Oh my goodness gracious! I am sooooo glad we already planned to take next week off school because it is soooo necessary for all of our sanity! {sigh}

By far the most meaningful thing we did this week was to celebrate the life of a dear young man who “graduated” to heaven last week after a long battle with cancer. His family had a small burial ceremony Saturday, but Tuesday was his memorial service. This was like no other funeral/memorial I have ever attended. I still haven’t processed everything I felt like the Lord was telling me, but I can tell you that this was the most amazing, Christ-centered, God-honoring, uplifting, humbling, convicting, life-altering two hours of worship I have ever experienced. This young man was only twenty-one, but was quite possibly the most Christlike person I will ever know this side of heaven. What I learned/felt here will have to be a blog post of it’s own once it has sunk in more deeply. Nothing we did in school this week could possibly compare to the impact that had on us all.

I planted a tree several years ago, but I have no idea what it is. How’d that happen? We got a dozen baby trees from The Arbor Day Foundation, and planted them all, but Lacy the WonderDog was a bit of a crazy puppy then and ate/pulled up eleven of those baby trees. Then somehow I lost my chart of which tree was what, and now, there is a mystery tree in our back yard. So our nature study this week consisted of trying to figure out what this tree is. We figured out a lot of things it is NOT, but we still don’t know what it is. Maybe we’ll finally figure it out as it continues to get bigger.

Kathryn had some exciting news in GA’s this week: she was a winner of the cookbook cover contest! So we’ll have to buy a copy in our church bookstore. 🙂

Lindsey celebrated the end of the colorguard season with a banquet this week, and got her “letter” for the sport, which she can put on a letter jacket — if we buy one at some point. This week, the colorguard/drum corp has one more performance, at the Georgia Tech football game. She’s excited.

In history, Kathryn is working on finishing up her lapbook on Colonial Life, and we have started our unit on the American Revolution. Kathryn placed the figures in her timeline notebook, read a bit about the French-Indian War (which was the setting of Calico Captive, which she finished last week), and began reading Regina Silsby’s Secret War. She’s learning about George Washington in George Washington for Kids.

Kathryn’s character trait of the week was “boldness” — very apt considering the life of the young man we celebrated this week. He was very bold for Christ, and the friends who spoke at the service attested to that! In our daily Bible readings, we’ve been mostly in 1 Samuel, reading about King Saul.

We finished up Christian Kids Explore Biology by learning a bit about freshwater life and amphibians. Kathryn used to have a pet frog, so she was fairly familiar with amphibians already. After our much-needed week off for Thanksgiving, we’ll start some new things for science.

Jamie

Wife, mom, J-ma. Introvert who enjoys good books, sunshine, and authentic conversation. Often seen with a steaming mug of tea in hand – unless it’s lost yet again in the microwave. Read more »