor time, without anyone freezing to death. One afternoon all 3 girls, and my mom, spent quite awhile outside. It had warmed up some, but they discovered that there was still icy down along the edge of the creek, so my mom & Little Bit had great fun throwing snowballs at Sassy and MiniMe, who, of course, had great fun dodging said snowballs. 

Another day, Sassy and MiniMe spent quite awhile outside exploring along the creek all on their own. I tried to take a picture, but they were too far away LOL.

A favorite this week was playdoh. I got it out to keep Little Bit entertained one day, and the big girls wanted to join in. They all spent a good bit of time over the course of the week, playing with the playdoh.

As we shifted things in the garage, we found a box of craft stuff (that I packed before we moved from Maryland, and never got around to unpacking, how sad is that?), that had gotten wet when the heavy rain washed into the garage (we'd tried to put all plastic bins on the bottom, or put any cardboard boxes on 2x4s, but had missed that one). SO I had to unpack it. Thankfully, the way it was sitting, the wet part was mostly things in plastic bags, and a bunch of stickers, that seem fine, after drying them out in the oven w/ just the light on. BUT as I was trying to deal with it all, Little  Bit was antsy, so I grabbed a tub of foam shapes, and a stack of foam sheets and handed her a foam sheet, handful of foam shapes, and bottle of school glue. She has had a BLAST with that combination. I figure if the stuff's been sitting in storage for 5 years, it might as well get used. What surprised me more is how much time the big girls have spent also gluing foam shapes onto foam sheets. I did warn them that, while we could take PICTURES of any of their masterpieces that they wanted to "save" we were NOT going to save a whole stack of these foam shape pictures. So far they've been ok with that LOL.

The newspaper continues . . . this week they decided to type their articles directly into the computer, which would be easier if I could figure out where I packed THEIR computer (they hadn't used it in I-don't-know-how-long, so keeping track of it when packing wasn't a priority), as it is, they want to use mine, which is fine, in that I'm often unpacking, except that when I'm unpacking, it's helpful if they are interacting with Lina, sigh . . . But they're typing, and creative writing, and the spell-checker makes them more aware of their spelling . . . this afternoon I'm hoping to show them how to format the newspaper pages with different size type and spacing and such.

And now, we need to get ready to go to a Lego exhibit at a nearby museum :)