catching up a bit

Yeah, yeah, I know -- it's already Thursday and I haven't summarized last week yet, or posted anything at all since Halloween. Six days into the new month, and you've not heard a thing from me. Well, it's because we've been busy. With things like:

Our new puppy, Grace.

Cute, no? She's a border collie, the kids are thrilled, and I'm honestly being run a bit ragged. It's hard to housebreak and puppy and do....well, just about anything else. That alone should be excuse enough, right?

But we've had other stuff going on this past week, too, like:



J's birthday party.

Where our house was filled with family and food and fun. And presents. Lots and lots of presents. And, that means:

No hope whatsoever of getting any school work (or anything else other than playing with new gifts) done this week.

The kids have been having a blast building and reading and exploring and playing. So who can complain? It became obvious early on that we were NOT going to be starting our 2nd Language Arts block this week. In fact, getting dressed by noon has been a challenge.

And then there was one of the biggest distractions of the week for us:

Our future First Family.

Is that not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?? Like the rest of the country, we've been swept up in the very emotional historic happenings, and the rejoicing at what this means, at how far we've come as a nation. I've never felt prouder to be an American. Good things are coming, people. GOOD THINGS!

The kids were swept up in the excitement as well. We never really talked directly about the election process and implications with them -- they're still a bit young for that kind of introspection -- but they've been soaking up the general feeling of how important an election is, excitedly asking me who I voted for when I got home from the polls. They voted in the kids' election at the children's museum. They enthusiastically checked in with the election coverage during breaks in play to see how many "points" each of the candidates had at that time. And they staged their own election, with two of their dollhouse dolls going up against each other for President of the Dollhouse. Here's the votes being tallied. It was a very close race, and ended in a tie, so both "Dorthy" and "John" will be President of the Dollhouse.

Aren't kids amazing??