Pictures

 Trick-or-treating at Grandma & Grandpa's. We debated whether this was an anti-Christian holiday or just harmless fun and decided on the harmless fun, but I'm not sure we're going next year. Family fun night might become our new Halloween tradition.

 Esme the Princess.

 Isaac the pirate (no eyepatch - he thought people would laugh), Esme the bobcat princess, and Simon the "ghost face," as he called it.

 Just about ready to go out & get candy. And oh my, the candy.

 Lego City - part of the reason I've been finding it difficult to exercise. The Lego people have overthrown my workout space and built an empire on it. I feel like Gulliver. Or maybe Godzilla.

 The TURKEY. Stuffed with caramelized onion and cornbread stuffing and rubbed with sage butter. It was good. Oh, so good.

 Kristin and Esme on Thanksgiving. Esme can't always remember her name, but she loooooves Kristin.

 Esme, Kristin, Grace, and Nick.

 The whole gang. (That's David holding up Grace.)

 David and Brittany enjoying Thanksgiving dinner.

 See the paper plates? We had a plumbing stoppage in the kitchen that we had to get cleared Thanksgiving morning, so we were afraid to do too many dishes. Thank goodness for Knobbe Plumbing.

Dylan, Brittany, David, Jennifer, Nick, Kristin, and Grace.

What a great holiday! And it's only Friday. Gotta love it. I never thought I'd have a big family - certainly not seven kids - and I couldn't be happier about the way things have turned out. Good thing God's in charge and not me.

Thanksgiving is Coming!

And I think I'm ready. I downloaded this wonderful workbook for the kids from http://www.scriptureadventures.com/ called "Give Thanks" - 102 pages of activities, crafts, memory verses, games, journaling, and other cool stuff - for only $7. I bought the Christmas one too. I think these would work for any elementary-aged kids; ideal age is maybe 2nd - 5th grade. I haven't fully explored the website, but it looks to be full of good stuff for homeschoolers (and church school too - pretty denomination-neutral from what I saw).

I also have our Thanksgiving dinner all planned and the cupboards all stocked. I raided the Food Network website and came up with the following:
Oven Roasted Turkey with Sage Butter and Carmelized Onion and Cornbread Stuffing
Classic Stuffing
Grainy Mustard Mashed Potatoes (you boil the potatoes in milk and cream...yum...)
Creamy Sweet Potato Casserole (topped with marshmallows and candied pecans - no, there is no such thing as "too sweet")
Pumpkin Gooey Butter Cakes (obviously a Paula Deen one)
Then, the piece de resistance: my grandma's green bean recipe. Beans, onions, bacon, vinegar, and brown sugar.
Have been depressed lately about the lack of time to do any of the following things: exercise, adequately plan school and church lessons, dust, read, knit enough to stay on schedule for Christmas presents, sleep, blog, pray, maintain my childrens' toe and fingernails, etc., etc. I'm not sure what I actually have been doing, but it's been keeping me very busy. One neat thing we did last week was to deliver our church's shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child (http://www.samaritanspurse.org/) to the drop-off site in Boone with our pastors. It's too late for this year, but if you've never been involved in this, you should check into it for next year. You pack shoeboxes full of goodies for kids in impoverished countries, and they receive the gifts, along with the gospel message, as Christmas presents.
I'm in the middle of knitting John's birthday present and it is going SLOWLLLLYYY, but I do have seven gifts done and another almost done. Scarves, cowls, gloves, toys, and more. Next year I'm starting way earlier. I wonder if anyone is interested in a knitting all-nighter sometime soon. Would that be fun? I'll have to ask the Yarnivores (my knitting companions). (Isn't that a clever name? I thought of it while I was feeding my way-too-old-to-be-getting-fed-at-1-am baby at 1 am the other night.)
My goal this week is to blog every day. Something useful. Can I do it?

Knitting Retreat!

My favorite knitting friend and I went to a knitting retreat this Saturday at the yarn store in Carroll, and it was heavenly. We knitted all day, learned three new scarf techniques (one of which was horrible and frustrating, but still a wonderful time), and ate like queens. I bought new yarn, which I shouldn't have done, but I think I'm all set for knitting my Christmas presents. It's impossible to just look at all of that gorgeous yarn and not get something. I may have to stay up all night for a few weeks, but everyone on my list is penciled in for a knitted masterpiece this year - scarves, cowls, hats, fairies, gloves...how exciting.
I also was eavesdropping and heard about a website for knitters that I didn't know about: http://www.ravelry.com/. Membership is free, and you can search zillions of patterns - some free, some not. There were all kinds of neat things you can do that I didn't look at, like mark your patterns and rate patterns and other stuff.
This was the busiest weekend ever. It started on Friday night with our First Thanksgiving, which I prepared for to the nth degree and was attended by...one other family and my supervising teacher. And my ex-husband. Sigh. Oh well, I guess I'm super-prepared for next year. And I learned all kinds of interesting things about American history. Then, the knitting retreat on Saturday, followed by shoebox preparations at church for Operation Christmas Child (it's not too late to fill up a shoebox with goodies for children across the world; go to http://www.samaritanspurse.com/ to see what it's all about). Sunday was church, my 31 Gifts party (much better attended than the First Thanksgiving), and a church leadership meeting. I haven't had two coherent thoughts in a row for days.
The kids had a great time with Grandpa at the Iowa Hall of Fame. They got to ride in the Mini-Cooper and eat out for breakfast and lunch, so this one was pretty much in the bag no matter what the actual hall of fame was like.
I've been forgetting to end with a Bible verse - today it's Psalm 100. The whole thing. So you'll have to go and look it up, but I'll give you a hint: it's about thanksgiving. The lower-case kind.

