Lenten Daybook

Lenten Daybook

Outside my Window:  I see a big open space where our “launch pad” used to be in the back yard. We finally pulled out a huge concrete slab last week, and not we are waiting for it to get consistently warmer before we try to grow grass.

I am Listening To: Quiet.  Liam is out with a friend, Dominic took Finnigan and the dog to a coursing event, and the littles are enjoying free rein of the TV.

I am Praying for: The upcoming Conclave, that the Cardinals will listen to and act on the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  I am also praying for a special intention related to our school year in California next year.

I am Wearing:. jeans and a ¾ sleeve length blue and white striped top

I am Thankful For:That after nearly a year of missing and found and missing and found orders, that we finally have them in hand.  This means we can tag out of our current job where Dominic is away more than he is home, and have a stable year together.

In the Learning Room: Starting Monday we are hitting a reset button and getting back on track.  I have been struggling with getting an adequate amount of work from my oldest, and keeping him on track with his peerset.  We have been barely scraping by with my bare minimum.  There is so much more I would like to do with my children, all the fun parts of homeschooling, but the daily battles have been wearing me out.  So come Monday, expectations will be raised.  (prayers please) 

My oldest has started taking off in reading, and has just gotten into the Geronimo Stilton series.  We are still smoothing out his handwriting, and working on getting him to write his own thoughts out more and more. Also we have introduced all the times tables and so we continue to work on memorization, and now applying them into multi-digit multiplication problems.

My second oldest has learned all his print letters and so we keep practicing the more challenging ones and work on getting them into small sentences. He has been working very hard on reading and continues to progress slowly but surely.  We have finished our introduction to math, and now will begin to work diligently on his addition facts.

I am Pondering: School next year. One of our main deciding factors in homeschooling was my husband's work schedule.  We wanted to be able to take family time whenever he happened to be home, since it didn’t happen very often. With him being stabilized for a year, and with the recent struggles we’ve had we are very seriously considering putting the two older boys into school for one year.  I don’t have an answer yet, but I am doing my best to discern God’s will for my family.

In the Kitchen: Time to clean out the freezer and pantry.  We have a few weeks left to creatively use and consume most of what we have.  Whatever we don’t finish we will pass on to a friend or two, but now is the time to get creative. I’m looking forward to it. It is always fun to see how well I can feed our family from just what I happen to have on hand.  Menu planning gets very interesting.

I am Reading: This Lent I am on a fiction fast, so I am finally reading, “Walking With God: A Journey Through the Bible”  By Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins.  It reminds me of “The Great Adventure” Bible Study by Jeff Cavins, but in book format.  I am really enjoying it because I have had the chance to take part in The Great Adventure Bible study, here and there in the past years, but have never actually been able to go all the way through because we keep moving in and out.   I am excited to read the Salvation history narrative all the way through in this book.  It is easy to read (ie, I can actually understand and follow along by the time I get to sit down and read at the end of a long day) and very educational.  I am learning so much that I never really knew and seeing all the parallels and foreshadowing in the Old Testament to the New.  

I also very slowly continue to work my way through “Introduction to the Devout Life” by St Frances de Sales, and you can see a recent review I did of that here.

Plans for the Week: We will hunker down into our school year, continue to sort through bags for our “40 bags of Lent” challenge, organize for our upcoming move, start to really work on minor repairs on the home as we get it ready for renters.  We also have swimming lessons, and cub scouts and dog training.

Picture Thought: How Dominic and I have been spending our evenings after the kids are in bed.  We uncovered our long lost dominoes set.

Prayer: I've been breathing "Jesus, I trust in You!" And "Thy will be done" for the past few weeks as we waited on orders.