Weekly Wrap-Up: Housing Crisis

This has been a crazy, nutso, stressful, only made it through because we depended on the Lord kind of week (well, technically two weeks since I didn't write a wrap-up last week). After my grandfather's funeral last week, Ava stayed with my folks for an extra night. I decided to spend the rest of the week fully devoting our time to Lukas' Bible quizzing competition, which was held on Saturday. He (uh-hem, WE) worked extremely hard to prepare for this. He knew going into it that he had to score 85% to qualify for the regional quiz meet. He did it! He is thrilled, and so are we. All his hard work paid off. Of course, we told him in advance that his hard work had already paid off, but he wanted to qualify for the regional quiz so much. There's something cool about competing at Mount Vernon Nazarene University when you're 9. 

After the Bible quiz, we brought one of Lukas' buddies home with us, and, later in the afternoon, two more came over for a sleep-over. It was a very loud evening, but it was a blessing for Lukas to be able to share a fun night with three of his chums before we move. Unfortunately, during the sleepover, we got a call from our realtor telling us that the house we were planning to rent has so much water damage that they're not even sure anyone is going to be able to live in it for a very long time...maybe never! That's not the kind of news you want to hear 7 days before your moving date. The house had extensive water damage. We were back to square one.

That means that we spent three days of this week looking for a place to live rather than packing as we should have been. We went to Coshocton on Monday and saw four houses. Two were given to someone else before we could blink, one looked like it had been hit by a hurricane inside and out and the fourth one, while being a perfectly nice house, we wouldn't figure out a way to make it work for our family no matter how hard we tried. We spent Tuesday on the internet and phone. 

So that this is in chronological order, I'll digress for a moment to say that Ava made blueberry muffins on Tuesday evening. Someone had given us a mix. I helped her to measure the milk, and she did the rest. I'm not quite ready to let her handle the oven, but she poured, mixed, scooped the batter in the tin and served the muffins herself. She was so proud of herself, and I was proud of her. She is loving learning her way around a kitchen!

Back to the housing crisis...On Wednesday, we drove all the way back to Coshocton (90 minutes) to see one house. That's right. JUST one house.  I was well past pessimism at this point since we, not being super picky people, should have found a house rather easily as far as I was concerned. Being a good example to my children was something I wasn't really thinking about. I was thinking about wasted gas and time and the fact that we had driven by the house and I didn't love it on the outside. I was not behaving pleasantly, to say the least. 

I kept reminding myself that the Lord was in control, and He repeatedly showed me that He was, but I was grumpy...right up to the moment we walked into the back door of "the" house. RELIEF!!! The landlord was painting the kitchen, which is so, so, SO much better than my current kitchen (big deal for a home cook). The hard wood floors were gorgeous. The rooms are large. There are two full baths, one of which is on the first floor which is exactly what we wanted. The four bedrooms are ideal because Eric can have an office. It. was. CLEAN. Nothing was obviously in disrepair. The landlord was genuinely nice and didn't give me the willies. The Lord had a plan, and He finally revealed it to us! I had to spend just a little time asking for forgiveness for my less than stellar attitude.

With all that hoopla going on, we moved our moving date to next weekend, so I decided to do some school with the kiddos the past two days. We didn't attack anything new or advanced, but they worked diligently and got a lot done each day. Ava's reading seems to have regressed a little, but I have to admit that's my fault a little. I haven't exactly been diligent about having her read to me in the past week and a half. As much as she loves Dr. Seuss, The Cat and the Hat was not making her happy!

We're studying the book of Samuel in our Bible study time for school, which is ideal right now as we're preparing for Lukas to compete at the Regional Bible Quiz in May. it's great review for his 9 month study of I and II Samuel. Ava is studying subtraction, and Lukas is studying division. We'll dig into new units after the move and focus on review for the next week or two. 

The fact that I have taken time to write this might make you think that I have all the packing done around here, but I don't. I better skedaddle and get a move on. Ava's bedroom awaits my trash bags. Um...you know what I mean. 

I hope your week was filled with highly educational moments. Our children learned that we pray a lot when we're under stress. That's a pretty outstanding lesson, don't you think? It's better than anything acadamia has to offer.

That's a wrap on this week's happenings. For more creative ideas, words of wisdom and general info about the ins and outs of homeschooling, visit Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.