All that work and getting up early (for us) this morning and the facilitator was a no show! Ken left a message on his phone after an hour had passed and tomorrow will call our board personally to see what happened. So Echo and I had a late morning/early afternoon nap while the kids did what we had planned originally for the time the facilitator was here – Play Doh. First was the free for all, make what you like and then they did some dinosaur work before running out of time before lunchtime.

Yesterday was a relatively slow day too – lots of cleaning and prep work. But the kids did worksheets of course.

And Gavin worked on his apple lapbook… it is fun going over those apple facts again, especially since right now we are finishing up on our applesauce.

To celebrate that we all got together and started a few batches of the apple leather. I am planning on defrosting some raspberries or strawberries and mixing them in with the applesauce to try and make something more “fruit roll up” like. At least I can control the sugar content.

Zander and Trinity took advantage of the lovely fall weather and did some leaf raking, not enough yet to do any true pile jumping though.

Last night’s treat for myself and Ken: chocolate with white chocolate chip cookies and milk! We had bought cookie dough from my mom when her work did a fund raising drive and this is my tub. SOOO good, especially coupled with episode 3 of Sherlock… although it ended on a cliffhanger and wiki says no new episodes until Autumn… 2011!!!

I even got a scrapbook page done – this one is from our trip to the conservatory – Emanuel’s flower art!

The rest of today was pretty basic – though the twins got sent to their room for a nap. When Ken was in charge they would not listen and play quietly and attempted to wake up their siblings so they were sent  to bed. This meant that when Trinity woke up from her nap she was the first one up and got her very own livingroom snack picnic.

Emanuel did some more workbook work too – the letter J and things you would find at a market… His focus is limited but when we do do our pages he is soaking it up. Trinity likes to come and watch so it is my hope that she is actually taking in a lot of it too.

Since we have not gotten word on the van yet Ken had to contact Sean and catch a ride to run some errands. Man do I miss the mobility. With such a large family we simply can’t go out with a friend and the bus… I cringe to think of all these kids on the bus. BUT if it comes down to it, you do what you have to!

I finished up a headband for Echo using the bra strap material I bought on the weekend and a butterfly embellishment I had from doing a tutu for another little girl. Now I just need some more “fancy things” to add to other straps and I will make her a few more!

Tonight’s dinosaur themed books was Digging up Dinosaurs by Aliki. A bit over their head but they enjoyed looking at the pictures after I read it and remembered hearing some of the words on their video.

So tonight there is a bit more cleaning to be accomplished, a late dinner to be eaten and some sewing (hopefully) to be started!!! Now if I could just get my laminator… grr on the no van.