FOR TODAY
November 7, 2010

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Outside my window...warm and sunny

I am thinking...about the menu plan for the next week and Christmas preparations!

I am thankful for...my consultants at Mother of Divine Grace!

From the learning rooms...Monday is a teacher in-service day. The only school activity planned for tomorrow is an ancient Egypt movie. I will be spending the day in the basement working on tweaking our schedule and the long-awaited chore chart!

From the kitchen...Simple meals and the crock-pot are my friends. I love to cook, but I've had to face reality and recognize that some days, I need to prepare meals that take are ready in an hour or less. This means using more prepared foods, like macaroni and cheese.

I am wearing...black pants and a red sweater. Still in my church clothes.

I am going...to start cantoring at church! I haven't done any singing in church in a long time and I am looking forward to sharing my talents with my parish family. I may also be helping with the Christmas Eve Children's Choir at church. I'm already doing a lot this year, but this would be a short-term commitment and rehearsals probably wouldn't start until after my homeschool children's choir has their concert.

I am hoping...to start running again this week. I was training to run in a half-marathon when I hurt my IT-band in early September. The pain became so bad that I had to quit running altogether for a few weeks to let it heal. I'm going to ease back into running with the Couch 2 10K program I used last winter when I trained to run the River Run 10K.

I am hearing...Clara playing with the LeapPad.

Around the house...just trying to keep up with the laundry, dishes, meals, and basic cleaning. I hope to get some stuff hung up on the basement walls this week. I would also like to thin down my girls' closets and drawers so that they don't have quite as many clothes to strew out everywhere. That's probably a couple of weeks' worth of work, right there.

One of my favorite things...art on Fridays with my girls! I have found some really neat art projects to do with children at Deep Space Sparkle. I did this Line Art Owls project with them a week ago. I plan to make snowmen with them in December, but we'll use Sculpey clay. I also bought this Egyptian Faces lesson plan to do with Mary Beth, since she is studying ancient Egypt this year. This week we will be working on activities from our Hearts and Trees Fall kit.

We have done a homeschool art class the past 3 years, but I don't think we'll do it this year. I think we are busy enough with out-of-the-house activities. There are plenty of free and low-cost ideas at Deep Space Sparkle to keep us busy. :-)

A few plans for the rest of the week: the sewing project from our Fall Craft and Nature Study Kit from Hearts and Trees, choir, Christmas and birthday shopping.

Here is picture for thought I am sharing...

I couldn't run in the half-marathon because of my IT-band injury, so I had planned to run in the 5K instead. Well, it turned out that I had a stomach bug on the day of the race, so I couldn't run at all. But, Mary Beth has been running, too. She ran her first 5K in September and she wanted to run in the 5K race associated with the half-marathon, too. Here she is, about to cross the finish line! I am so proud of her!