I bought the rest of Samuel’s homeschool books today. We’ll be using My Father’s World as our core curriculum, but we’re supplementing with A Beka for arithmetic and reading/grammar.

In the next week or two, Samuel and I will head to the store to pick out his school supplies. I saw some at Walmart today that he’d like, but figured he’d like to pick them out himself.

He’ll be in first grade this year. It’s hard to imagine this will be our third year homeschooling. He’s been asking if we can go ahead and start school soon, and I’m getting pretty excited myself.

My friend Marla directed me to some new-to-me blogs – Raising Olives and Confessions of a Homeschooler. Through those, I discovered Raising Arrows. All three look to be large families, but the suggestions there for home management and organization look great. I know I for one could use improvement in that area (despite the number of people who think I’m super organized – I still have room to improve!). I haven’t read any of the blogs at length yet, but so far, there’s been a lot of good information there. It’s so nice to read about how others homeschool, when they’ve been doing it for years and years.

Anyway – all that to say I’m getting excited for school to start!

When I first planned this menu, it looked like it was going to be a pretty calm week. Now it’s looking like it’s going to be pretty busy between piano lessons three days in a row and VBS the second half of the week. . . .so the menu may very well change. We’ll see.

Sunday: dinner at the in-laws’ house

Monday: tacos

Tuesday: sesame chicken, brown rice

Wednesday: BLT’s

Thursday: grilled chicken breast over tossed salads

Friday: pizza night

Saturday: BBQ chicken

The meals without veggies listed we’ll just decide then which veggie to eat from the freezer.

Breakfasts are smoothies, eggs, oatmeal, biscuits, and scones.

Lunches are sandwiches, wraps, macaroni and cheese, and leftovers.

Snacks are cheese, baby carrots, nuts, and fresh fruit.

You can read more menu plans over at Orgjunkie.com.

This was taken at the top of our road last night on our way to Stephen’s parents’ house. I love seeing the rays of light like this – it makes me think of Heaven and Christ’s return.

Have you ever stopped to think that when you try to do God’s will, the devil will oppose you? He will. The devil does not want us to live for Christ – in fact, he will oppose us whenever we try.

A couple weeks ago when we went to Indiana for the weekend, we knew that that is what God wanted us to do. It was a wonderful weekend. Stephen had so much liberty to preach while we were there. It was an amazing blessing to me, and it was evident in many other ways that God wanted us there. I told Stephen on the way home, “Just watch, now the devil will attack us for having gone up there.”

Sure enough, he did. He waited just long enough for me to forget about it, and then snuck in to attack. The only problem was that even though I anticipated it, I failed to recognize his attack for what it was when it did come.

Earlier this week almost like a comedy of errors. Anna got sick and only wanted to be held. Our air conditioner decided to get tired in the middle of a 95+ degree day and quit. Caleb stopped sleeping at night and started screaming relentlessly whenever we’d put him down to sleep. Samuel’s behavior even changed. I got discouraged, tired, and just plain irritable.

It is so easy to wallow in self-pity, and I seem to be so good at it. I got frustrated and overly sensitive. . . .which ended up causing disagreements between my husband and I. Disagreements between us are usually pretty rare.

Thursday morning, I sent the kids outside to play and tried to read my Bible. Yet my attitude was still not where it needed to be. Stephen came home to restart the fan on our air conditioner (which stopped again that morning), and I snapped at him. Oh yes, what a wonderful, Godly response that was!

Later, Samuel and I were talking about how we can choose to react to things. I was explaining to him how we can choose to be calm when we get upset or we can react out of anger.

At that point I realized how I’d been acting myself. . .modeling the very behavior I was warning him against. Here I was explaining to him about how the devil tries to get us to sin, when I had failed to see his attempts to get me to do the same thing. It was a humbling moment.

1 Peter tells us that the devil is like a roaring lion.

1 Peter 5:8-9
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

It amazes me sometimes how sneaky he can be. We know his tactics, and yet we still fall for them. I don’t know about you, but it’s easier for me to try to resist him when I realize what he’s doing. Like I told Samuel – the devil loves to try to get us to sin, but it’s our choice whether or not we do.

This week our meals aren’t all that different, but there’s a lot of fresh fruit in the house. I really like serving just a bowl of plain fruit for dessert. It’s a great way to end a meal with something sweet but without all the extra sugar and refined carbs.

The honeydew melon in this salad was amazing, and it was a lot of fun to see what fruit we had in the house that would work well in a fruit salad. This was watermelon, honeydew, mango, and blueberries.

Here’s our menu as it is typed up. I make the menus a month at a time, and then buy whatever fruit is on sale when I go grocery shopping. It’s fun seeing what new fruits we can find each time.

Sunday: burgers and watermelon

Monday: chicken Alfredo, green beans

Tuesday: tacos

Wednesday: baked tilapia, brown rice

Thursday: grilled chicken breast over tossed salads

Friday: pizza night

Saturday: meatloaf bites, brown rice, green beans

The meals without veggies listed we’ll just decide then which veggie to eat from the freezer.

Breakfasts are smoothies, eggs, oatmeal, biscuits, and scones.

Lunches are sandwiches, wraps, macaroni and cheese, and leftovers.

Snacks are cheese, baby carrots, nuts, and fresh fruit.

You can read more menu plans over at Orgjunkie.com.

Miss Anna has been running a fever since Friday night, so we kept her home from church today. Our first thought was that she’s teething, but didn’t want to potentially expose the entire congregation to something if we’re wrong.

Even though she wasn’t feeling well, she sure did look cute when I tried her new American flag bows in her hair. She’ll just have to wear her new little firecracker dress with them another day. . .

Before we left last week, I made a travel jewelry roll. It was a very quick “instant gratification” project, as well as something I needed anyway.

There’s a wider pocket on the far right for bracelets, and a small flap to put earrings through. It was nice not having tangled jewelry this time.