School, Fall Fair, and Salsa

This week is the first week we've had full days of lessons since we "officially" started our school year near the end of August.  Since that time, Belle got more work than she'd had all summer, we had a visit from friends lasting a couple of days, and Fall Fair happened.

We had a lovely time with friends last week-friends we haven't seen in a few years. In fact, they have two more children than they did the last time we saw them. We were blessed to have the use of a tent trailer for some of them to sleep in. That helped immensely, but it didn't solve the problem of one bathroom for seven children and four adults.  However, we survived, and quite happily.

The day after friends left, we spent the day baking for Fall Fair.  Two loaves of bread, two chocolate cakes (one flopped), one pan of brownies, one pineapple upside down cake, tea biscuits and shortbread, all baked by the three oldest family members, were ready by a rather late bedtime that evening.  Belle and I also had entries in Crafts.

Friday Belle and I had our duties at the Fair. We always have a good time watching and assisting the judges.

Saturday after a hurried house-cleaning, we were off to look at all the exhibits, have lunch, and pie! Five first-place wins, four second place wins, and two non-placing items were the result of our hard work.

Monday we started our lessons in earnest. It was a good day, but busy. Tuesday, in addition to some lessons, was salsa-making day.   My husband posted his take on that here. Friends also blessed us with a load of green beans.   Wednesday, in addition to school, it was my turn to work in the Hospital gift shop.

So it has been a busy couple of weeks.

Here are the results of some of the work last week:

And this week:

The Things We Want to Do

As I've been plugging away at putting our Sonlight Core into Homeschool Tracker, I am struck by the feeling that summer is passing very quickly, and will soon be gone.  Lesson planning takes hours and hours of work.  But it also saves hours and hours of work during the school year, when I can simply plug the day's assignments into the plan for the day without having to enter books or type everything out.  When one is trying to school, keep up with meals, and do the laundry--in addition to all the other mundane (or not so mundane) details of daily life--it has been a sanity saver for me to have everything planned out.  But as I look at my two remaining weeks of summer, I also note that I have nine weeks of Read-Alouds to plan, and twelve weeks of History.  There is a fair amount of work left to be done.

We are hoping to start our year at around August 19.  So far I think the busiest part of this week is over (at least one can hope), so I should be able to get done with the Read-Alouds at least.  That leaves History, and Dad is coming up next week for a visit.  I know that I won't want to be spending all my time lesson-planning.  What I am going to do about that remains to be seen.

But one cannot spend all of the remaining summer break lesson planning.  So I thought I should make a list of things we still want to do.

First on the list, but not necessarily first in the matter of importance is to finish weeding the driveway.  Actually it is a job that is never really finished.  The gravel on the driveway is mostly gone, washed away by the combined effect of rain, snow-blowing, and the slightly downward slope of the driveway.  But if we can get enough done that it looks better until the snow starts, I will be happy.

Secondly, I would like to weed around the dining room window.  That is at the back of the house, and isn't really seen, but I've been gradually working around the deck and the garage this year, trying to pull out the maple trees before the forest grows.

That's the yardwork.  Another thing on my bucket list for the summer is to visit the cemetery about 25 minutes away where some of my ancestors are buried.  When considering that I grew up in five countries on two continents, and never really had a place to call home--except where we were living at the time,  I think that it is really cool that we have now lived for nearly ten years in the area in which my great great grandparents lived.  I have never been to this cemetery, although some of my siblings have.  I am sort of hoping that this is something we can do with Dad next week.

Another thing on the list is to go on at least one more bike ride with the children.  We went in the spring, but haven't even had the bikes out this summer.  It has either been simply too hot, or too wet.  And I'm not one to ride a bike down to the park, or to the grocery store.  I want to ride for fun.  This is one thing that we still may be able to do on nice evenings after we start lessons.

It would be fun to take a day to do something "touristy" in one of the nearby towns too, but I don't know if we will have time for that.  I was chatting with my daughter last night, and we had to laugh about the fact that though we travel a lot, we tend to be real homebodies when we aren't travelling.  We haven't seen a lot of our own area!  I would like to change that, but that may have to be a longer term project.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  We have had more times when we played games together or made beads together this summer.  That has been really fun.

What is left on your bucket list for summer?