Adagietto (A Slow Tempo)

Here's a picture of my String Bass hanging out with its new friends, Guitar and Ukulele.

I have a new metaphor for my life and I think this metaphor is due to playing the string bass again. Most composers have a usual pattern when they write a symphony. The first movement will be really fast. When that movement is over everything slows down for the second movement. The tempo decreases quite a bit. Its a nice pause before everything kicks into high gear again for the third and fourth movements.

I realized that my life right now is kind of like the second movement of a symphony. We are going at a much slower pace than we have in the past and it's a much needed rest. Maybe one day we'll kick it back into high gear again. But for now I'm appreciating this slower pace. 

So let's look back at the last 2 weeks. 

Here's a picture of Marcia enjoying our slow pace too. She puts up with so much from the kids.

During a regular school year our mornings used to start at 6:45 at the latest. We'd have the get the kids up, dressed, fed, and to school by about 7:45. Now 7:45 is about the time we all start getting out of bed. Brandon has done really well with the extra time to sleep. 

The kids get up and have breakfast and get dressed.  Brandon changes into his "Mr Science" outfit - it now is complete with a Lab Coat he bought at a scrubs store.  Brandon/Mr Science teaches Math and Science in the morning.  I head to work around 9:00.

Derrick goes to Behavioral Therapy with Miss Natalie for a few hours. Brandon goes to work and I come home. I make lunch for the kids. Derrick comes home home and we eat lunch together. Then we go downstairs for the second half of school. I'm in charge of social studies and reading. 

The first few weeks of school we spent a lot time on placement tests for the various curriculums we'd ordered. The reading and math had really long placement tests that were pretty grueling. I only had two laptops so I had the kids rotating through the tests. They'd do 20 minutes and then take a break while someone else took a turn at the test. 

Between tests Charlotte and Lydia spent a whole day building an amusement park complete with a Ferris Wheel. 

They would build the wheel and have it almost done, and then it would fall apart and they would start re-building it. I think it went through this process three different times. 

Here's a different version. Part of what made it so difficult is that the wheel really spun. That mde it unstable. 

They finally got it done and worked on the other things at the amusement park. There was a cotton candy booth, a little train, a shooting game, and a merry go round. I really like that the kids have so much time to work on projects like this these days. 

We had the whole thing on display for a few days. Charlotte also added a snack booth with baked goods. 

I love reading memoirs so when I heard that Democratic VP nominee Kamala Harris has a book I really wanted to read it. I reserved it from the library and then read quickly when it came in. I really admire this woman. She has done so much in her career and has always stood up and fought for justice.  I'm so excited to vote for her ticket this year. (And let's take a minute and go over her name pronunciation. It's pronounced Comma- la.) 

This picture is from a day with absolutely PERFECT weather. It wasn't hot or cold, smoky or windy.  IT was just NICE. So we had our lunch our on the patio. We even tried to do school out there, but it got a little too distracting.  

Veronica had her first soccer game on Wednesday September 2nd. It was slightly disastrous. Her coach wasn't able to attend because her daughter was having a baby that day. So a parent stepped in to coach. He did okay, but we missed a bit of crucial info such as what field we were playing at and the fact that Veronica needed shin guards. I was able to find the right field and somehow Veronica made it in without shin guards.  The kids ran around and chased the ball with no real plan which was okay because they don't keep score at this age. 

All that was secondary to the fact that derrick was basically having a full on melt down the whole game. He'd had a bad afternoon and I'd debated dropping him off with Brandon at work before going to the game. But he'd calmed down by the time we left. So I brought him with. BIG MISTAKE. He wanted to play at the playground with Charlotte and Lydia, but was so keyed up I was worried he'd hit a kid or start screaming. So I wasn't going to leave him unsupervised. I made him sit with me during the game, but he kept running off and screaming. So I was chasing him down. Finally he settled down a bit. Then he got up and just started walking. There was no one playing that direction and the field was huge so I was fine with him taking a walk to be alone and calm down. But I had to keep an eye on him so I was watching him the whole time instead of watching Veronica's game.   

Then he disappeared into the corn field next to the soccer field. I had to go find him. He wasn't too far into the field. He'd only gone in about a foot to look at the corn. I'd called Brandon to pick him up so we walked over to the field to meet up with him. As soon as Derrick saw Brandon he started crying. Brandon picked him up and carried him to the car and took him home. 

