When Your Ship Comes In

My heart is full. God has been so kind to us. Our ship literally came in, and we got all of the things we sent from America this week! This was incredibly exciting for me.

Some of the bins were taken off before I thought to take a picture.

Yesterday Seth got back with all of the storage tubs, and it has been like Christmas opening them and remembering and re-finding out what’s in them! I packed several of them in the beginning of May, and I couldn’t remember everything that was in them. Now I just need to figure out where to put everything. 🙂 This is a good problem!

There is a lot to share about Seth’s trip and our shipment, so I’ll leave the rest for Monday.

Knowing that I would be eager to unpack all of the tubs at the end of the week, I frontloaded the week with homeschooling responsibilities. We checked off our lessons as quickly as possible. In fact, I’m going to check off this blog post as quickly as possible…

Cleaning out the toy bin in preparation for Daddy and the shipment to arrive.

We really had a great week, if not colored a bit with worry-that-didn’t-help-or-change-a-thing about the shipment. Caleb is learning, the children are growing, and I’m seeing myself more sanctified through motherhood.

Caleb’s penmanship is turning out quite beautifully for a boy. His reading is improving, if not his affection for it. Any ideas on how to increase a 6-year old boy’s love for reading? Or will that come with time? I try to give him interesting, fun books to read, but he only reads what he has to.

Caleb finished All About Spelling’s Level One this week after only 8 weeks! Whenever I can unpack level two from the shipment, we will go on. Meanwhile, I’ll just review level one, which won’t hurt him. He was pumped about trying to finish it before the shipment got here, and he just barely did.

In history we began learning about Julius Caesar, a very interesting historical figure. We played the “Ransom Caesar” game and plan to make Roman mosaics next week. Anyone know how to do that with cookies? I’d much prefer cooking projects (especially desserts!) to crafts we will throw away! We also finished Ben-Hur today. We plan to watch certain portions of the Charlton Heston video of Ben-Hur tonight as a family.

In science we learned about the endocrine and excretory systems. We measured and weighed Caleb and Colin and recorded the measurements in their science notebooks.

We found a frog to draw for nature study. It’s really been rainy!

Colin can sound out liiiiittle controlled-vocabulary stories now. Unfortunately Colin came down with a fever and stomachache today. And I just found out that Seth had planned a date for us tomorrow night! Isn’t that the way of it!

I am hoping that some of the extra toys from the shipment will help occupy Callie and Carson during homeschooling! But maybe I should rather anticipate some screaming fits between them over the new toys. Doesn’t it seem that no matter how much we ought to give thanks for, we always find things to be unhappy about?

As I write, rain mixed with hail began pouring down. We have had some heat, but not as bad as other years. I have a feeling we will have another rainy year like last year, maybe another international-news-making flood!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some books to go put away! 🙂