Iowa Hall of Pride

Did you know that there is an Iowa Hall of Pride? It's in Des Moines, attached to the Hy-Vee Hall, and it showcases famous Iowans of all kinds - athletes, historical figures, actors, and so on. You can check it out here: http://www.iowahallofpride.com/, or take a trip there like Isaac, Simon, and Grandpa are tomorrow. So, you're thinking, are there really enough famous Iowans to fill up a hall? Why yes. Here are a few famous Iowans; I'm not sure whether all of these are in the Hall of Pride, since I haven't been there. I'll have to let you know next week.

Famous Iowans
Bess Streeter Aldrich author, Cedar Falls
Bix Beiderbecke jazz musician, Davenport
Norman Borlaug plant pathologist, geneticist, Cresco
Donald L. Campbell inventor, Clinton
Wallace Hume Carothers inventor, Burlington
Johnny Carson TV entertainer, Corning
William Buffalo Bill Cody scout, Scott Cty
Gardner Cowles Jr. publisher, Algona
Lee DeForest inventor, Council Bluffs
Simon Estes bass-baritone, Centerville
William Frawley actor, Burlington
George H. Gallup poll taker, Jefferson
Susan Glaspell writer, Davenport
Herbert Hoover U.S. president, West Branch
Ann Landers columnist, Sioux City
Cloris Leachman actress, Des Moines
William D. Leahy fleet admiral, Hampton
John L. Lewis labor leader, Lucas
Glenn L. Martin aviator, manufacturer, Macksburg
Elsa Maxwell writer, Keokuk
Glenn Miller bandleader, Clarinda
Harriet Nelson actress, Des Moines
Nathan M. Pusey educator, Council Bluffs
David Rabe playwright, Dubuque
Harry Reasoner TV commentator, Dakota City
Donna Reed actress, Denison
Lillian Russell soprano, Clinton
Wallace Stegner author, critic, Lake Mills
Billy Sunday evangelist, Ames
James A. Van Allen space physicist, Mount Pleasant
Abigail Van Buren columnist, Sioux City
Henry A. Wallace statesman, Adair Cty
John Wayne actor, Winterset
Andy Williams singer, Wall Lake
Meredith Willson composer, Mason City
Grant Wood painter, Anamosa
Ashton Kutcher, actor
Elijah Wood, actor
Dan Gable, wrestling legend
Kurt Warner, football legend
Jerry Mathers, actor

So, to everyone who thinks Iowa is uncool, PTHTHTHTHTH. (That's me sticking out my tongue.)

Coin Collecting

Isaac is ecstatic over his coin collection, enhanced this weekend by a bunch of cool coins and bank notes from Grandpa. We've started looking them all up online, and we discovered a bunch of coin-collecting websites in the process. Who knew? You can catalog your coin collection and swap coins online for free! Cool. Of course, I had already started a spreadsheet, which Isaac doesn't want to give up, but eventually, I'm making him put the whole thing online.
Here are a couple of the sites we saw...I'm not sure which we'll use or which is better, but they all looked neat:

Numista:  http://en.numista.com/
Collector's Society (this one has paper money too - not sure if the others do or not): http://www.collectors-society.com/default.aspx

UCoin: http://en.ucoin.net/
Nostomania (this one can be used for other types of collections too): http://www.nostomania.com/servlets/com.nostomania.HomeServlet

Routine, shmoutine

We have been terrible lately at sticking to a schedule. Grace is wailing in her crib right now because I know it's not naptime, but she's so crabby that I don't know what else to do with her. I had forgotten how high maintenance almost-one-year-olds can be. She is everywhere, and she only likes to play with stuff she can choke on (especially paper, legos, and hair bands), and she falls and hits her head ALL the time. So if she's fussy (read: awake), doing anything else with anyone else is almost impossible, including school. And, as you've noticed, blogging. I never get to work out in the morning anymore, because she gets up early and smiley and fights to climb all over me while I try to vinyasa. And now, Isaac and Simon always want to get up "early", so mornings to myself are totally out. I think I'm going to start getting up from 2-4 am to enjoy some "me" time. I read somewhere that "me" time is selfish anyway, so I suppose I should be willing to get up at 2 if I think I need it.
The only useful information I have to pass along today is that you must read the book, Free Range Learning, by Laura Grace Weldon. It's an excellent book on homeschooling. You also must read As Always, Julia, which is a collection of letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. I will probably never get to the end of either of these books, because of the aforementioned problem with me-time, so don't expect me to be able to talk intelligently about either of them. I can only vouch for the first 30 pages or so.