I was able to watch the last 20 minutes of Veronica's soccer game in peace.  When it was over I took the kids home and realized I didn't want to get out of the car. Brandon said he'd take care of the kids and I went for a drive. I ended up at Shoshone Falls. I really don't appreciate the fact that this place is 10 minutes from my house.

Thursday was a much better day. When we were done with school I took the kids to DI to introduce them to thrift shopping. Charlotte and Lydia had been talking about they toys they wanted to save up for. Things like Calico Critter homes and special Barbies. I told them that I'd found the Calico Critter home that we already had at DI for a dollar. I said we could probably find some other things they wanted at DI. So we went and found so many great deals. Charlotte found a Calico Critter Tree House for $2. It was missing the actual house, but that's no problem for my little builder. 

Lydia found a Barbie and Veronica bought more stuffed animals and some other toys. 

Derrick found a robot for $1 that rolled around, talked, and shot little disks. 

I had been feeling pretty okay with Marcia. But when we got home from DI we discovered that she had poop on my BED! I'll spare you the picture. But I did take a picture of it and sent it to Brandon with the caption, "Your dog is dead to me."  

Brandon cleaned everything up when he got home, but it's going to take a long time before I like or remotely trust Marcia again. 

We spent the evening in the garden. It was time to harvest the pumpkins. 

We are so excited by how well these turned out. 

Look at the size of this leaf.

Veronica was picking tomatoes while I was getting the pumpkins. She's always taking initiative and picking the tomatoes without being asked. 

Here's our harvest. They all turned out so cute!

Charlotte and Lydia are talking about having a stand and selling them.

They washed them all to make them look their best.

Here's Veronica taking the tomatoes from her container to the bowl on the counter.

Here are the kids playing nicely together with one of Veronica's new toys. 

Veronica spent quite a bit of time making a video camera from a salsa bottle. When it was done she found her microphone and pretended to be a TV reporter while Lydia filmed her. 

I have symphony rehearsal on Tuesday nights and I try to practice 2 - 3 nights per week. I'm doing okay, but I'm very slow. So songs like this freak me out! I'm not sure I ever played 16th notes in high school. My goal is to know where I am the whole time in this song. My section leader even said it's okay to just fake my way through the crazy parts.

Our homeschool program gives us $600 per student each semester to spend on educational resources. We use this money to buy curriculum and chromebooks. There was still money left over after that so I ordered  bunch of fun learning resources. They started arriving in the mail and it was like Christmas. Here are the kids playing with the mth cubes. 

We have a bunch of sight word cards that Derrick got in Pocatello. I'm using them to figure out what words Derrick and Veronica know. When they both pass off a word it goes up on our wall. So far we are at 36 words.  

Here's Derrick loving his robot. 

The doorbell rang and we got more packages. This has been so fun.

On Saturday we cleaned the house super well for the first time in a few weeks. Just as we were finishing up, Brandon's parents arrived. We had lunch with them and then went to the pool for the last time this summer. The weather had been cooler during most of the week, but had warmed up to the high 90's by Saturday so I made a reservtion for the 8 of us to go to the pool

Here's our group in the water. 

Charlotte and Lydia. They both showed that they can go off the diving board. 

Here's Lydia.

And Derrick, Veronica and, Brandon.

The pool closed at 3:00 and we went home. After dinner we took Steve and Jacque to see the Perrine Coulie waterfall. 

They were so impressed by it. 

I had fun looking t the water falling down. 

Here are the kids climbing on the rocks. 

Me and the waterfall.

Here's Steve and Jacque next to the waterfall. 

Lydia wanted to look like she was drinking the wterfall.

On Sunday we had church at our building. After lunch we  took Steve and Jacque to see where we work. It was also the first time Brandon has been to my office. When we went to Brandon's work  he showed off his riveting project on a metal RV. This is a skill he learned in the aviation program. He's glad he can still use this skill - even if this particular RV has been a pain.

We also walked around the temple. 

Steve and Jacque went home in the early afternoon. I made lasagna with homemade tomato sauce. Charlotte made a hotel with legos. 

Here's the staircase on the side. 

Monday was Labor day. Brandon nd I didn't have work, but we did have the kids do a little bit of school to catch up. I had Charlotte and Lydia finish one of the long placement tests for reading. We were ble to buckle down and do it while Brandon distracted Derrick and Veronica.  

In the afternoon we went to the park and few kites.  It was a really windy day so it was perfect for kites. Plus Charlotte had found  dragon shaped kite t DI for $2 and wanted to try it out. 

The dragon kite was really fun. We pretended it was a baby dragon learning how to fly. 

Brandon had another kite that had some balance problems. It still was fun.

