Homework Sunday

After having been on call for the past two Sundays and soccer and other kids' activities on the weekends before that, it was nice to not have anything officially scheduled today. Instead, everyone worked on homework or homework-type activities. That meant that today wasn't exactly fun, but it was definitely productive.

Alex had some homework in a couple of classes plus he worked on his big project for this quarter, which is building a castle. He had already measured out the walls and drawn them out on some foam board. He did try cutting the walls out himself, but he cut himself with the X-acto knife, so Patrick went ahead and did the rest. I haven't helped at all with this project yet. I'd like to keep it that way. I had my own "homework" to do. Alex still has to do quite a bit of work on the castle this week. It's due on Thursday, so time is running out.

Natalie is laughing here because I'm taking a picture of her while she's making her own PB&J sandwich for lunch. She didn't have any school homework, but she did have some "piano" homework. She usually has lessons on Mondays, but she had an extra lesson yesterday to make up for the lesson on the 20th when her teacher will be on vacation. She has another lesson tomorrow, which makes three lessons in a week. During her lesson yesterday, she was in "la-la land", meaning she couldn't focus, so that meant a wasted lesson. Today I wanted her to practice a lot so she can actually show some improvement for her lesson tomorrow. She ended up practicing about 30 minutes and she spent most of the rest of the day outside playing with her neighborhood friends.

Anthony also has a big project due this week. It's a group project for Chemistry. They had to create a game about the Periodic Table. They used the board game Trivial Pursuit as a model for their game. He finished his project today and the best part was that his group didn't have to meet today to finish it.

Eric didn't have any homework, of course, but I couldn't exclude him from this post. He seemed tired--all he did was stare out into space during church instead of playing with the cars he brought, but of course he didn't take a nap. He played indoors and out today, so maybe he'll sleep well tonight AND take a nap tomorrow.

What was my "homework"? I had to make ten more Christmas cards, I wrote in a few of them, and I put address labels on most of them. I still can't believe that I made all 100 cards and I think I'll need more next year! Here the kids are applying the return address labels, while watching one of our "No Ordinary Family" DVR tapes. They look rather mesmerized, don't they? I also worked on my December Daily album. I hope I'll have some time this week to catch up in that album so that I can finally post some finished pages.

Because we had taken over the sofa with all of the label stuff for the cards, Eric just stood there and said he was "looking for a place" as in a place to sit. Patrick put him on his lap instead. I love how Eric looks so relaxed on his Papa's lap. We were all pretty busy today, and my poor boy didn't have anyone to play with. He'll be "playing" with his Papa all day tomorrow, though. Hopefully he won't prevent Patrick from mailing all of those cards and getting some teacher gifts. That's this week's project--teacher gifts, then we'll be all done for Christmas.