We certainly have been enjoying this fall. It is our first fall season in our house as well as the first with Jia Qing! It's all kinds of busy, but we love it.
Our house, despite us living in it for the past 9 months, still has some areas that are not finished. For instance, we do not have a garage. We decided to do the painting to save some money while building and while the inside is painted, there are areas of trim work that have not been done. We have also not painted the outside and the siding is still primer. We were actually going to do that this fall...we went to China instead. So now, it will have to wait until spring, as will some of the grass that we want to plant, extending the garden, and planting more trees. Yes, some of it has been done. But it always takes a while to get it all done.
The kids have been busy in school, although it is a challenge to try and teach 4 different grades at once. I will be honest in saying that I haven't been loving it. It has been so difficult that we switched programs and started using a new curriculum about 3 weeks ago and that is a little bit better. The kids are still learning how to be more independent with school work and since Jia Qing does not know much English, he is starting at the basic levels of vocabulary. However, he is as smart as a whip! Have I said that before? He catches on so easily and he has this drive to keep trying. Russ and I were trying to test some of his math knowledge because we noticed that he is excellent with numbers. He is the age of 2nd grade, but he knew all of his single-digit multiplication tables and was adding and subtracting three-digit numbers. He was so proud when we checked his answers and said, "you're right!" Big smile. Such a kid.
Today, the boys are working diligently with some homemade pumpkin play dough. It's actually salt dough colored orange that has pumpkin pie spice in it. It smells so good! But I had to remind them not to eat it. There is a half cup of salt in the recipe. Still, I'm sure if they did, they would quickly learn not to eat it again.
This weekend, we visited with family that we have not seen in a while, some of whom have not met JQ. My aunt and uncle each had their 70th birthdays so we celebrated them together with a gathering at my mom's house. There was good food but mostly it was nice to catch up with people and see how they are doing. We had the chance to talk about some family history and genealogy (I love that stuff). My aunt was remarking about how young people (us? young?) often have little interest in history but we seem to love it. I have always loved learning history; my dad was a history teacher for a while, too. I think he instilled a love of that into us, as well as a love of reading because we always had books around. I'm trying to teach that to my own kids, too. So far, it could be working! I know they love history; the reading part is coming along. Asher is getting to be a better reader all the time and it's so great to see him sit down with a book and read it out loud to his sister or his dad, all of his own accord.
That's part of our goal here: teaching these kids and instilling in them a sense of the importance of things. Hopefully, it will stick.
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