Mary's NaNoWriMo

Mary just won NaNoWriMo! (That's National Novel Writing Month) I offered her a month off from narration, copywork, dictation, and any other writing assignments if she wanted to try it. She enjoyed filling in the novel planning workbook during October. Toward the end of October, we looked at the word count recommendations on the NaNoWriMo website and set a goal of 4000 words for her, with a daily goal of 175 words. That was more words than she'd ever written at one time. On November 1, she was a little intimidated by the blank page in front of her, so Scott helped her with an opening line. After that, there was no looking back, and we were both surprised that her first day's writing produced over 200 words! Some days she knew exactly what she wanted to write, and some days there was a lot of pencil tapping and sighing, but she stuck with it. We talked about her novel between writing sessions, about ways to get unstuck (just skip over or sum up the boring parts), about the relationships between characters. We noticed how other authors handled the passage of time in our read-alouds. Tonight we uploaded the first 4000 words of her novel into the NaNoWriMo word count validator and celebrated her win. She wants to keep working on her novel until she finishes the story, since 4000 words barely introduced the main characters and problem. Scott asked her if she learned anything about writing and her first response was, "I learned that writing can be exciting if it's something I want to write about!" I thought that was a great lesson to have learned.

Master bath

George the tile guy offered to trade jobs with me for a while. Under his supervision, I cut a hole in one of the tiles for our shower (the top hole in the picture) and set six tiles in the shower. He hasn't done any Barbie hairdo's yet, though.

Here are more pictures of the master bath.

Audrey's Wedding Cake

Audrey created this lovely wedding cake while Mary and I were doing our Greek yesterday. Each tier is separated by a layer of blackberry jelly, and the cake is topped with a smiling Inuit couple, also whimsically decorated with blackberry jelly.

Jaguar Girls

Mary put together a diorama of a jaguar habitat as part of her unit on Central America, and to fulfill part of a Brownie Try-It badge requirement. She made the jaguar out of Sculpey and drew the spots on with black Sharpie marker. The display shows the jaguar eating a peccary in the jungle, and a road nearby to represent the shrinking habitat. Audrey is not part of the diorama, but she had a good time leaping out of a tree (dining room chair) to attack a peccary (couch pillow). Fortunately, Mary used washable marker for Audrey's jaguar disguise.

Renovation update

It started to look a lot more finished when they got the walls up and the doors and trim done.




Here's the progress in the girls' bathroom.

Bike riding in the park

A couple weeks ago, before it got really cold, I wrestled the kids' bikes into the back of the car and we drove to the park for the morning. Mary never rode much in Florida, and our neighborhood is too hilly for a novice bike-rider, but the park has a nice flat paved trail where you don't have to worry about cars. Mary rode back and forth and got better at starting and stopping, except when she panicked and stopped by jumping off or falling over. Audrey met a little boy her age, and the two of them explored a ditch at the edge of the park and rolled down the big hill together.

It's Beepin' Cold Outside!

Scott's car is complaining about the weather, too. When he was driving to Lowe's his car suddenly beeped and displayed the temperature: 37 degrees. Same thing on the way home. So he looked it up, and found out from other Mini owners that the Mini is programmed to alert the driver whenever the temperature drops below 38 degrees. He hasn't checked the car manual yet, because the car is outside and it's beepin' cold out there!