Homeschool Co-op Day

Last week Megan and I went to our Homeschool Co-op. It is a once a month thing but I have only made it to 2 or 3 this year as I usually work on Thursday mornings. Megan has been able to go with my sister Keren who lives nears us and has kids old enough for co-op this year.

The activity of the day was making fun foods. I was in charge of having the kids make fruit bouquets. They aren't quite professional quality yet but they were fun to do and the kids seem to enjoy eating them as well.

Some of the kids with Sara teaching made these cute little chicks.

Emily and a group of young ones made veggie insects.

Keren led this under the sea sort of dessert.

MollyBea helped some of them make little sweet sheep.

Tara made resurrection rolls with her group. This is a really fun idea. I guess the had a marshmallow that represented Jesus. They rolled it in spices and place it in some dough (the tomb) and placed it in the oven. When it baked the dough tomb popped open on its own. The Marshmallow was supposed to be completely gone but that didn't quite happen. Still it is pretty fun.

Katy led a group in making some cute decorated rice crispy bars. Altogether it was a fun morning.

Megan is always a good helped.

Eden was in our group and was a great flower fruit maker. Tavi came to join him and help out when his group had finished their project.

More helpers that came after they had already worked in their original group.

   This time of going to co-op was pretty bittersweet. It was probably my last time. Oh, I probably will visit again sometime but after 11 years of leading the group and this year of being somewhat involved I am moving on. Aaron graduates this year and Megan will be a Junior in highschool next year and will probably be doing early college (PSEO for Minnesotans) next year and is ready to be done with co-op now anyway and I am working. It is time to move on. But I will admit I have shed some tears. 

   In our homeschool co-op I have had the opportunity to learn a lot, to work with, encourage and be encouraged by some pretty wonderful people. Some great friendships have been formed and I have been very blessed. Thankfully I don't have to be in co-op to be friends and I have other opportunities to teach children. 

  Thinking about homeschool co-op prompted me to look through old pictures. Here are some that brought back some good memories of homeschool co-op...

Aaron as Lief Erickson (Or was it Eric the Red???)

Jonathan as Abraham Lincoln

Megan as Laura Ingalls.

Another year... Mara was a suffragete, Jonathan was Wilbur or Orville Wright and Megan was a nurse in WW1.

Learning about the Scandinavian roots of many Minnesotans was super fun one year.

We quilted together!

We put on a big drama. So many fun things!!!

I wanted to share a bunch more pictures but realized that I have blogged about a lot of the events in the past so if you would like to see more about our homeschool co-op years you can look through this group of posts.

I would love to hear if you have been involved in homeschool co-op and your thoughts on it.

   

 

Introducing my Grandson and other random happenings

 We had a new arrival in our family last week and we are so excited!  Mara gave birth to Malcolm with Thomas by her side supporting her. Labor and delivery went well and they are blessed with a beautiful Healthy baby boy!

I am completely in love!

I and others from our family were able to go up and see them in the hospital. There is only supposed to be one guest besides the dad at a time but they allowed 2 people a couple of times so that was really nice. I was just thankful that we were able to go at all with COVID.  They were sent home the next day so that was really nice too. They are both doing well which is a great blessing.

I think Malcolm looks a fair amount like his mother. Above is a picture of Mara as a newborn.

Megan is pretty excited to be an aunt. I think the boys are happy to be uncles too but they aren't quite as interested in newborns. They enjoy playing with them when they get a little bigger.

On Sunday we had fun taking quite a few pictures of Malcolm.

The sweater above and the hat below were both made by Mara.

I will try not to overwhelm this blog with Grandbaby pictures but I probably won't apologize for them very much either. :-)

I had mentioned in my last post about Megan's sewing abilities and I just wanted to share some pictures from one of her latest projects....

She decided her cousin Beulah looked rather like a gnome and probably needed a gnome costume so she made her a dress completely with a hand made hoop skirt and a cape. She also made her a belt and a tie on pocket. Beulah wasn't impressed with getting her clothes changed in the middle of a bunch of people just so she could try on something new but she looks pretty adorable in it anyway. :-) 
 

 We had an absolutely beautiful day today. I did flowers for a wedding and went to lunch and had a walk with a friend. I was also able to visit with both my Mom and my Mother-in-law and I was able to stop in quickly to help Mara with some laundry and dishes and give a couple of kisses to Malcolm. It has been a good day. And, I came home to find a May Day surprise from my neighbor Alice. 

Speaking of May Day....

Various ones from our homeschool co-op came over on Thursday evening and together we made over 100 May Day Baskets for the nursing home.

It was a lot of fun. Plus a few burned fingers from the glue guns. :-)

We put candy, tea and flowers in each basket. We hope the brighten up their day.

Happy May Day to all of you!

Life as Mom - the 2019 addition

This evening at supper we were visiting (I love the opportunities that we have to sit down and visit and eat together almost every morning and night!) and were trying to remember the details of a story when Megan was quite young - I hadn't written about it in her baby book but then I remembered that I could check my blog, I shared many stories on here. I just found a brief mention of that story but I did have fun going down memory lane and reading a bunch of old posts. 

I found this one from 11 years ago called "Life as Mom", I thought it would be fun to do a new up to date version. I still feel just as blessed as ever to get to be a Mom. Here is some tidbits of that last week or so......

 -Enjoying seeing Jonathan lead as we and a group of teenagers went through a challenge course together.
-Working together with all of my kids still living at home to accomplish the tasks on the challenge course along with many of their friends. Pushing ourselves to our physical limit and getting the tasks done together.

