Weekly Wrap Up: Vocabulary, Pilgrim’s Progress, Early Rising, and Defrocking the House

I learned a new word this week.New words are important around here, because we seem to be in perpetual SAT/ACT prep mode. We’re always trying to use big words in sentences to sound really smart.

What new word did I learn, you might ask? Adelynn posted on Facebook that she “defrocked” her house.

Not being Canadian, I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Little did I know, I too was defrocking my house. That is, taking down my Christmas decorations.

I normally don’t do that quite so early on. I usually wait until Epiphany. That was always the family tradition. I’ve been on something of a cleaning frenzy lately though, and all that stuff was in my way.

The last three years, I couldn’t defrock my house myself. Year one I had shoulder surgery. Year two I had more surgery. Year three I celebrated Christmas by having my gall bladder out.

By the way, the key to really learning any new word is to use it in a sentence frequently when you first learn it. SAT advice for your older children!

So, the children defrocked the house. The Christmas lights showed definite evidence of this.  In defrocking the house this year, I went through and marked which sets of lights were in need of new light bulbs, which ones were to be used for spare bulbs (I was told the cat, long gone now, chewed the wire three years ago…), and tossed any Christmas ornaments that were cracked or otherwise broken. Next year when we set up for Christmas, things shall be more orderly. Hopefully.

We’ve been trying to get on a better schedule. Lately we’ve been at the mercy of dear husband’s schedule, which often involves working 2nd shift. One night I awoke at 3 am to hear my kids and husband playing a game after he got home from work. Needless to say this is not conducive to getting things done during the day. We have things to do in the evening too, so we can’t simply push everything to nights.

In particular, I wanted to get back to waking up fairly early (7 am) and having breakfast and reading aloud with the kids, no matter what time hubby came home.

My solution was to bribe them into coming to the breakfast table by 8 am. For the next 30 days ,I will pay $1 per child to any child who makes it to the table by 8 am, no exceptions, with the table set, ready for breakfast. And, I’ll charge $1 to any child who doesn’t make it to the table.

Having older children, these sorts of rewards and consequences work well for us. They’ve been better at getting to bed and staying there.

So far, I’ve broke even, as not everyone makes it to the table.

We’re starting to read aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan in the mornings. So far, so good. This is one of those books I wanted them all to read, but because it can be complex to understand, I thought we’d read it aloud together. Read aloud isn’t just for kids who haven’t learned to read. My fondest teacher memory is of a teacher that read  novels aloud to us in Junior High and High School.

We’re also reading aloud from the One Year Bible again, with us reading only New Testament and Proverbs so as to not be bogged down. The One Year Bible makes this quite easy to do.

The children are also working on figuring out some projects and experiments for the upcoming science fair with our homeschooling group. I want them to have some fairly solid ideas to work towards by tomorrow. They’ve begun to work hard at the task to figure out what they’re going to do. So far, only two of them seem to have solid ideas that will work well in a fair setting, but everyone else is diligently researching their ideas still.

On this blog, I am partway through a series this week on organizing a menu plan, inspired by a reader question on that topic. I took some of our email correspondence and wrote out 31 days to a more organized menu plan.

Have a great week,