Last weekend we went to a campout at Rend Lake in Illinois. A lot of the staff from Midwest Summer Camp was there. It was so much fun. We were blessed to stay in a camper that a friend of ours borrowed from a friend of theirs. The air conditioning was so nice. We had a full bed to sleep in, and the girls slept on a pull out couch and Simon David slept on the table that turned into a bed. It was really great. The tent will seem different the next time we go camping!!! The end of this month we will be going to the homeschool campout at Shakamak in Indiana. We are so excited. I am really excited!!! I love being with all the moms, we all have so much in common and I can't wait to be encouraged and attempt to encourage in return. We were going to stay in the group camp and share a cabin with three or four other families, but today we decided to rent a family cabin which is a mile or two away from the group camp and we will have to drive over every day. The group camp was just really crowded and this way we can have a bath to ourselves and a little more privacy. It is a little more expensive to go this route, but I think for now it is the best decision. We have gone only one other time, to Fall Creek Falls in Tennessee and that had to be the coldest campout on record. We did not bring a heater or anything, the cabin was nothing more than four walls with lots and I mean lots!!! of holes in the chinking. On the drive over to the group camp on Saturday morning, the temperature read 24 degrees-and this was after the sun came up, so who know how cold it got during the night. It was so cold. I can't describe how cold we were. This cabin in Indiana has a wood burning stove, so if it does get down in the twenties, which I doubt, we will at least have some heat!!
Glad you all had fun! I heard it was a blast! I bet it will be different going to Shakamak for something other then MSC! Hope you all enjoy yourselves!
Hi Teresa...Well, I was just going to say something to you about us sharing a cabin as I started reading this post!!Yes...21 people in one cabin is indeed SHARING!! I truly understand tho, but sure sorry we aren't going to be "roomies" ....or would that be "cabbies!?" ha However, I am so happy you are all coming. There are going to be a lot of people at this camp, so it will be a different experience all the way around! And you are SOOO right, I don't think I've ever been as cold as I was in our little opened air cabin...with bathrooms TOO far away! ha See ya soon!
I enjoyed so much getting to know you and your famliy a little more this weekend. Shakamak will be odd in a different setting for you all. Enjoy your own cabin. Thank you for the link about the homeschooling styles. I would love any additional help/advice regarding getting started with homeschooling that you have to give. I realized today that one school year is not that long to start planning (if we decide to start next year instead of waiting another year). Hope you all had a safe trip home.
Thanks for you note...I was wondering about how you were going to adjust with 3 other families, etc. and it's okay to pray for "cooler" weather...but not FREEZING, okay!! ha
Do you have any information on the HS campout? I don't know anything about it or even when it is, so if you have any information on it would you please email it to either my mom or I? I greatly appreciate it!
Thank you I reaaly appreciate the words of encouragement. I ope and pray the work at Northside continues to go well for you and the family. It means a lot to me to hear those words of encouragement
Tomorrow is the big day. The kids are NOT excited. But what do we expect? You know, though, I think in ways they are a bit. They love the books we read, so I think they are looking forward to that. They really like buying school supplies, too. I feel ready and still though I feel overwhelmed. Kelsey's two AP classes are going to require a lot from me. But at least they are in subjects I like. Simon David is moving into more complicated science, so we will see how that goes. He likes science, so that will help. Faith is doing sonlight 3-first half of US history, which is my favorite sonlight year, so I am really looking forward to that. I like the routine so much. I like everyone getting to bed earlier and I like everyone starting the day together. Those things don't happen in the summer time. Poor Faith has fallen asleep on the couch more often than not in the last month!! I am so much a same old same old kind person. I find comfort in predictability.
Hope school gets off to a great start for you all!! We started back last week and I am so happy to be on a more structured routine. Summer is fun, but I need routine and organization to feel productive. :-)
Enjoy your first day of school. As much as I hate to admit it, I guess I kind of like the routine of the school year too. I do love the laziness of summer, but after awhile, it does get kind of yucky. Samuel definitely NEEDS routine. He kind of gets a little stir crazy without it. We are adjusting pretty well being back in the groove of school. :)
Good Luck with the school year. How do you teach subjects that you are not familiar with? Like to me calculus or any other higher math would be impossible. Some days I have trouble with helping Drew now on his homework.
