where I talk with my inside voice
This has been a rough month. It started with me having a disagreement with the chainsaw (the chainsaw won, by the way), and a trip to Urgent Care for five stitches. A few days later, the United States finally succumbed to the coronavirus pandemic that has been spreading across the globe. Despite what seemed to be ample warnings in Jan...
Pea Ridge National Park is a Civil War battlefield in northern Arkansas, not too far from Branson. We wound up taking Noah’s troop there for a weekend campout because our original plans fell through. I had agreed to organize the Feb campout, which is always scheduled over President’s Day weekend and usually includes a visit to some patriotic landmark like...
Foul weather prevented us from going to cut a tree this year, for the first time in a long time. But the kids put up the artificial tree and they did a great job decorating it, so it didn’t really matter that much. We also didn’t go to the symphony this year, which I now regret, so I’ll plan on...
The kids wanted to make some extra money, so they asked me if they could go around asking the neighbors if they could rake their leaves. I said sure. I even drove them up to Ace Hardware to buy some equipment (a new rake and bear claws) and the paper bags for yard waste. They spent the day walking the...
Strangely enough, Jane was the person who told me that my aunt Marlene had passed away. She just happened to call my dad the day it happened, and she sent me a message on Facebook letting me know. So Dixie and I drove down to El Dorado for the funeral. We rented a trailer and hauled my dad’s Mercury down...
We have spent the last several weekends going over to my parents’ house in O’Fallon and going through everything we find there to see if there is anything worth keeping. Certainly there are plenty of things, like photo albums and books and other mementos, but I am somewhat surprised that there isn’t more. We have brought home three truckloads of...
There are a lot of reason why I love that we homeschool. Here’s another. I gave the kids a project this year – to plan our fall vacation. I drew a circle on the map around St. Louis that represented how far we could drive in 4-5 hours. I told them we could go anywhere inside that circle (which included...
This was a rough week. I got my dad moved down to El Dorado Springs. He has moved in with his sister Marlene, for which I am grateful because I’m not sure how much longer he can actually live on his own without help. So it’s nice knowing that he has someone else there in case of an emergency. He’s...
We are truly blessed. Sometimes it is easy forget that. So today I wanted to take some photos of Dixie and I with our new cars, so we don’t forget how lucky we are – and also so we could look back on these decades from now and remember that there was a time when we were still cool. The...
Last year, the poison ivy was a bit out of control in our yard, and Dixie wanted to move the garden away from the back fence so that we didn’t have so many vines growing through it into the garden. So we spent the weekend creating a new bed, by moving the rear bed to the front – leap-frogging the...
Dixie took the kids down to her grandparents for 10 days, and I flew down for a long weekend to hang out with them. This was our first time being at their new house in Winter Garden. It’s a really nice neighborhood, and they still have a pond behind their property with plenty of wildlife. The kids loved being able...
Our little girl had another birthday, and now she is officially a “tween.” She helped make her birthday cake this year, and I’m so proud of the young lady she has become.
The St. Louis Symphony’s annual Christmas Concert never fails to get me in the Christmas spirit. The choices of songs are always so festive and this year they had the entire audience sing along with a medley of carols. At last year’s concert, I saw several people wearing the LED light necklaces, so I had to order some for us...
We spent two weeks, and drove over 750 miles across Virginia, for a home-school history field-trip. Photos are now up in my album. I sure had fun. I hope we made some memories that will last in the kids’ minds.
My family indulged me in a little road trip to Lebanon, Missouri today to visit Whirlwind Ranch. They have been raising alpacas there for 25 years and I’ve always thought they were cool, so we went to see them and to buy some yarn. We stopped in St. James on the way home for lunch. It was a good day.
The first quarter of this year has been a complete blur, but I'm glad that winter is almost over. Today we celebrated Josie's 10th birthday. Talk about a blur. How has it been a decade already? She's really into greek mythology right now and so that was the theme for her birthday. I also promised her I would get her...
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