 -Watching Megan push herself beyond her comfort zone to develop relationships with others. Today she reached out to be a friend to one of my new piano students. That isn't always very easy for her and I was proud of her.

-Aaron willingly going with me to help out with the pig butchering and getting right in there and helping.

-Singing together with my kids. I love it! We miss Mara from our daily singing but have had the fun addition of my Mother-in-law Sharyl quite a bit lately.

 - Aaron reaching out to a new boy that came to church and inviting him to Wednesday Bible study (and he came too!).

-Jonathan really working to get to know a new boy in our homeschool co-op and trying to make him feel involved and welcome.

 -Having competent helpers in the kitchen.

-Getting to visit with Mara regularly on the phone.
- Watching Mara and Thomas work on reaching out and encouraging others.
-Watching Jonathan do a presentation at Rotary with confidence. It was especially meaningful to me as he was doing it alone after planning to do it with some other teens who had backed out. Also he didn't really want to do it but he did do it and did it well. They had sponsored him and others and sent them to RYLA a Rotary camp for a week this summer. He really enjoyed it the camp. Today's talk was to tell them about it.
-Working together with Aaron and Megan at Theater as we participate in doing the show "Annie" (a Broadway musical). This leads to a lot of singing together which is pretty fun.
-Watching Aaron get better and better at Mountain Biking and jump building.
-Watching Jonathan get better and better at video shooting and editing. (Stay tuned for a new music video that he has us scheduled to shoot tomorrow morning.)
-Watching Megan make a pretty cool new dress for herself - without a pattern just copying from one of the dresses that one of her porcelain doll's was wearing. She has been amazing me with her sewing skills lately. I really need to get some pictures!
-Hearing reports of Mara and Thomas living on their own and running their own home just fine. I wish I could be around to check it out in person but it sounds like they are doing great and that makes my heart happy.
- Aaron getting 100% on his spelling test today. That is a milestone for him and it is so lovely to see his progress.
-My kids working so efficiently and effectively to get their school work done each day. This stage of having kids in 8th, 10th and 12th grade is certainly much easier than it was 11 years ago.

  Life certainly changes as the years pass but it is still sometimes challenging and always very blessed. I am so thankful for the grace that God lavishes on us and the strength He provides!

Glimpses of Wedding Preparations

 One week until Mara and Thomas' wedding. It is coming up quickly and our house looks like it. There are wedding associated things all over the place. But we are having fun and for that I am so thankful! God has truly blessed us with peace and joy in the midst of a busy time.

   Wedding prep isn't the only thing keeping us busy. Just lately we took a fun trip to go on a super neat field trip (out of town) that I totally have to blog about soon. Today was a bridal shower for Mara in the morning. This evening (another thing I need to blog about) we have a fun new experience with a film premiere for the short film that the highschoolers in our homeschool co-op put together this year. They did a great job. This has really been Jonathan's baby as he loves this sort of thing and he has spend hundreds (Thousands???) of dollars to buy the filming equipment that he needs and he spent hundreds of hours working on it as well. This last week he generally was up until midnight to 3 am and then up again pretty early to get it done on time. Anyway - hopefully more about that later with a link to the film.

Just now I thought I would share a few glimpses of the wedding prep.....

 Handmade lace....

 Wood burning is rather fun.

Items for children's activities

 Collected pussy willows for decorating.

Yesterday my sister-in-law, MollyBea came over and we have a fun time painting some wall decorations together.

 I can't wait to share the finished products soon!!

Our Hanukkah Celebration- It started with a Dreidal

At homeschool co-op this month we had an "International Christmas Party". Well for the most part it was for celebrating Christmas but we also had a segment about Israel and Hanukkah. My friend Juanita and I were in charge of decorating. We worked at having decorations to go along with the 4 highlighted countries which were Sweden, Mexico, Japan and Israel.  I saw some cute Paper Driedal decorations on Pinterest and so my girls made some for me to use at co-op. After co-op they came home and I checked out when Hanukkah was and since it was going on right then we hung them up.

  This is kind off one of those if you give a mouse a cookie sort of stories. :-) The afternoon that I hung them up was the last night of Hanukkah.

   After I hung the Driedals up I figured I should hang of the Star of David that had been a a craft at co-op.

We already had Ken's parents coming over for supper (there was a football game that the guys wanted to watch) and I had chicken out thawing. I figured I should make some traditional Hanukkah food. So I put the chicken into roast following a Jewish family recipe that I found online. It turned out delicious after being rubbed with olive oil, rosemary, thyme and garlic. I also figured we had better make Potato Latkes which my Jewish friend had said were needed for Hanukkah.  We tried this recipe which was completely delicious! I have tried them with wheat flour once and rice flour once - both were great. Then I figured we had better have the traditional cooked apples too - so we did.

 Megan said that if we were going to have a Hanukkah celebration we must have a menorah. I said: "Great, why don't you figure one out?" So she did. Jars, candles and ribbons where pressed into service.

 Then she announced that if we were going to have a menorah we would need to say a blessing while we lighted the candles. Great! Since we didn't know exactly what sort of blessing was supposed to be said at this time she said we could quote Psalm 100 together.

 Since we were celebrating Hanukkah, Ken's mom, Sharyl had fun telling us about the miracle of Hanukkah (the traditional story).

  All in all we had a great time, it was a super simple, spur of the moment celebration but one that will be remembered. The food was delicious (Sharyl also brought a salad which was wonderful if not traditional) and we had a fun time celebrating together.

  We may or may not celebrate Hanukkah again but it was fun this time. I do hope to make potato latkes many more times but not just at this time of year. Do you celebrate Hanukkah or any other Jewish holidays? I would love to hear about your celebrations.