We have had an empty nest this week. The kids went to Louisville to stay with my folks on Monday and they will come back on Saturday. The time has gone by so fast. I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday working in the resource room, did a little there Wednesday, but spent the biggest part of the day sitting with some folks from the congregation here who are involved in a custody trial. Pray for them-James and Janette and God's will be done for that little girl.
So all this empty nest has made me wonder what I will do with my time when my kids are grown and gone. I don't want to go back to teaching, but I think I would like to volunteer at a school and work with kids who are struggling, and then have the freedom to take time off when we want to travel or go visit the kids whereever they might live. I liked being up at the building with Simon. His office is right across from the resource room, but I try not to bother him. I liked the togetherness though. So I might try to spend a day a week at the building once my kids are grown, there is always Bible class work that can be done, for my class or someone elses!! I also thought about a young mother here who just had her third child, if I hadn't been so busy at the resource room(trying to get it done before we start school Monday) I would have offered to go to her house and stay with the kids for a couple of hours so she could get out. I'll have to remember that in the future to get my "baby" fix. There is a great lady at Galena who is an empty nester who fixed supper once a week for one of the members there for almost a year after she had twins. She has set a good example for me!!
So you ladies who are empty nesters, what have you found rewarding?
I'm not an empty-nester yet, but I have been thinking about what will happen in the coming years when my status changes to that. I plan to look at it as an opportunity to serve my brethren. There doesn't seem to be an end to the things we women can do to help others!
I've taken on the teaching of two ladies classes here, teach a class on "wives and mother" at other congregations 3 or 4 times a year, and especially enjoy traveling with Jimmy to gospel meetings. Also, helping him with large studies he's done by proofreading them. Fixing food for members who need it. Feeding a family on Sundays who had to travel a good distance to worship. Hymn writing. The days fill up! But I still miss my boys.
We have the resource room under control. It took 15 of us working for 2 1/2 days, but it is organized. Tomorrow we will copy resource books to add to the files, but it is done. That photo indexing that I mentioned in the last blog-we took over 700 photos. Unbelievable!! Anyway, next we are moving on to the classrooms. We are going to organize them is such a way that every room is set up to teach the OSH in the same ways-everyone keeps the teachers' manuals in the same place and the files are set up the same and the OSH cards in the same places. And then it will be maintenance-which sometimes is the biggest issue because if one person breaks the system it falls apart. BUT everyone seems to be excited and desirous to have a system and to get it all consistent. What an effort, but what a blessing to allow teachers to focus on teaching, not finding materials!!!
I was just telling my father(kevin's) about OSH and how we went through it while I was at college and I really liked it. He asked where to get it and I found it online. I hope that we can use it here in Trenton.
I meant to tell you last night - I re-did the first 13 lessons of praise passages for Life&Bread. I'll get you a copy of the master if you like. Oh, and I found the Memory Verse sheets too! I'll get them to you Wednesday.
Oh yeah! Haha! I almost forgot about my picket fence! I have a small paper picket fence that I purchased from a teacher store.... just hadn't quite figured out what I was going to do with it! For now, the teacher who was going to be in there already has the kids' names out in the hall on some cows (she had a barnyard theme). I think I'll leave it that way for a little while... it kinda fits my backyard theme because we really do have cows in our backyard sometimes! haha
We have started cleaning out and reorganizing the resource room at the building. You can not imagine. I would say it was 2 decades worth of stuff. Lot and lots and lots of visual aids. That is what is going so slowly-trying to create a photo index of all of them. Today we got it all cleaned out (so now it is all out in the hall ;)) and got some of the visual sorted by stories, photographed, bagged, and indexed, but there is so much more yet to do. We are meeting again in the morning to get it done. Sheila, if you read this, are you interested in some of the duplicate stuff? We have a box ready and will mail it to you if you want it. Our goal is also to have a file drawer with masters and activites for each lesson for each semester of OSH. I keep telling myself what a wonderful thing it will be when it is done. It just has to get done!!
Having everything indexed is very nice! One of the women at our church spends a lot of time organizing our resource room! It will be great when it is all done! :)
I'm sure the members there will appreciate it as much as all of us at Galena have appreciated it. It makes teaching and preparing to teach so much easier!!! I've never been a part of a congregation with such a well-organized resource room, it truly is a blessing.
Thanks for thinking of us. Yes, I would be glad to have it, if it's not too expensive to mail. Good timing because I am starting to travel to another congregation to start a children's class there next month so I can really use the extras. Do you have my mailing address?
