I've occasionally seen a magical device known as a Round Tuit.

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That's how much I got written when I started this entry a week and a half ago! I still haven't gotten the Ultimate Round Tuit, but a few little ones keep popping up from under the furniture and the back of the fridge. One just poked it's head up from behind my computer monitor and said perhaps it's time to get a Round Tublogging.

I have two major deadlines this Friday:

1. the registration forms for my students entering the Spring Music Festival are due, meaning I have to have them in the mail by tomorrow, meaning I have been busy doing last-minute finalization of details and forms tonight. That's done--I've licked the stamp, licked the envelope, and gargled with peppermint oil to get rid of the taste! :-)

2. I have to replace around a hundred of my eBay listings, as there is a major price increase going into effect on my saddle pads on Friday. The Canadian dollar has been good for Talena the Consumer, not so good for Talena the Business Owner with an American-Based Supplier. And, it follows, not so good for the customers of said business. Oh, well. C'est la vie.

Besides these two "small" projects, I have been nearly consumed lately doing research on who the "sons of God" mentioned in Genesis 6 and a few places in the New Testament are. It's been a fascinating study, and it's kind of shaken up my established notions of a few things. But it's been good. Anyone curious for a peek at what I mean can visit Michael Heiser's website and click on "The Divine Council."

The temperatures this week have been hovering around -40°. That's the one temperature I don't have to clarify between "F" and "C"! It just means FREAKING COLD no matter how you measure it! Yesterday, in some places close to here, it was -47°C in the morning, and colder than -55°C with the wind chill. Thanks to this little bit of old-fashioned winter weather, our van has decided not to start. Period. It won't even turn over. We boosted it yesterday, and it begrudgingly woke up from hibernation to do its job, but today the lazybones was back to Neverland. Jason thinks it might just be the battery. He's going to replace it, but that presents two challenges: 1) how to get to Canadian Tire to buy a new battery when our only working vehicle is dead in the snowbank, and 2) how to change a battery out in Arctic-like temperatures in mittens, or without going into hypothermia.

Needless to say, we've had a semi-cozy week indoors. I say "semi", because although we have a full load of wood (Praise the Lord!), the only way we could keep our whole drafty house warm in weather like this would be to set it on fire--and while that would make things extra-toasty in here for a while, the life-expectancy of the heat would be a little less than the life-expectancy of the snow and cold. Not to mention, we would then be shelterless. (I guess we'll just keep layering up in our sweaters and turtlenecks.)

Despite my current heavy workload, I have been managing to take little "sanity breaks" and do a little scrapbooking here and there. While my full gallery (which really only has a fraction of my actual layouts in it, due to the work required to scan in my volumes of paper layouts) usually has a pretty current inventory for those who would like to see what I'm up to, I thought I would leave you with this one. I scrapped it yesterday--while the photos are over two years old, the journaling I wrote yesterday was representative of both then and now. (Jude's been fighting a cold this week, and it has made for some long days.)


Oh, that Tuit's back. He brought his friend, Round Tuworking. Guess that means it's time to go.

Miss you, friends! I'd love to hear how you're staying warm in this! Hugs!

Here are some recent pieces of Jude's artwork:


Just another milestone to mark.

Sigh. I have pretty much resigned myself to the fact that now that I am home schooling, blogging is going to be relegated (is that a real word?) to a weekend activity. However, I've been meaning to post these photos of our new "classroom" for a week, now. The baseboard is still not on, but other than that, it looks great! And I love having everything in one room--learning tools, craft and art supplies, and desks! The kids love it, too. They often go in there as soon as they wake up and start doing puzzles and colouring. So cool.


I said I would explain why Jude is now home schooling, so here goes. One of the main reasons we decided to put him into school this year, instead of home schooling him from the get-go, was to help him learn to focus in a large group setting, and to help him to gain confidence in new situations, meeting new friends, etc. Unfortunately, when we had his parent/teacher interview a week before we left on holidays, we found out from his teacher that he was still not adjusting well to kindergarten--he would often be teary at school (I imagine in frustration), did not participate well in group activities like singing, etc., and was always trying to figure out what would be "next." He is the type of kid that likes to be feel like he knows what's going on, so being ushered from one activity to the next at school was disconcerting for him. Besides this, he had been telling us almost daily since about two weeks in that he didn't like school, and didn't want to go.

After the interview, we finally got him to tell us that it was partly because he didn't feel like he had any friends in his class, and no one would play with him at recess. We encouraged him to ask a couple of other little boys that he was acquainted with and liked to play with him, which he finally did. It seemed to help, but there were still the other issues to deal with.

Jude is young for kindergarten, having just turned 5 in November. The sudden switch to early mornings and a schedule 5 days a week was a little much for him, I think. We decided to home school him for the remainder of this year (something his teacher agreed was a good idea), and re-assess where we are at come summer. I may just continue to home school him into grade one from there, as I was planning to do until about grade 3 with each of our kids, anyway, or we may have him repeat kindergarten this fall. Time, and his maturity level, will tell.

