Monday Motivation!

1st row: watching Netflix at hotel, MC disapproves of sofabed-jumping brothers, someone wrote on the wall!, Katie in her bumbo

2nd row: he felt better when floating in the tub, crafts from NeNe, messy school stuff in hotel room, swimming with PaPa

3rd row: Katie loves sitting up by the closet mirror, Tommy proud of his parrot coloring, SJ figured out how to make spit wads without anyone telling him about this concept--a true boy, looking at old photos with NeNe

4th row: a rainbow on daddy's birthday, walking around the waterway after dinner, lunch fun with friends after mass, and my Pretty in Pink girls in their Sunday best!

Another week begins!  We are starting Week 3 of our homeschool year and I'm hoping this will be a much better one than the last, when all members of the family (except the baby and me who had some mild symptoms) were plagued with a yucky stomach virus!  We are still hotel-living at this point.  It looks like there have been two showings for our house so far, and we are going to stay away for now in hopes that it will sell before I need to come back with this crazy, messy crew!  We have been on the road so much this past year, and I am just hoping it's not much longer until we can sell our house and find another here where we can settle back down and not take any road trips for awhile.

I'll do a homeschool update soon, but overall the Mother of Divine Grace program has been a great fit for us this year.  I need the support and accountability, especially with all the upheavals in our life right now.  I love the way I can print out customized weekly checklists with assignments for all the kids!  And I can email my consultant whenever I have questions.  Next week will be my phone consultation, and Mary Clare will have one too for the classes where we've signed up for grading.

We are enjoying seeing my parents a lot, along with our local friends here.  The girls also started back to ballet at their old studio while we are in town.  We have looked at a few houses, one that the girls fell in love with, but we are waiting to see what happens with our Corpus house.  We are entrusting it all to St. Joseph, knowing that he will take care of all of this in God's perfect timing.

We were able to celebrate Steven's birthday as a family last night.  The kids made him banners and we picked up balloons and a little rosary.  We went out to dinner on the Waterway, and then picked up a few special cheesecake slices for us to share!  It was a great night, but I know Steven was exhausted after working all day.  He's back to Corpus tonight and we're just hunkering down, watching way too much TV, and hopefully getting back on track with school tomorrow.

One good thing about being out of town is that I can't have a normal to-do list.  The housekeeping cleans the room if we need it, there is free breakfast down the hall, and I just have to try to keep kids quiet and entertained and stay on top of schoolwork.  It's hard, don't get me wrong, and we've had quite a few minor injuries and kids nearly damaging the hotel room.  One child has a red arm that looks just like a clothes iron, ironically?!?  And we may have left some crayon marks on the wall of our "sick" room next door before we switched rooms (see photo above).  The kids are really getting on each other's nerves by the end of each day.  But I know that keeping our house show-ready with all of us there would be much harder!

I know we will look back on this crazy year and laugh...staying in a cabin while awaiting the baby's arrival, staying at a hotel while the house was on the market, getting a stomach virus on top of it, and the many drives back and forth from Corpus to Houston with all of the children. Our moving plans and Steven's work schedule change by the hour it seems, so we are learning lots about flexibility and patience!  There are so many virtues to practice during this crazy time in our lives!  Please say a prayer for us...and I'll be offering prayers and little sufferings for the intentions of all of you.  Thank you, friends.