Christmas in July (7/7-7/9)

We made an adjustment to our summer daily schedule this week.  I'm now scheduling one big project each day for the afternoon.  In the morning, the kids get up and I make a list of what they need to get done for the morning and a deadline for when it needs to be done.  Workbooks, some reading, a few chores, and suddenly it's lunchtime.  This seems to be working pretty well for us, and the kids like having all their stuff done in the morning.

Jonathan being crafty.

The beginning of our week, our big project was to do some Christmas crafts.  Every year at Christmas, we have tons of projects and crafts that we want to do but we end up running out of time to get them done.  So this year we had our first ever Christmas in July craft days on Monday and Wednesday.

Emily working on a
Christmas craft.

Benjamin likes penguins.

Abigail is busy working.

Monday, we set up five different crafts in stations around the table.  Emily and Jonathan can pretty much figure out the instructions, which left me free to help Abigail and Benjamin.  Ben helped with a couple things, then was happy to go play with other stuff.  Abigail made a few, then got tired of gluing.  Emily and Jonathan sat and worked until it was time to clean up for dinner.

One of the picture clues
from FHE.

Monday night was Family Home Evening and Jay was in charge of the lesson.  He took close up pictures of lots of things around the house on his phone.  The kids had my phone and he would text them a picture.  They had to go find what it was, take a picture, and send it back to him.  It was hysterically funny listening to them whispering and giggling as they figured out the pictures.

Tuesday we went to the free movie at the Palladium, which was The Pirates: Band of Misfits.  The two older kids enjoyed it, but it was a little over the heads of the younger two.  Oh well-- it was free!

Starting the transformation.

In the afternoon, it was a little stormy, so we didn't head to the pool.  Instead
we started painting the master bedroom.  Good-bye to the ugly brown!  Jay is the master painter and got two walls finished by the evening.  The rest will get done another day.

Abby and Jonathan and the
mutant ninja
gingerbread men.

Wednesday started with workbooks and chores, then we did more of our Christmas in July crafts.  We had some to finish from Monday and two new ones.  Ben was starting to come down with the crud that Jonathan and I had, so he didn't do much.  Emily and I set up a snowman assembly line and worked away.  Jonathan and Abigail realized that some of the gingerbread men weren't cut correctly and made an army of mutant ninja gingerbread men!

Emily working on her
snowman assembly line.

Early dinner, gymnastics, baths, bed finished off our Wednesday and this part of Christmas in July.