Pre-Christmas Vacation!

I mean this when I say it- It's so hard for me to take time off from school! I'm not saying I don't have days that I wake up and don't want to "do" school. I'm saying I very rarely give in to it. I'm a dedicated homeschooling mama and I like getting our days done. I can very easily turn into a box checker and a day counter- and let that be the driving force behind our school days. Typically I like to complete 20 days per month so that we can be done with school by the end of May. Let's just say that is not happening this year!

Even with our recent move, I only took a few days off- the day of our closing and the Monday following. I'm a school Nazi, I tell you!

But I just had to take some time off before Christmas. It felt like the season was slipping by It is slipping by, with only four days til the big day! And I haven't even watched It's A Wonderful Life yet! It's just wrong.

So I've lightened our school load the past few weeks so we could slow down and try to enjoy the season more.

We've recently been studying architecture and how appropriate and how perfect to build our very own gingerbread house- from scratch! We actually decided to make it a gingerbread castle. We designed it on graph paper, cut out the templates, and used them to cut the dough perfectly. I used the dough recipe on this web site and found it to be excellent!

I was beyond excited that our gingerbread castle actually stood! We used pint sized mason jars to hold the walls up and then laid the roof across them. I didn't use the recipe on the web site I shared, just because it involved egg whites and I knew my kids wouldn't keep their fingers out of the frosting. So I used a bag of confectionery sugar and about a cup of shortening and milk to get the right consistency.

Leftover gingerbread dough means- gingerbread men of course! Isabelle's shirt is appropriate- Cookie Eating Champ!

Wow, is that me? Yes, once in a while I make an appearance on the blog. I was adding frosting rosettes to the walls of our castle. I also made Ionic columns, the "female" style columns of Greece with "pleats" and "curls" at the top. You know, making the school link and all.

In the end, I think our castle weighed about 25 pounds worth of sugar!

The kids have been doing lots of painting lately and Isabelle specifically asked to do our art, "you know, the one in the book", meaning ARtistic Pursuits of course. Which frequent readers know I love, but I have to confess- we have only done three lessons this year. So we did lesson 4 on Giotto and our assignment was to make a fresco and paint expressions on the people in it- as Giotto is one of the first artists to do so. We made frescoes last year with plaster of Paris, but this one used spackling paste- which we had plenty of! I got in on the action too- guess which one is mine?

We've also been reading from A Little House Christmas and I pretty much cry in every chapter. Caleb just grins at me, but tells me I make him nervous when I cry- even though he knows I'm happy. And then we watch Little House Christmas movies- and I cry some more.

It's about time I watched some It's a Wonderful Life and did some more crying! That's what this pre-Christmas vacation is all about, after all!