Homeschool Discoveries

We’ve had no shortage of things to keep up busy the past couple weeks! Last week, we spent three very full days doing service projects with Mission to the City.  This week, we accepted an invite from a friend to do Vacation Bible Camp at a neighborhood church, so I had quality time with Mr. K each morning while the two older kids participated in the camp.

Last week Mr. E started a once-a-week-for-six-weeks evening soccer class.  And this week Miss M started a month of tennis at our neighborhood park.  That’s every day (weather permitting), but luckily it is first thing in the morning (8am!) and she can walk to the park with her best friend from across the street (thank heavens for the S. family, so I don’t have to get everyone out the door before 8!).

And on top of all of this, I’m nearing my quarterly editing deadline (July 1st) for Faithwalkers Journal, so I’ve been taking advantage of summer break and arranged several hours of daytime babysitting for the kids so that I could actually get my work done while I’m fresh (aka not editing late into the night while the kids are sleeping). That has been wonderful!

As crazy as this sounds, I haven’t felt too stressed out.  🙂  I feel like overall we’re still having a pretty relaxed and fun summer.  Here are a few other highlights of our “summer fun”:

1. Have you heard about the Little Free Library project? It’s a grassroots movement to put small tiny lending libraries in neighborhood everywhere.  Individuals create the library boxes and put them in their yard (I’ve also seen one at a neighborhood school yard).  It’s a lending library for everyone — you can take a book or leave a book any time! Neighbors just down the street installed a Little Free Library about two weeks ago. Our LFL has one shelf for adult books and one shelf for kids books.  The kids love to visit and exchange books.

2.  To help with the initial stocking of the Little Free Library, we donated a stack of books we selected at the thrift store (including some classic kids chapter books I picked out for the neighborhood kids to enjoy!).  But this is the stack I picked out for us!  I just couldn’t go browsing books without picking out some for us!  A dollar a book is just too good to pass up when there are lots of classic chapter books to be had.

3. Dinner picnic in the front lawn before Mr. E’s first night of soccer.  To be honest, the dinner picnic was more due to the fact I had gotten the dining room sparkling clean that afternoon and didn’t want to wreck it right away than due to me being so much fun as just letting the kids eat in the front yard.  😉

4. Watching big machinery is always entertaining.  Here the boys are watching a tree stump being dug up across the street.

5.  Big bouncy fun at the “Neighborhood Street Fest” at the church where the kids attended VBC this week.

6.  As always there is lots of arts and crafts going on around here.  Here Miss M and friend Miss L  create a sort of tye-dye effect on old rags with tempera paint.  They came with this themselves, with some inspiration from a craft book!

7.  Mr. K pushes baby J at the park swings

8. and 9. Our “very hungry caterpillar” grew to be very large…and made its chrysalis a little over a week ago.  Now we are patiently waiting to meet (and then release) our butterfly.  This is one of my favorite parts of summer.  Metamorphosis is such a miracle to see and I am amazed by it every time!

Hope you are having lots of summer fun too!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly-Wrap Up: