The new normal

A small sample of our day to day existence...

Why oh why can't all books be a vailable on Kindle? This is "A Child's History of the World".  I remind myself that I feared that he would never read, and that I was told that he would have to learn Braille.  He is doing so well, and most of the time we use e-books, but sometimes my heart aches when he cannot just take a book and curl up on his bed.

This Sunday Pastor Cassidy preached about Bartimaeus, the blind man who called out "Son of David, have mercy on me!"  It was a beautiful sermon. I suppose on some emotional level I will always struggle with that passage, and Jean will calmly tell me: "But I am not blind.  Blind people cannot see."  Which is true, I suppose, 20/200 is a lot better than nothing.

Here Jacques is building a model ship, and Martinus is completely absorbed.

 The late afternoon sunlight in this kitchen is so beautiful.  The owners of this kitchen have told us that they are planning on moving back into their home in May 2013, so we will have to start looking for a new place to live.  Three months (yikes) till we leave to visit home for 8 weeks, and when we come back it will be February.  It is almost impossible to think that I am going to do all that - pack, leave for 2 months, come back, pack, look for a house, buy a house, pack and move.  On top of everything that happens anyway, every day. But we have survived worse. Much worse.  (Despite all that packing, I am sure that we will not be done by the time the movers arrive.)

For everyone that wondered what the twins do while we homeschool.  They clean, of course.

 This is Jean drawing a car for a change, he usually only draws dinosaurs.  He wanted to add color, so I sorted the pencils into colors and wrote the names of the colors on the paper.  I studied four years to become an Occupational Therapist, and not for nothing!

Apart from clever adaptations in and around the house, my children also have very good three point pincer grips on their pens and markers. 

Melva took a break from knitting and baked an amazing cheesecake this weekend, from one of the Cook's Illustrated cookbooks.  The only thing marginally "healthy" about it was that the eight eggs were all organic...

(Before moving to Texas, I had this vague notion that I should be able to make something that Americans would like, and I baked a cheesecake from Jamie Oliver's cookbooks on several occations to ensure that I could whip it up as soon as we have our first guests over.  Then I could not find any digestive biscuits for the crust when we arrived here.  It turns out that they like brownies much better, I have not seen them eat cheesecake except when we serve it.)

That is it, more or less.  Just a little glimps. Very different, and yet the same.