In my life this week…
The week started out with my wife’s cousin visiting from Ontario with her two little ones. One is the about the same age as Ian. The other is younger but I can’t remember her age. With them in town there was a family gathering which we also made into a birthday party for Margaret. It has been a while since we had this much of my wife’s relatives in one place so it was a lot of fun and good to see everyone. I was on cake duty and ended up making two which I’ll talk about down below
On the Monday my wife took the day off and went to the beach with the kids, her cousin and another cousin’s wife. They spent the entire day there and played in the water. There is also a zip line into the water that kids really love.
On Wednesday the Snowbirds were in town doing a show. They are the Royal Canadian Air Force’s Demo team. It was cool to watch and brought back memories of being a child and just how enthralled I was with their performance back then. It didn’t have quite the same punch for me now which I blamed on my age and how many times I have seen them. My kids enjoyed the show but they certainly were not as enthralled as I was way back. I think with the digital age and rarely having to wait for anything, the time it took for them to turn around and reform for the next manoeuver was too long for my kids short attention spans. I did stop for ice cream after the show. It was down at the beach with the show being over the lake so it was rather hot. Also there were a lot of people down there and in are relatively small town that ends in a mess of traffic. By the time we had eaten our ice cream cones and walked back to the car, traffic was reasonable with a few detours to avoid the worst areas.
I’m Cleaning…

Under the stairs is where our long term storage is and it is packed full. There are other things that I want to put under there so that eventually the storage room can become a workshop that it was. So far I have hauled out seven boxes three I have emptied, two are going back as is, one is my wife’s and the last one is full of paper cranes. There is at least two more boxes like the one pictured and I think there are three. My proposal to my wife was a 1000 origami cranes and we strung them all together as decorations for our wedding. I have a plan to restring them vertically and that way they will take up much less space and we can display them somewhere.
In our homeschool this week…
I am writing the blog posts on the curriculum that we have picked for each of the kids. Writing it out really shows the differences in how each of them learns although there is some guess work with Ian’s plan. Philip is basically point him at a subject and stand back. A couple of weeks in I will talk to him and come up with some projects. Margaret likes the living books and more of a starting goal, something that she can aim for and check boxes off.
I’m Cooking…

As I said above I made two cakes for the party and even though I gave some away I still came home with too much. The first was an Apple Streusel Cake. I make it in a 13 1/2 by 9 1/2 pan since I hate trying to get things out of my bundt pan and I just hand mix in the streusel. The second cake is a family favorite called Hyper Cake. It is a chocolate cake in a 13 1/2 by 9 1/2 pan with mini marshmallows over top and then I pour 3 lbs of chocolate fudge over that.
Linking up at:
Sounds like you all had a great time with family. Happy birthday to Margaret! I think it’s so sweet that you made and kept all those paper cranes. I have to admit that when I saw the word snow birds in your blog title I thought maybe winter was coming up there already! I have noticed that many of our song birds have quit singing or flown south. Either way I’m just not ready for summer to end yet!
Oh, that cake…I just made Dark Chocolate Zucchini Brownies with Dark Chocolate Ganache. (Zucchini from my own garden!) I’m craving chocolate! 3 pounds of fudge?