Great Deals!

I've found a few good deals recently... Got a great pair of shoes at Marshall's for $5.00. Very comfortable, and I know it's a very durable brand too. And Good Will (which I'm finding I love even more than Value Village even though the selection is much smaller) had some great stuff this week! First, I got a really nice shabbos skirt for $3.49 that goes down to my ankles. Hard for this 5' 11" lady to find ankle-length anything! :) Then, much to my dismay, I found a beautiful shabbos robe for $5.00. It looked like my size, but I figured even if it wasn't I had to buy it anyway and give it to someone. It turned out to have been tailor-made for me. These robes usually cost $125-180, so this was a real coup. We also always cruise the books there to see if there's anything to add to our library. Sure enough, some good children's literature from pre-1950, some easy reading books for Eli, a coloring book of antique cars for Eli, and a Fannie Farmer cookbook for me.

The whole reason we were at Good Will at all is because we had to go to the Humane Society. And the reason we had to go to the Humane Society was to drop off a very sweet, very pretty, very well-behaved little grey cat that had decided to adopt us. Unfortunately, we weren't interested in adopting her right now and we hope someone else will soon. She was around for three weeks, though, and Amirah handled taking the dear kitty to the Humane Society very well. The check-in clerk did her best to persuade us to keep her and I did my best to make sure Amirah didn't hear all the reasons we should take her! A required "donation" a short goodbye to Florence and we were on our way.

So, that was yesterday's excitement. Lunch break is almost over and we'll be reading about Family Ursidae (bears), reading the latest Boxcar Children mystery, working on our Hebrew (yesterday/today/tomorrow and dates), digging holes in the back yard, cleaning off the sukkah pad (including pouring boiling water on the weeds in the cracks), doing three pages of math (adding 3-digit numbers to 2-digit numbers), phonics lessons for three of the kids, adding to Amirah's ocean mural in her bedroom, doing some English cursive practice, taking a quick spelling test to see how much we can skip in our spelling book, doing writing and math with the two middles, and maybe dragging out a bunch of paints at the end of it all.

Already done is mapping the Byzantine Empire and discussing the just (to the Christians) and unjust (to the Jews) laws that Emperor Justinian enacted (and how it wasn't nearly as bad for the Jews as the Roman Empire!), a grammar lesson on linking verbs, chumash study, yom kippur study (including discussion of what a chesbon hanefesh is - a personal accounting of what we have done right or wrong in the last hours or days or months or year!), a few pages in a science book that has logic exercises (very interesting!), our daily davening, writing a two-sentence dictation exercise and LUNCH.

Seems like a lot, but most of our lessons are short and sweet (15 minutes), longer for Hebrew, reading, and math. It's a nice variety and the kids are happy with most everything. We're still fine-tuning our schedule and our materials a bit, but that should all settle down soon.

Wishing everyone a good day/week/month/year!