Senior Night

I mentioned recently that Genevieve is super busy right now and rarely home. That has lent itself to a few illnesses. She had a stomach bug that many people in the basketball team also had. And last week she was home with a fever and a sore throat that my mommy instincts led me to take her to get a strep test which was positive.  When she started to get sick she was panicking that she was going to miss her senior night for basketball. The last home game for seniors they do a special presentation and they give them a personalized basketball, team photos framed, and a basket of goodies that the teammates collect.  

Luckily we got those antibiotics just in the nick of time for her to be allowed to go back to school Friday afternoon so she could be a part of her senior night. However she had missed several days of practice, had been in bed, and was very weak still.  But Genevieve has all kinds of drive and motivation, and she played almost the entire game with a beet red face.  It was a good game, and I'm sad for the season to be ending.  I only have one more that's interested in basketball, Isaac and Judah are playing baseball this spring.  I don't have anything against baseball but it's just not as exciting to watch as basketball and the games are so very long.  Roman really enjoyed watching basketball all season and I'm not sure how he'll feel about baseball since it's harder to see what's happening and much slower.  He loves all the action and all the noise of a basketball game.

Back to Genna's night, her coaches said that she was "tenacious with a smile" which is so very true!  Her friends in the stands made cut outs of her and some of the other seniors and put them on Popsicle sticks which was kind of adorable.

Finishing Up the School Year

The rest of May was a busy one.  My tomato and jalapeno plants were growing and doing well with all the rain, but one of them was blown over in a storm and it has never quite recovered.  The only problem really was too much rain.  

After the big kids were out of school we made it down to the Urban Garden section of the local food bank to volunteer again with friends.  After harvesting green beans for two hours, the kids were rewarded with feeding the goats.

The little two boys were with me so I could check the plants as they finish so they didn't miss any of those sneaky little green beans that like to hide.  Drew was with his buddy and Isaac worked hard all on his own (seen here).

When we moved into our new house in August, we lost a lot of closet space in the kid's rooms.  However, we gained an extra huge hall closet in addition to several others.  The one outside the boys' two rooms was turned into a shared closet.  I still have their hanging clothes in their room closets, but I did hang one pressure bar at the top (not visible in he picture) for Isaac to keep his school uniforms hung up because he is up before his roomie (Bob) sometimes.  I collected every basket or container not in use and labelled my heart out.  Each boy gets an entire shelf all the way around.  Then there are two more shelves (above what is pictured here) that have bins of boy clothes that no one is wearing currently, all labelled and ready for someone to grow into them.  I spent a morning moving out clothes that didn't fit and reorganizing since the boys are not perfectionists when it comes to putting their clothes away.  This closet serves well for a changing room for them too.   

Drew finished up his basketball season with his cousin on his team.  They were called "Flash and Dash" and finished the season already looking forward to the next.

Drew never smiles in group pictures.  I don't get it, because he's a happy guy most of the time.  He just hates picture time.

Hannah had her 10th grade concert.  She's not a singer really, but it is mandatory at her classical school to do these concerts on certain years.

Two of her good friends with her afterwards

The homeschooled boys had an end of the year bowling day.  Judah and Bobby haven't done much bowling before, but we signed up for Kids Bowl Free for this summer and are going to try to go once a week if we can after our trip.

This is a terrible picture, but I was trying to catch Drew altar serving at daily Mass after Mass was over.  It just took too long to get my phone out and the camera on.  He and his other homeschool friends that attend the same Mass and picnic day that we go to each week all did altar server training one day while the moms and little guys had the picnic and play time.  This day was his first day to carry the crucifix down which he was nervous about because it's heavy and hard to keep straight as he walks.  He was very focused.

Drew has also started reading the Harry Potter series and began his quest to build all things Harry Potter with his Legos.  

The day that school ended we drove to visit Gigi and Poppy before they moved out of their house.  The kids did some swimming, but not as much as usual because the water was still so cold from all the rain.  Playing pool became the obsession when Poppy taught the boys the proper way to play the game.

While we were there, Gigi got Genevieve a cake for her recent birthday and we celebrated again.  Gigi actually had tons of food for us and stuffed us full as usual.

When we got back home we spent the week getting ready for our RV trip to New Mexico and Arizona, and I spent a ton of time driving kids to sports camps all week.  Hannah also got some more practice driving in.  That next weekend, we had a couple of parties for the big kids and we had our family dinner with swimming at my sister's house.  Usually we've been swimming every weekend by the first week of June, but not in this rainy April and May.  It's barely hit 90 degrees a couple of days.

