I love reading weekly wrap-ups on other blogs! So I thought I’d join in this year on the fun! We had an amazing week and later today we will be going to a family get together to honor my husband’s nephew who is leaving for a long tour overseas. He will miss Thanksgiving and Christmas this year while serving our country and doing his part to keep us all safe. It will be great to see everyone but the reason is bittersweet.

We started our week at church and our Sunday School class discussed our pastor’s sermon on raising our girls to be Godly wives and mothers. Our teacher questioned us on if there was a way to really raise our girls to be true Christian women who took seriously the role of being a wife and mother. I do teach my daughter some housekeeping tasks and I do understand that she will learn much of what it means to be a wife and mother by doing life with me…but I wondered if I should be more diligent and purposeful in my instruction. Then I realized the answer was already in my hands! My friend who is moving away gave me the “Keepers at Home” curriculum to use with my daughter! So I pulled the books out this week to study and begin a more purposeful time with my daughter to guide and prepare her. Maybe we will have a weekly mother/daughter time or possibly find some other families willing to start a little group.

We also enjoyed the Top Gun Cruise-in in Mayfield this week. We love going as a family to the car shows and enjoying the beautiful works of art cars were in the old days. Cars are generally not as beautiful and colorful today as they were in the past. I did get to sit in my favorite car…a 1978 Firebird Trans Am Special Edition!! The owner let me sit in it to look at the Burt Reynolds signature. I really cared more about the car than the celebrity scribble. Awesome!!

Just for fun I entered a picture of the kids in the current Apologia contest. Right now you can download two chapters of the new elementary science book on chemistry and physics. We did the experiment on buoyancy and had a little competitive fun with it too! Sparkles ship was the last to sink and held 103 pennies overall. We also tied that experiment in with Christopher Columbus’s last voyage to the New World…school is fun when we can tie subjects together that way!

This week also held our annual breakfast at Hutchen’s and the mailing off of the official “Letter of Intent to Homeschool” day. The kids enjoy their annual (well…our second annual but we plan to keep it up) breakfast out at our local favorite diner. The kid’s always have a wonderful time and enjoy all the attention they get from the patrons. Littlest even managed to get a few sweet potatoes from the gentleman in the booth next to us. We then went to the post office to send of our letter by certified mail. Our second homeschool year is now officially started…and we are already five weeks in!

Tuesday morning I discovered a mouse had visited the pantry…grrr…yuck…eeeww. We spent that morning cleaning everything out of the pantry and bleaching every can and bottle. The mouse ripped all of the paper off of the Hershey’s powdered chocolate and tried to eat through the green plastic lid on the parmesan cheese. That night my husband set out a trap but the mouse managed to eat the bait and escape. The second night he set out more bait and sticky traps. The mouse managed to escape again and still eat all the bait. The mouse was finally trapped on Friday while we were out and the babysitter was over…finally! Today I will be cleaning and putting the pantry back together.

The best day this week for me was Friday. We spent the morning with friends…visiting and planning for the school year. Then I enjoyed a wonderful date night with my husband…something we had not got to do since before my brother had moved in with us…and the mouse got caught!