Just A Little Bit of Now

I think I've been slow to blog these last several months, maybe more, because I keep waiting for inspiration.  Well, I give up.  Inspiration isn't happening - the brain is elsewhere occupied.  It will soon be freed from it's current state of growing a baby, but then it will be sleep-deprived and still unable to put forth creative juices.

So I might as well just take a couple of minutes and write down some of the current happenings around here before there are too many of them to remember.

First of all Ben turned 5 in July!  My little Bubba Ben, 5.  Wow!  

He wanted a super-hero party so I did my best to accommodate.  He and his friends had fun running around in their super-hero capes and participating in various training exercises: shooting arrows at balloons, throwing water-balloon bombs off high buildings (chicken coop roof), rescuing kidnapped animals from the tree, and apprehending two masked criminals who were up to no good.

One of his most favorite birthday presents was from Grammie and Pop-Pop in OH.  He loves his Daniel Boone outfit.

The next big event: Sammy's 7th birthday.  On his actual birthday he had a special breakfast, and got to open gifts from family after Daddy got home that night.

Sammy really loves Legos these days, so of course he wanted a Lego party.  Easy enough - a blueberry (his request) Ninjago cake, a couple of fun Lego games: picking up Legos with only a straw and building a race car and competing with others on a ramp in the garage.  They all had a lots of fun!

Our garden this year has been somewhat successful.   We got tons of sugar snap peas - we're still munching on them!  Lots of wonderful different colored carrots.  Heads and heads of romaine and butter-leaf lettuce - we were giving it away!  For the second year in a row our potato crop all but failed.  We were able to enjoy a few of the world's smallest potatoes I've ever seen.  At first it looked like we were going to get a nice crop of corn, but we were forced to pick them early because of a freeze last week.  Unfortunately most were not ripe or sweet enough.  We'll try again next year.

School has been lots of fun this year so far.  We're using My Father's World: Creation to the Greeks.  We started in Gen 1:1 and have moved forward through history, Biblical and secular. We've spent a lot of time studying Egypt and the pyramids.  Today we read about Abram's attempt to fulfill God's covenant by sleeping with Hagar, and the ancient civilizations of the Indus Valley - I am learning SO much! 

  

Did you know that the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia had indoor plumbing and a more advanced sewer system than some modern day cities today?  Or that wealthy homes in the cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa of the Indus Valley had forced air heating and hot showers?  Crazy, I know!  We were taught that ancient civilization, although intelligent enough to erect pyramids and move very large objects that we still can't figure out how, were below us, primitive, etc.  Also note worthy - the Indians of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa wrote an epic that details a global flood with only a man and his three sons surviving (so do many many other world-wide cultures, by the way).

Our version of the Fertile Nile Valley.  Our Nile only split into two rivers as it heads towards the Mediterranean Sea, but the kids didn't mind.

An Egyptian farm using the flooding Nile river to water the crops.

A very tasty stepped pyramid.

Art with Mrs Finney.

Now we're waiting for baby boy to make his appearance.  This is the hardest part - waiting.  It'd be REALLY nice if he'd come this Saturday evening, Sunday anytime, or Monday early morning - Tom's job doesn't have the flexibility that his previous ones have had.  We're going to try some things these next couple of days to see if we can't encourage him to vacate his current premises, but...we shall just wait and see.  My actual due date isn't until the 8th so I'm not late, yet.

That's all for now.  The next time I write something it should be the telling of a little baby boy's birth and how God blessed our family once again.  Until then...