The wind was a sign of a big storm that was supposed to be pushing into the area. The temperature that night was projected to be about 37 degrees. So I went outside to harvest what I could from the garden in case we ended up at freezing.   I was surprised to find some cucumbers. I'd assumed nothing was growing on the plants.

I also spent time cleaning off the patio. Brandon and I moved the big rectangle table back into the garage. I replaced it with a round table that my friend Kaymie gave me a few weeks ago. 

And for perspective, here is the "before" picture of our patio. This is from last year a few weeks after we moved in. (When we were puppy siting Lemon.) 

Let's do some other before and after pictures while we are at it.

This is the garden area in 2019.

And this is what it looks like now. 

Here's the backyard in 2019 from the back looking toward the house. 

This is from the same location in 2020. Completely different!

I also took a bunch of pictures of the garden in case the windstorm/cold did it in for the season.  Here re the heavy headed sunflowers. 

The tree house.

We have three pumpkins still growing. Here's one. 

The cherry tomato that is out of control.

MI Gardener recommended 10 plants that you could plant in August. Peas were on the list so I decided to plant more peas in the spot where we had onions. A few were sprouting. 

Heres's another pumpkin. This one grew through the tomatoes.

Here are the strawberries. They are spreading like crazy. If I'd known how well these strawberries would do I would have put them in a bigger bed. 

The raspberries are doing well too. Next year we should have a ton.

Here are the black berries. They didn't do much this year, but I think they'll really take off next year. 

The morning glory has filled in well. I'm going to plnt it here again next year. I might even do an arch and grow it up the arch. 

Here's the pretty rock fountain. There's still a lot I want to do with this, but I'm really happy with how it's turned out this year. 

Brandon spent a good amount of time making stilts for himself. They are part of his Halloween costume for this year. 

The wind had been blowing all Monday, but it got scary Monday night. Around 7:00 there seemed to be a lot of dust in the air and it got cold. During the night there was a lot of rain and wind. When we woke up the weather was much colder than it had been the day before.  It suddenly felt like fall. 

The regular school calendar had the kids out of school this day for a record day. But I felt like we had a lot of work so we made it a regular school day. We were finally done with all the placement tests so I told the kids we'd celebrate with a computer free day.   We spend the day reading and writing. It was so peaceful.

I gave the kids  writing prompt of "My Favorite Part of Summer Was . . . " Derrick copied it down perfectly and then drew a picture of loosing a tooth. Technically this was something he was hoping would happen rather than something that happened in the summer. But I didn't care. I was super excited about the picture he drew. That face has eyebrows.  I didn't know derrick could draw eyebrows.   

Here's Veronica playing with the model of the human body that she'd wanted as part of our education resources. She's fascinated by the body so she really likes this model. 

We desperately need to work on spelling so I had Charlotted and Lydia work on some spelling words. They were not excited about this 

And here's a cute picture of me.  I'm excited about all the long sleeve shirts I can wear this fall.

Veronica spent a long time playing with her doll house. She's really gotten good at playing pretend lately. 

On Wednesday we woke up to internet that didn't work. So we had another wonderful day without computers. We'd gone to the library to pick up book so the kids were excited to have new things to read. On Wednesday night we ended up spending the whole evening reading. The kids just sat in the basement and looked at books or playing quietly for at least an hour.  Yes I'm just as shocked as you guys. 

The internet was still out on Thursday. We had a tech scheduled to come look at it in the afternoon, but most of school was spent reading and writing again. Here re the kids working on writing. 

We've figured out a few tricks for making it work across different learning levels.  Derrick does really well copying so I write the prompt on a whiteboard and put it by him to copy down. 

Veronica is still learning how to write so I write the prompt in yellow marker and she traces it and then adds her own words or pictures at the end. 

Lydia and Charlotte like to work on the couches. Here's movie star Lydia working.

Derrick has been doing really well at home. He likes that he can take a break to make himself  corndog when ever he wants. 

We got out the watercolors to do an art project. 

Derrick painted a few lines and then lost interest. Our internet was working again - it had fixed itself a few minutes before the tech showed up - so Derrick wanted to use one of our new Chromebooks. The Chomebooks had shown up in the mail the day before. So Derrick played on reading eggs while we painted. 

We originally ordered 4 chromebooks from Bestbuy, but they were out of stock by the time our homeschool program people put in the order. Brandon was able to find 3 decently priced refurbished ones on Ebay. We are super happy to have these. They re all exactly the same so we put stickers on them to keep then straight. 

