Parades!! Christmas Children! Thanksgiving!!

This was yet another busy week at the Westervelt house. We had a great time at the end of the week pouring through our new Usborne books. Maddie is particularly interested in The First Encyclopedia of the Human Body She has investigated it from cover to cover, asked questions and requested that we read some parts to her. This is good since the science topic after Christmas is the human body! This was followed closely by Living Long Ago We have many more than that and really love the books as does Maddie.

We tried to have a 4H meeting on Thursday but the 2 boys were sick and another of the girls was recovering so we decided to postpone the meeting for another day! We spent the better part of the week searching down items to go in the shoebox for Operation Christmas Child. Maddie was not quite as gung ho about this as she was last year. I suspect its because she was trying to democratic or diplomatic and said we should do a box for a boy. Its hard enough to get her to focus on boy toys when she is trying to pick something out for a close friend, forget it when its for someone she doesn't know! We did finally get it packed up and delivered it to Abounding Grace church on saturday morning.

Saturday Evening was the Schenectady Holiday Parade. We had a lot of fun carrying our banner. Our particular banner was for the National Guard and they were actually organizing everything behind the scenes. One of them would stop to direct us to the place we were supposed to stand then they would look at our banner and give us a big grin and a "Hey!! You've got ours!". Unfortunately they were not directly behind us which we thought was rather odd. They were sponsoring that particular section of the parade but it was a bit confusing not to have them right there. Then we didn't have any 4H gear to wear so I am quite sure most everyone wondered what the heck we were doing there. Maddie rose to the occasion beautifully. Not only did she have a marvelous time dancing about and waiting for the parade to start but she waved and yelled "Happy Thanksgiving" for most of the parade route. She also managed the entire route with no complaints or getting tired. It was a mile long. Our daily walks here, there and everywhere have apparently got her in shape. She had to walk back to the car too and there was still no complaining. We had fun seeing lots of people we knew on the sidelines.

This week we are doing some very abbreviated schoolwork. Maddie is right on target with her math work but I feel we should be a bit further along in The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and her History book. So we are going to do some work in those. Our main project is going to be working on a Thanksgiving lapbook based on the book Cranberry Thanksgiving. We are of course planning to make pies and help Brian put on Thanksgiving dinner. Maddie is busy planning a centerpiece. We hope you have a good Thanksgiving!!