November

DH and the boys are out in a blizzard to pick up his mother and brother from the airport.  I am sitting in a quiet, clean house, noting the snowfall and drinking tea.  And frankly I'm soaking up all the normalcy I can before Christmas jumps in.  It's a refective time so with that here is a bit of a reflection on the last month of life.  

We enjoyed Denver's Night at the Museums at the beginning of November.   This year we went up to Golden to explore the American Mountaneering Museum and the Astor House with friends and their amazing kids.  Amazing because they have a great story.  And amazing because they just are.  

B took part in a three part physics co-op wherein they built towers, bridges and containers for the egg drop.  He did pretty well with his design.  It didn't break from the fall from a second story window.  Of course, some kids in the group were disappointed that they did so well so they did end up breaking a couple just for fun. 

We studied sheep.  Yes, sheep.  We thought, too, about shepherds.  It was a two week unit study and one thing I most enjoyed was reading to B from Scouting the Divine by Margaret Feinberg.  Sometimes we assume that kids won't understand our "adult" spiritual formation books.  But Margaret writes so accesibly that B tracked right along with her and we both were reminded of what the Good Shepherd does for us daily.  This little craft was so cute and easy for S to make.  And it was so much more fun than gluing cotton balls to paper like he's done sooo many times in Bible class.  

We began to be Thankful.  S made a little thankful tree.  The crafts you think are overdone (i.e. ahem...gluing cotton balls to paper to make sheep) they end up loving.  He said what he was thankful for and we wrote his thoughts on leaves and taped them to a branch.  I think his favorite part was hacking the branch off the felled limb in the backyard.   And on the computer is tenmarks.com which is B's math curriculum for the year.  He and I both love that it's all online and includes instructional videos.  Plus I love that it's only $10 a month. He's doing really well, and if he's ever stuck I just watch the video with him and help him work through both practice and graded problems.  I can even set up rewards for him and pause the program (like I did for Christmas this week).  He's halfway through his year but he's 3/4 of the way done with math!

 We took a little break. J was off the whole week of Thanksgiving and we were lucky enough to find a little condo in Estes Park to rent for three days. It was out of cell phone range and had no internet access.  Perfect.   We played games, walked through downtown and watched the glassblower for a long time, enjoyed their community-wide free Thanksgiving Dinner, took in a movie and tried out their skatepark.  Perfect.  Oh, I said that.

We don't have many traditions at the holidays, but since moving to Colorado we've been to see the Littleton Christmas Tree Lighting every year. So, after returning from Estes Park we went to cute little downtown Littleton yet again and froze and watched as the wind blew all our candles out.  But it's still fun.