Back to painting. Lydia told me she wasn't very good at water coloring, and then did this masterpiece. 

She says that doing it on card stock really helped.

I did this picture.

And Veronic did this one. It's showing up on its side. It's a picture of trees, pumpkins, and leaves.

Another learning resource we ordered was a robot kit from Hobby Lobby. Derick had seen it with Miss Natalie and since it was a STEM kit we were able to get it for school. Brandon spent science time putting it together with the kids. Here they are working on it on Friday before I left for work. 

When I got home from work I had Charlotte and Lydia work on the online reading curriculum. We'd all hated the placement test, but we'd hoped the program would be better once we started the learning part. NOPE. We HATED it.  It was a bad combination of boring lessons combined with clunky navigation.If we didn't push a correct button t the right time it would restart the whole boring lesson.   Charlotte nd Lydia were crying from frustration. I realized this wasn't going to work when found myself yelling, "GIRLS, STOP GETTING FRUSTRATED AT THE PROGRAM!"

So I emailed our mentor teacher and asked if we could change to a workbook curriculum for reading. She sid we could. That should work much better for Charlotte and Lydia's personalities.

Derrick was also pretty emotional on Friday. It was the first Friday he's had behavioral therapy in  while.  And so he was just DONE by the time he got home. 

I made it through school, but I was DONE as well. I laid down for a cat nap at 5:45 nd didn't wake up until 8:00. Brandon had come home and made 7 layer dip for dinner, but realized the kids would just fight him on eating it. He wasn't in the mood for that.   So he took them to get a pizza and then to play at the park. When they got home he put them right to bed. 

Then Brandon and I had a stay at home date. We walked to Smiths and bought Ice cream. We went  in the back yard and ate the 7 layer dip outside. (The weather had warmed up a bit.) After dinner we went inside and watched Inception while eating ice cream.  It was a simple evening, but it ws just what I needed.

Saturday was Veronica's second soccer game. This one went much better because I left Derrick home with Brandon and the coach was back.  I still didn't have shin guards for her though. (Buying them had completely slipped my mind.) Thankfully Veronica's kindergarten teacher is also a parent of another girl on the team. She had extra shin guards and said Veronica could used them the rest of the season.  

Here's Veronica playing goalie. 

And here she is playing on the other side of the field. They were much better bout playing positions this time. The best part of the game was watching her talk to the other girls. She made friends with a girl that she liked talking to while they waited on the sidelines. And when she was "playing" she liked talking to the goalie and the other girl that helps protect the goal. She wasn't super into the game, but she did kick the ball a few times. 

I hadn't slept well the night before - thanks to that super late nap - so I took nap around noon. When I woke up the kids and Brandon had finished putting the robot together. Derrick was so excited!

I kind of felt in a funk all Saturday afternoon. I just didn't feel like doing anything - so I didn't.  

In the evening we watched the movie Nanny McPhee because Miss Natalie recommending it.  We really liked it. 

The kids went to bed and then Brandon and I stayed up talking about how we'd like to remodel the house to make  bigger dinning room. It's all several years away and pretty theoretical at this point. but it was tun to think about and got me out of my funk.

I slept swell last night so I felt much better this morning. I took Marcia outside in the morning and sw that my morning glory flowers were open. So I took this picture. 

They are so cheerful.

I like how the plant has really made this rock wall look alive.

Here's another flower. 

And here's the weekly garden check in. 

The peas have sprouted and are growing. 

Tomatoes are still doing well. 

So is this pumpkin. 

This one is turning orange. It's the last of the hanging ones.

The one that grew through the tomatoes is also looking great. 

And look - lettuce sprouts. I planted these from seeds from the lettuce we grew earlier in the year. I'm excited to have more growing again now that's its cooler. 

And we have a few more cucumbers. 

The sunflowers are about ready to be cut. Some of them look like they will have some good seeds. 

And look at these cute little raspberries. We've had a small handful of berries this year. They've ll tasted great.

Charlotte took Marcia on a walk and I went along. The morning was really hazy because smoke from Oregon and California blew in.

When I got back home Veronica showed me that she'd made a cute bed for Coco. She loves to ply with all her "Stuffies."

And that catches us up to today. Some of you may be wondering how this represents a "slower" pace. But trust me it is. This is way simpler than when Brandon was in Army Flight school. It's also simpler than having Brandon in school, 3 kids in elementary school, and 1 in preschool while working 28 hours a week. 

I don't know how long we'll be at this slower tempo, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts. 

Thanks for reading.