Day Trip to Houston

A few of my former Continental family were getting together in Houston and were encouraging me to go. I wasn't sure about it, but decided to make a quick day trip and take Baylie with me.

We drove to Greenville because it was a nonstop flight to Houston. The boys were camping. We stayed up too late and then had to get up at 3 a.m. to head to the airport.

We had no trouble with the flight and made it to Houston. When we got off the plane and were walking through the airport, I heard my name! Such a surprise! It was David Knighton who had a connection. It was great to see him!

Cynthia Noriega picked us up from the Marriott and we went and picked up Francisca True. Francisca had flown in from Brazil to pick up her Optavia order. That was the main reason we were all getting together. Then Cynthia did us the favor of driving by our Houston home. It was smaller than I remembered and had No Trespassing signs in three places. I like our current home better.

Lorena Martin was in town from Ecuador for a CTO conference so we made a quick stop by a Denny's where her group was having lunch. It was so great to see these coworkers. The time we spent working together was such a beautiful time.

Cynthia, Lorena, Me, Francisca

Then we met Sandy at a great place in the Woodlands where they grow their own herbs and the food is very fresh. I can't remember the name of it, but it was delicious! I got the salad!

It was so wonderful to spend time with these sweet friends that I hadn't seen in so long. It was like no time had passed. We reminisced about the good old days of international Continental. We hope to have a reunion in the fall.

We took a little shopping spree to TJ Maxx and then Baylie wanted to get some kolaches to take home. Kolaches are popular in Houston and can't be found in Columbia. I did Google and find one an hour and a half away.

Afterwards, Cynthia took Baylie and me to Old Town Spring. I had hoped to swing by the temple, but it was too far and there was too much traffic. The suburbs have changed a lot and are a lot more crowded than I rememberd. There aren't as many trees. I'm glad we didn't move back.

Old Town Spring hadn't changed much. It is still a fun, quaint little place to shop or eat. We bought some frozen tamales to take home to Columbia.

We saw some pretty school sports cars.

We also saw crawdads!

We had originally planned to spend the night at the hotel with Fran, but the flights were way better to fly home the same night. It was a whirlwind trip, but so much fun. I'm glad we decided to go. It was a lot of fun!

Passover & Easter 2023

Easter really snuck up on me this year. I'm not sure why, but all of a sudden, it was Easter week. We weren't decorating eggs until Saturday and I don't like to hunt for them on the Sabbath so we decided to do Easter celebrations before the actual egg decorating. 

We set up the table with their baskets and goodies. 

I had ordered some egg tokens so we put those in plastic eggs and hid them. We put jelly beans in others and hid those in the kids' bedrooms.

Baylie woke up, walked over the eggs in her room and laid on the couch without even noticing the decorated table!

Jalen woke up about 30 minutes later and immediately noticed that Easter had happened. He was upset that we forgot to plant jelly beans to have them grow into lollipop suckers. Whoops!

That night the elders joined us for a Passover dinner and Easter egg decorating. I fully recognize the irony of eating a Passover dinner while decorating Easter eggs with the Mormon missionaries. That's how we roll!

David takes his decorating very seriously. He is always still decorating when the rest of us are finished.

But the finished products are always masterpieces.

My favorite thing is still to use my egg spinner. It's so fun!

Elder Allen and Elder Bahr had f un decorating.

Jalen was very creative this year.

Baylie (half way through a hairdo).

I was proud of my eggs!

We sent the elders home with their eggs and an Easter basket full of candy.

We ran out of time to take our traditional porch Easter picture. This is the best we got this year.

Aldi had tulips on sale. I love tulips.

The Andersons joined us for Easter dinner. It's always fun having friends over for special occasions.

Jalen and David were going to make a Greek boat from ice cream as a school project so we decided to add it to our Easter festivities. 

We added whipped cream for waves.

A friend shared these beautiful pictures of Christ as a black man. Representation matters and these are beautiful.

We had a beautiful Easter. Sunday was focused on the Savior and all week long we had read of the last week of his life thanks to Wendee Wilcox Rosborough's book. We love this book.

Adventures in Home Schooling! (January - April 2023)

Without going into great detail, several things happened at PACE this year that led us to the decision to homeschool Jalen. I never thought I would be a homeschooler. In fact, I was not a fan of homeschooling in general. But homeschooling has proven to be an amazing experience for Jalen, for me, and for our whole family.

There is a lot of support for homeschooling in South Carolina. The primary courses are reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. We are using The Good & the Beautiful for ELA and science. The creater of this curriculum is LDS, but the curriculum is non-denominational Christian. It teaches traditional parts of speech, including diagramming, and incorporates art and poetry. I love it. The science lessons have lots of experiments. For math we are using Singapore which I have liked. For social studies we are using The Story of the World, which is a whole-world approach, which I also like a lot. It also has a lot of hands-on projects. In addition to this, we have been working on times tables, days of the week, months of the year, what holiday comes in what month, Roman numerals, how to use thee/thou/thy, and other things that Jalen needed to have reinforced. It's been nice to be able to customize the learning to him and what he needs.

One of the things we've done for science is Mark Rober's Crunch Lab Kits. They have been so much fun and Jalen builds them together with David. They teach STEM principles. Mark Rober is LDS and was a scientist for NASA.

The first project was a disk launcher.

Next there was a coin spinner.

Then a trip wire.

They even set a trap for Baylie!

We built a volcano.

He did a diorama of the Nile River.

Built an Egyptian pyramid from sugar cubes.

We tried to make eggshell geodes, but they didn't work very well because they broke.

Our rock candy sugar crystal creation was much more successful.

But we had trouble getting it out of the jar!

It was still tasty though!

We went to a rock shop so Jalen could see a variety of rocks. He was fascinated!

He bought a geode and we brought it home to break it open.

It was beautiful inside!

Brother Harris brought him over a whole bunch of rocks! 

We did some reading outside.

He did some Chinese calligraphy.

He made "Phonecian" pita bread.

He made an Egyptian death mask. First he cut out strips of newspaper.

Then he dipped them in a glue/water mixture and pasted them onto a balloon.

It was a bit messy!

He covered half of the balloon. We let it dry in between layers and did about three layers.

After it dried, we popped the balloon. David helped him cut out the back from cardboard and glue the mask to that. Jalen then spray painted everything gold.

The final step was to paint in details to create his finished mask. It turned out really cool!

He made a chariot.

And we burned incense.

We made a tasty creation to study the layers of soil.

Doing math.

We went to the temple to do baptisms and then to a Greek restaurant.

Greek salad

Gyro!

He made a wind gauge.

We did an evaporation experiment and learned that water only evaporates when the lid is off the jar.

We made a rain gauge just in time for some heavy storms.

We made rain.

I made a memory game of the Greek gods to help him learn who they were and what they did.

The adventure continues and we are all loving home school so much!