Thanksgiving Weekend

We've been busy here!

We had a nice Thanksgiving.  Josh's parents were able to come out and join us for a couple nights so we got to spend all of Thanksgiving day together.  We had the missionaries over for breakfast (pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sweet potatoes!!), and lots of yummy snacks all morning.  For dinner I cooked Turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, sauteed green beans with bacon and onions, and homemade rolls and cranberry sauce.  Grandma brought her incredible dressing, a yummy persimmon steamed pudding (like an old timey plum pudding, which is actually a cake), pumpkin pie and plenty of whipped cream.  The kids helped me make cherry and apple pies, too.  So that was our feast.  It was a LOT of food, but oh-so-good as it always is.

And then to work off our feast, on Friday Josh and I got started reorganizing our house a bit.  I know.  I can't help myself.

We decided to downsize from two computers to just one (for now).  At some point we'll probably get a laptop.  But we're going to see how it goes with just one.  And not only that, but we moved it onto the hall desk and totally cleared out our huge computer armoire.  It's ready to go into the garage while it awaits a new home.  So that space in the dining room is going to be where my new piano ends up once we can round up five other guys to help Josh move it (aren't you glad you all live too far to help with that?).    We used to be very caught up in having the computer in the living area for two reasons - one is that it is the best computer safety tool, counseled by prophets of God.  Second is that we wanted to be able to watch movies on our projector from off our computer, and we didn't want massively long cords roping around our house.
The movie reason is moot - our new DVD player will stream wirelessly from the internet or from our computer.  LOVE IT!!
And, the new hallway location actually works really well because I can see the computer screen from the living room.  I tested it out yesterday as Hannah was supposedly working on geometry and all I could see were christmas youtube videos on her screen.

"Uh, Hannah, how's that geometry going?"
Click.
Back to math.  :-)
Sigh.

I'm such a mean mom.  But hey - it was her choice to do math! She's trying to get caught up (more on that later).

We made room for our Christmas tree, which arrives TODAY - fun!  AND, one of Hannah's chores this week was to sand and repaint the low bookshelf in my living room that I've had since she was one and never done anything with.  We painted it an off-white, since I have a lot of brown furniture in my house, and it was going up against my accent wall.  She did a nice job - especially considering it was her first time wielding a sander and painting!  That job is finished and the bookshelf is back in it's place and awaiting Christmas decorations to make it festive.

Finally - the reason Hannah is doing geometry on her week off of school.  After a conference with Hannah and her teacher, and looking at her 8th grade test results and the results of a test she took this fall, her teacher thought that Hannah might be better served by getting geometry done this year (she's currently in Algebra, but her grade is over 100%).  She thinks Hannah isn't being challenged enough AND that since Hannah seems to really love science, taking more advanced mathematics in high school would be super beneficial to her.  This will allow her to take Calculus her senior year.  So Hannah emailed her math teacher and he got her started - told her to use the holidays to catch up to where they are.   And there you go!  One of the joys of a small school that tries to be flexible and curtail the educational experience to fit the needs of the child.  She's also getting extra grammar/reading/writing assignments from her teacher to help fill in her time. Lucky girl!  But seriously, the girl never had any homework, and she had a lot of free time at school.  Now we're hoping she'll feel a lot busier at school.

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Josh and I did a little online Black Friday Shopping.  We just kind of kept our eyes open for a steal of a deal on something we have been in the market for.  One thing I noticed is that not all the deals are "deals".  I think that the original price is often raised right before Thanksgiving so that the discounted price looks even better.  I saw that in a couple things, most noticeably the ipod nano that Josh bought in October.  He thought he'd be disappointed when he saw the black friday price, but it was only $4 cheaper than the price he paid last month.  So you really have to be a smart shopper.  The only big thing we got was a Cuisinart food processor, which was really a bargain.  Josh will use it for salsa making, and I can actually use it to make bread dough, which I'm excited to try.  Merry Christmas to us!  Oh, one last thing about that.  When I found it on Amazon's website, it said that all the items were "claimed", but that I could put it in my cart.  If one became available I would have 15 minutes to purchase it, or it would go to the next person in line.  So I did, and it was actually immediately available.  So the lesson there was, 100% claimed does not mean 100% purchased.  The risk is that you get placed in a position of making a last minute impulse purchase, so you have to watch yourself!