What a week!

This was one crazy week and I am glad we are entering the weekend.  Although, to be honest, things don't feel like the weekend until about lunch time on Saturdays.  I'll get about half a day of rest before working nearly all day Sunday.  Jon coaching is a lot harder than I had anticipated, and we're only 3 weeks in.  The kids seem to really be missing him too.  But so goes life.

We continued with our learning activities this week.  Carolyn continues to work on writing, this week I had her work on tracing some lowercase letters because she definitely has uppercase down.  She gets the basic idea, but is reluctant to write anything lowercase.  So we'll continue to do more tracing next week.  We did another book from the Bob series, so we've completed 4 of those.  And Carolyn did some more work in her math book.  We've slowed on coloring the numbers to get up to 100.  There are so many things now to color on each page that it takes a while to do each one.  She's currently working on 32 and James has lost all interest.  We had an art day where I encouraged the kids to use different objects to paint with.  They both had fun with it.  We played out in the snow quite a bit and built snowmen for the first time.  We all enjoyed that and used Carolyn's old snow gear and scarf to dress one up.  This morning after playing outside we read all about skin.  I like how the books overlap each other but each one seems to add a new bit to the topic at hand.  They seem to be enjoying reading about body parts.  Next up is cells!  Tomorrow morning I'm thinking either obstacle course or another Bob book.

We attempted bread this afternoon.  I'm not sure my oven is reaching the proper temperature and so while the outside cooked very nicely, the inside was still doughy.  I tried to cook it a bit longer, but it really didn't work out.  I bought an oven thermometer and now I'm going to give it a try to see if temperatures are off or something else wacky is going on.  I really liked the part of the bread that cooked well though.  I'm wondering if this is something that I could make in the breadmaker that we have as that would make it much easier and more likely to make more often.  Could be a great way to get the last wheat hold out in the house out if I can bake fresh bread for sandwhiches each week.  We'll see how it goes.

I've become concerned about Carolyn's level of anxiety this week as she has been asking some interesting questions.  Add in the nail biting, swimming fears, and fear of heights and I become worried that her anxiety is more than just passing curiosity.  I will be keeping a close eye on her over the next few weeks and we'll see how things progress.  She seemed interested in the idea of painting her nails tonight, but I told her they need to get longer.  She was intrigued when I was tapping my finger on the counter this afternoon, and I explained that only works if they're long.  So if the nail biting is not anxiety related, I'm hoping I've found a good way to get her to stop.

Early to be tonight, for I'm simply burned out.  Ready for spring and trips to the park and watching the kids ride their bikes in the yard!