summary for fall

No catchy title today. We've straggled our way through the fall for a variety of reasons, most of them having little or nothing to do with Sunny and Posy.

My parents visited at the beginning of October, for Posy's baptism in our church. Hosting makes regular school work a challenge, so I usually skip it. As soon as they were gone, I was in charge of presenting an awards night for the church youth group I help coordinate. The next morning after that was over, we left for Washington DC for a wedding. Then I got sick with bronchitis for almost a month. Wow, that was bad. Yay for modern medicine - I had to learn how to use an inhaler, even. As I was coming out of it, Azalea broke her finger. Multiple trips to the doctor later, she ended up with a pin inserted in her finger to hold the bone in place long enough to set it. So I spent a couple more weeks sitting on the couch consoling our injured and sobbing 2-year-old.

And BAM! There went all of October and November. We still somehow managed to get to 180 days, and we're calling it good for the year.

While I was doing all of that, AC was on a yo-yo with trying to get a new Boy Scout pilot program off the ground - STEM Scouts has come to the Hartford Council, and he was (is? It changes daily) all kinds of excited about being able to do Scouts with our girls because it's co-ed! YAY! Except it's more of a basic class instead of a Scout group. Getting this thing off the ground - registering kids, recruiting enough parents to assist with running the group, finding a meeting location and a charter organization, and arguing with an inexperienced Council executive about how to actually run a Scout troop - has been substantially more of a headache than anticipated. And now that the group is going, AC comes home every single meeting with issues with the materials itself, starting with - the leader guide and student guides don't line up. At all. It. Just. Keeps. Going. There are far more problems than not. I realize this is a pilot program, but does that excuse shoddy editing? No, it does not. Short version: we will not participate in STEM Scouts again after this year. It's a huge disappointment, but we dropped $500 on this thing for AC and two of our girls to participate. Not worth the cash.

And meanwhile, the girls have been going to co-op, dance classes, Geo Bee study group, and the library a couple of times a week. They've also gotten on a kick with drawing - they've finished off an 18-inch stack of scratch paper with tons of drawings just in the past 3 months. They mostly use colored pencils and whatever markers they can find (markers were banned for awhile because Azalea kept putting them in her mouth, and then leaving the caps off), and they're drawing mermaids and fairies. Their bedroom walls have become their art galleries and are practically wallpapered with the drawings. (And oh. The rolls of tape that have disappeared.) This shows no sign of stopping.

Now we will finish up the outside classes in December and call it a year. Thank you and good night.