Easy day

I think I'm a little tired from our visit to Tennessee this weekend. (Between the headache and allergy head.) There has been snow on the roads for weeks. Every weekend we planned to visit our newest grand daughter…fresh snow would cover the roads over the mountain. Well, 5-7 March finally cleared up and we were off to the races. Isabella is a beautiful little angel. Her parents did a good job.

I slept in a bit today so we got started later than usual. And I’m a little foggy in my head. Maybe I have allergies or something. So today started out with the normal topics and we scraped keyboarding, journal, and art...so it was an easy day.

We did devotion first. Today was International Women’s day. It talked about ordinary women who made history. One of those women was Ruth from the bible. Had Ruth not stayed with her mother-in-law history would have been different. Ruth met Boaz and married. They had a son named Obed and he had a son named Jessie. Jessie’s son’s name was David, King of Israel. And of course out of David’s line came the most important person of all - Jesus. **Side note - This should encourage all of my female followers. Keep doing your ordinary things and I’ll keep doing my “mundane” things and we’ll sit back and watch where God uses us. Because He does use all of His children to do his will.

Then we did the Purpose Driven life. We are ¾ of the way through the book. Today’s title was “Shaped for Serving God.” We were all made to serve God. God crafted us for a specific ministry. He gave us the abilities, interests, talents, gifts, personalities, and life experiences for his glory. Rick Warren used an acrostic for the word shape. S = Spiritual gifts, H = heart, A = Abilities, P = Personality, E = Experience. SPIRITUAL GIFTS are gifts that are given to only believers and they cannot be earned. We don’t get to choose them and not everyone has the same gifts. How boring and unproductive would that be? They are to benefit others. Imagine if someone you know sits on their gift. The church body gets cheated and it hurts God’s plan. It’s easy to become dissatisfied with our gifts so try to remember who gave you that gift. There must be some reason he gave it to you. HEART is what you love or are passionate about. Basically what motivates you or what you have interests in. (**Who knew I would be a teacher? I know I am serving God. Not with my “gift of intelligence “rather, my gift of patience with God’s child.)

Then we did a math lesson called “Time Flies.” Yes it does; when you try to do THAT math lesson. It wasn’t a lesson about telling time. It was MUCH MORE COMPLEX. I think I disliked that more than fractions. There was a table showing 60 seconds = 1 min, 60 minutes = 1 hour, and so on. Then there was a question saying Sue ran for 12 min 13 seconds, Bob ran 5 min 31, what’s the time difference? Ok now subtract 31 from 13. You can’t. You have to take one from the minute’s column and add 60 seconds to 13 for a total of 73 seconds. Okay, easy enough. The difference is 6 min 42 seconds. Then we had to convert 96 minutes 1 hour 36 minutes. Then it started asking about work times. Phil worked from 6:15 am to 5:45, how many hours did he work? (Back in my military days, I would say a normal day, but that answer wasn’t available.) It took us through so many steps to finally reach 11 hours and 30 minutes. (Room spinning.) Then it taught JD a cute tip to remember what months have 31 days in them. Make a fist. See the knuckles and the valleys between the knuckles? Start with the index knuckle: Jan (index), Feb is the valley, Mar (middle), Apr is the valley, May (ring), June is the valley, July (pinkie), Aug (back to the index knuckle), Sept is the valley, Oct (middle), Nov is the valley, and finally Dec (ring knuckle). This helped with the questions like: A project starting 30 Oct and ending 5 days later. What day would that be? (It was quite a site to see both of us doing knuckle, valley, knuckle, valley. The answer is 3 Nov. JD did something amazing today. I asked him how he knew the answer but it was sort of foggy. I’ll try to explain the word problem. “The conference began at 8:30 am. It lasted 5 hours and 45 minutes. What time did the conference end?” JD added the start time to the total conference time, 8:30 + 5:45 = 13:75 When you convert that it’s 14:15. Then he said the answer was 2:15 pm. (Now for those non-military folks out there 2:15 is said 1415 (14, 15) hours. This amazed me that he figured out military time.) I said how did you know 14:15 was 2:15? He said, “Its past 1200.” (Confused about the explanation but amazed nonetheless.) So I told him some other common times he should know. 0745 hours is school start time. We eat lunch at 1115 hours. School ends between 1300 hours and 1400 hours. Dinner is 1800 hours. Bedtime is 2130 hours. It was a long lesson but ended successfully when I told him he cracked the secret military time code. (He was proud of himself and said, “Do you think daddy will be proud?” I said, “Of course he will.”

After a five minute break I gave JD his comic book to complete for both the journal lesson and art combined. He is extremely dependant on my opinions and suggestions when it comes to creativity. He stalled out with the comic book and I didn’t want to argue with him. The beginning stages of another migraine headache were growing in my head after lunch so told JD he might have writers block and that we would work on it later in the week. Then I called school closed for the day and went and lay down. I made a deal with him though. That after I lay down he would get his spelling words. I took the 5th grade spelling list and picked out 15 four letter words. (None of the ones I was thinking about during the “Time Flies” math lesson were in there…just joking.) I did a spelling pretest on him and he knows how to spell 10 of the 15 already. So JD and Jeff worked on sentences together. After they finish JD said, “That was fun.” Jeff overheard this and suggested JD and Jeff do spelling word sentences every Monday.

So that was our easy day…now I will go rest my mind.