Our Twenty-Four Days

Today we read our book The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas by Madeleine L'Engle in preparation for our Christmas season and starting our Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas. No matter how old our kids are they all want to do our 24 days. In case you haven't followed us long and don't know what I'm talking about it's this: we got the idea from this book to do something special every single day in December till Christmas. So, for twenty-four days we will do some special thing each day - though it may be really small like putting candles in the windows or decorating the tree or just having hot chocolate.  The kids have all loved doing this for years and they all want to keep this tradition. So, tomorrow will start our twenty-four days. Hope you join us. 

This Past Week

It's been a slow week and not much happening here. We finished our current book The Pink Maple House by Christine Govan and we are ready for a new book. I'm actually considering a Christmas book now - though we usually wait till the first of December. But, a month is not a long time to read as many Christmas books as we have and we have started a little early this year anyway. So, tomorrow I guess we will pick our new read aloud and it will probably be a Christmas one. 

We have started doing a little decorating here even though Thanksgiving is not even here. But, we just felt like since we stay home so much it would actually add a little joy and the kids were definitely enthusiastic. So, we have put up a small kitchen tree and a little garland and just a few other things. We have a bunch of buckets out in the family room full of stuff that we are going through and deciding if we will use this year. The kids love to go through them and pull out stuff to play with - especially cottages and people and little trees. My kids have played with this stuff for years and years and it is fun to see Piper and Bella playing with the same little cottages that their older sisters and brothers played with so long ago.  

We are having a small Thanksgiving this year due to COVID. We will only have our family that lives in our home for dinner. With such a large family there is much greater risk and three of my daughters work in a hospital. After much thought and discussion we decided we just should not risk so many people here at one time especially since we have several children that are high risk. It is sad and I will miss all our family. This is a first for us. But, next year we will all be together again on Thanksgiving day. 

A New Machine

Over the weekend Bethany's vest machine died - though we had just gotten it over the summer. Not having this machine means we had to go back to hand PT and that is very time consuming. Neither Bethany nor I really enjoy that so we were both thrilled with how quickly her machine was replaced. It was here on Tuesday and works great. Once you use this machine you are definitely spoiled. I can't imagine going back to all hand PT again - though we did it for years. 

More Pumpkin Painting Pictures

I thought I would post a few more pumpkin painting pictures - though most of my pictures are not of pumpkin painting, but the animals and the kids riding the pony. I will get around to the actually painting sometime. They had so much fun and they are already asking if we can do it again next year and I think maybe we will. 

Pumpkin Painting Party

Today it rained all morning and I was sure we would not get to have our pumpkin painting party. But, around 2:00 it stopped and the sun came out and it actually was nice the rest of the afternoon. So, we had our party with the pony and animals and painting pumpkins. The kids had so much fun and it was just nice to be together for a little while. Since it is late, I'm just going to post some pictures and then I will probably post more later because I haven't even looked at all of them yet. It was a really nice day.