For now, I have been loving the home schooling--it is actually easier, in some ways, because instead of going crazy all morning with little boys fighting with each other out of sheer boredom, or driving me to distraction with questions of "What can we do?!", the whole morning is planned out. The afternoon is when I get my own stuff done, and they get a little more free time to play. And now that I am getting the hang of it, the lesson planning is getting shorter every night. It's been fun to bend my creative brain around fun ways to impart the information we need to cover.

Plus, Jude is still technically enrolled at his school, so we are going to participate in field trips and special class days. Tomorrow morning we are going on a field trip to the hospital.

Other than the zoo of getting all the kids out the door early again, I'm actually looking forward to it!

• 2 adults, 3 kids
  
• 21 days total
• 9 travel days
• 56 hours of driving
• 11 cities: Edmonton, Dallas, Memphis, Nashville, Hot Springs, Little Rock, Ft. Worth, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Whitecourt, Red Deer
• 4 Hotel stays (all of which had swimming pools, but we only had time to use two of them)
• 1 performance
• 3 quads, multiple uses
• 2 Scrabble games
• 1 turkey dinner (not on Christmas!)
• Many friends and family members
• 1 continued New Year's tradition (of the seven years of our marriage, we have rung in the New Year with Mark and Colleen for at least three, possibly four of them now--kind of amazing, considering we have always lived long distances apart)
• 3 job opportunities
• 1 zoo
• 1 gorgeous light-filled experience
  
• Lots of great memories
• 5 people happy to be home again
  

Rick Mercer has long been one of my favourite comedians. AND! He's Canadian. In fact, most of his humour is about Canada. Especially since he now has his own show called the Rick Mercer report.

This video, taken from his show, is one of the most exciting things I've seen in a while.



Want to learn more? Check out their website. ZENN.

I'm kinda speechless that we can only get these in B.C. Hopefully our government wakes up and smells the exhaust fumes soon!

What with the painting and the laundry and the unpacking, today is the first day where I have gotten my act fully together to do a pre-planned, structured day of home schooling. We are on a little break right now, and just before this we had a little "song time." Jude surprised me, but only a little, by wanting to sing a song he made up "on the fly." Usually the songs he "makes up" are closely related to songs he already knows. For example, yesterday he was singing "Oh, Can-a-ba!" and I corrected him, saying, "Sing it properly, please." He said, "This is a different song, not 'Oh, Canada!'" "Oh," I said.

What really surprised me was the poignancy and originality of his most recent composition. It was still fairly "free-form", so while I tried to remember it as accurately as possible, please take this as the closest approximation, with the heart intact, not as a verbatim quote.

My Little Dog Is Gone
By Jude Winters

Oh, my little dog is gone
I wonder where it went?
My little dog is gone,
I miss my little dog.
Why did you have to go?

My little dog went away
When will I see you again?
My little dog is gone
My little dog is gone

We're home again. Back in the frozen north. The very frozen north.

We spent the last few days of our trip around Sylvan Lake and Medicine Hat--more specifically, Eagles Nest Ranch on the edge of the Cypress Hills, which is only a little over an hour north of the Montana border. The whole south of Alberta was experiencing the most lovely chinook--a weather condition which, sadly, never reaches our little Peace River town since we are too far from the Rocky Mountains and too far north besides. While they had a bare skiff of snow and a warm face-caressing breeze on the other extreme of our province, we had another inch or two added to the already-high mounds of white stuff yesterday.

So, because of the extremely sporadic and dial-uppish nature of my internet connection over the last week, I decided to wait until I got home to continue the update of my trip. However, there is a LOT that I missed, so I plan on relaying it in little blurbs throughout the rest of the week. I haven't even uploaded the photos from my camera to my computer yet!

However, for now, I just wanted to say "HI!" I don't even have time to update beyond that. We got home on Friday night, and it didn't take long to discover that Jabin was no longer thrilled about sleeping in the crib, and alone in a room at that, since he had been sharing sleeping quarters with his brothers for three weeks. The only reason we hadn't moved him out of the crib before we left is because we did not have beds to move everyone "up one" into. After Friday night's fiasco, however, we decided to improvise. We moved Jude's and Noah's beds into Jabin's room, and took Jabin's mattress out of the crib and put it on the floor.

The plan is to turn Jude's and Noah's old room into a dressing room/school room, as I will be starting to home school Jude starting tomorrow. (More on that later.) However, that room has been steadily moving up the list of priorities on "rooms-to-be-painted" since we moved in here, and since it was nearly empty, and we had the paint, we (meaning me) decided yesterday that now was the time.

So. I need to go help finish painting it. I start teaching tomorrow, and I need to put my house back in order before my students arrive and try to find the piano under the mess!

Happy New Year, friends!