Bob, Dylan, and Drew

Second Semester School Updates *edited with a few more pictures*

We started back to school the week following New Year’s Day. We had a slow start because they had been on a light schedule during December. They are all ahead in their work, so we took the opportunity to do art projects and read books together about Advent and Christmas. They did a little bit of Grammar and math flash cards so they weren’t completely off track. The long “break” has made it harder to get back into the swing of things.

Judah (2^nd grade) is getting so distracted by everything from his pencil to his brothers, and he is getting work done at a snail’s pace.  

Bobby (Kindergarten) is adding numbers up to twenty in his head like a boss now and he is reading very well too. He’s read over 20 early readers to me since finishing his 100 Easy Lesson book. I’m adding in word searches and extra math books to slow him down a little and keep him busy.

Bob is perfecting his reading with massive quantities of comic books: Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and Zita.

The other day around 4pm, I found him reading comic books for the fourth time and asked him if that's all he'd done all day.  His response, "Well, I did my school too."  At that point I shooed him outside until dinner.  Only in our house do you have to force kids to stop reading and go play outside.

Drew (3^rd grade) is getting the hang of long division and still working on his cursive being natural. He and Judah are starting Latin this semester and we are trying a new program, Classical Academic Press’s Latin for Children. So far the grammar has proved challenging, but I’m not concerned that they fully grasp that yet since they are starting young. I mainly want the exposure and vocabulary so they can see it again and again and it be easier in the upper school years.

The big kids are back in school for only about a week now.  Hannah had grown quite accustomed to distance learning, but the other two were sick of the computer, missing the social interaction, and losing focus and determination in their schoolwork.  They had an independent study project that they all completed just before going back to school.  We are still adjusting to the new norms of traveling to school and back everyday.

Basketball season is wrapping up here in a week.  The girls are both on Varsity together, but they lost a lot of girls this year .  Their team is mostly ninth graders playing against juniors and seniors.  It has been a humbling and challenging experience.  It is fun to see my two daughters playing together again.  I am team mom and I have been running the books/clock this season for all home games so that I can attend the games.  My sister and I played on the same team in high school and my dad used to do the books for my games in high school.  It brings back memories.

This is what this year's support of their sisters looked like...

Basketball Banquet

This year, the girls' school started having sport's banquets instead of just handing the awards out at the end of year parties.  I let the girls invite some of their teammates over before the banquet to get all dolled up together.

I curled Hannah's hair, and Nanna curled Genevieve's and her friend's hair too.

They had a great time, but my girls didn't get any awards this season.  Genevieve, unfortunately, missed her cross country banquet when she got the Coach's award.

Catching up in Pictures

Judah is getting better at doing his schoolwork willingly, but he takes FOREVER to do it.  One day he was trying so hard not to do his work diligently that he carried his math page, front and back, around with him all day as we went about our day, in the car many times and even to his sister's basketball game.  When he finally completed it, it was ripped up all on the edges.  Turned out during those car trips he was tearing off tiny pieces and throwing them on the floor in the van.  So he had a lot of cleaning up to do as well as having to start all over on his math page front and back the next day.  Hope that taught him his lesson!  That was all in addition to having to do his regular assignment the next day.  Things went faster, luckily, since I was worried he'd be compounding days of work going at that speed.

Bobby LOVES his reading lessons still and gets on to me if we miss too many days of it in a week.  He is almost halfway through the 100 Lessons book.

Judah is like Hugo, the Abominable Snowman, with Daffy Duck.  "I will hug him and kiss him and squeeze him and call him George" with Luna.  She was tolerant of it for a while and now she is kind of done with that.  We are working on him learning to read the dog signs and know when to give her space, but he can hardly help himself sometimes. 

Judah is moving along in his piano lessons and is starting the staff now.

Drew has been surprisingly helpful with Luna and likes to play with her and pet her.  He is afraid of the cat, by the way.

Brian got Luna this tactical vest with patches and all.  No one in the house was enthused about this masculine vest on her, but it has turned out to be a very helpful harness for her.  She calms down tremendously when it is on her.  We now put it on her whenever someone is coming over until she calms down.

Basketball season, and all it's craziness, has begun for the girls.  This year, Genevieve, made the A team for middle school again, but Hannah is on the JV high school team.  Two different practice and game schedules, team dinners, etc has proved to be quite exhausting.  The season is pretty short though and we only have two more weeks of basketball after New Year's.  These pictures were from a UTSA women's college ball game that the teams all went to watch one Sunday afternoon.