Week in Review

Seizing the moment, I am posting a weeks worth of pictures tonight. There has just not been time for blogging lately. There is so much that needs to be done and sometimes it is really hard to know what is most important and whose needs are most urgent.

Here are some highlights from the last week:

On Sunday, we went to Layton, FL to visit a church where the radio station has a temporary antenna.  To me "Layton" doesn't sound like a place in the Keys, but it is - it's on Long Key, which is a small, very sparsely inhabited key.  Most of it is a state park. It is about 15 minutes north of the 7 mile bridge, so we drove down to it.

It was low tide and we saw LOTS of very big fish!

Monday meant back to swimming lessons.  I have struggled with finding a workable schedule all summer (and by summer I mean, since we restarted school in March).  I finally decided to make a schedule that would apply to the weeks we had swimming lessons and then we will take a week off and recoup.  My thinking was that maybe we hadn't found a good schedule because I gave up before we got the hang of it.  I thought we'd stick to the schedule religiously for the swim days and see if that helped - and it did seem to be helping.  I put the girls in the 8am class, we'd have breakfast at the park after the lesson, come home, and get into our routine.

And then on Monday afternoon, Natalie's swimming teacher called me to ask if we would switch classes.  So on Tuesday we did swimming at 9 and my beautiful poster is wrong now.

Fortunately, Monday was 7-11 and our neighborhood got at 7-11 in the last year and we all got free Slurpees.

Swim swim swim.  Natalie is doing a 2nd session in level 1, Annalise got moved up to level 3.  Level 3 is a lot more exercise and it took a few days to get into the groove.  They asked Natalie to move because in the 8am class, all the other kids in 1 moved to 2 and she is not ready.  The move to 9 was good for Annalise too because a girl from our church is in the same class and because the 8am level 3s are more advanced too.  (8am turned out to be the hour the park's summer camp took lessons - this was not the schedule in the past, so the classes were bigger and most of them have taken lessons all summer.)

On Tuesday we went to a family of friends' house.  That is, I'm friends with the mom, A and N are both friends with the sisters, C was happy to poke around the little brother's immense car collection and Irene just loves toys of all kinds.  While we were there, a squirrel fell out of a tree and broke its back.  It was the most bizarre thing and very sad.

On Thursday, we got a spontaneous invitation to the park in the morning and had already planned an outing to the marina for the afternoon.

On Friday, we broke ground on the 3rd bedroom.  Or rather, broke floor.  We have been preparing for the addition for a long time.  The paper work was nuts, but we are set to start and Rob has hired a handyman he knows to help him do the work.  It will be in fits and spurts, but there are two gaping holes in the floor, so things are visibly moving forward now.

Of course they made those holes with a jackhammer, so the kids and I made ourselves scarce.

First we went to the zoo - they have been building a new entrance and it opened Friday. 

They are also adding a new Everglades exhibit, but it won't open until the fall.  It looks really cool and I've been eager to see it.  The entrance is pretty and bright, but a little anti-climactic, since we did not plan on seeing any more of the zoo.  By Friday I'd sweat enough.

We had to kill more time than that though, so after we ate packed lunches, we got ice cream at McDonalds.  The girls all wanted cones.

Caleb wanted a McFlurry and was disappointed when I told him he had to get the "snack" size, but he has a history of getting things for free and they happened to mix in the wrong mix-in, so he got two!

Free activities not being in abundance, we ended up at the library where we were happy to soak in the a/c and kept busy enough keeping Irene from pulling books off the shelves.

With our schedule struggles (Next week we have to be out two days), I've been on homeschool blogs and discussion boards looking for ideas.  I found more empathy than ideas!  I guess there are just times when things won't work like you want them to.  But I did find encouragement to list 3 things we are doing well.  So here are 3 things:

1.  We notice little things - weird bugs, butterflies, host plants, differences in types of cichlids, squirrels mysteriously falling from trees....
2.  We fold laundry and we put it away - I am currently folding less laundry than I did before we had kids - I only fold adult clothes and oddly shaped items.  Irene got so interested in the process that she has figured out how to fold a washcloth - really!
3.  We are all learning a little more Spanish - the organic way - we hang out with our Cuban next door neighbor a lot.  Did you know that nene (neh-nay) means little kid?  I did not!