Barn Full Of Blessings: Our First Week of the 2016-17 School Year....

It finally arrived, our first day. Our traditional big back to school breakfast was offered...chocolate chip muffins, scrambled eggs made to order, sausage, fresh OJ, strawberries, fruit and yogurt

parfaits topped with granola, iced

coffee...basically, everyone's favorites. There was only one problem... Nobody was hungry 😂😂😂. Seriously, Hannah, who'd been talking about her back to school breakfast for weeks, barely ate a muffin. Alrighty, we were off to a good start 😉

Next up, the traditional first day pictures....which were met with a chorus of "now?" "Can't it wait till tomorrow?" "Do I really have to get ACTUALLY dressed, or can I just take it in my pjs?" Hhhmmmmm....keep in mind, it's like 9:30 and they're acting like its the crack of dawn🙄.

We finally get settled in and started on our lessons. Just like we have every school day for all these years, we began by saying the pledge of allegiance to our flag, doing a morning devotion and prayer...or so I thought, until this morning, when we finished and I excused Sarah to go do her lessons. The girls start giggling and inform me that I forgot to ACTUALLY SAY OUR PRAYER (both yesterday and today) which I quickly remedied😅. I guess they weren't the only ones needing to wake up a bit more 😂

Our lessons are going great and the girls are proving to be true to form. Hannah made it thru until today without any meltdowns, but I guess her spelling words were just too much to handle..."F A R M" was fine to write 5 times; matter of fact, I guess it was fine to write 50 times...it was the other dozen or so words that put her over the edge today. So, we erased "F A R M" all but the 5 times I'd asked for it to be written and put her spelling aside. She can finish that up tonight while her sisters are at church. Gracie, of course, had a near heart attack when she saw me start to mark a math problem wrong. So instead, I erased the answers of the 2 or 3 she missed and she re-worked them, correctly this time. I asked her, however, why she had me buy a package of very specific red pens...her answer: "So you can write 100% right here on all my assignments". Oh, of course, my sweet child. Why on earth didn't I think of that 😂

We are doing pioneer studies this year using the Prairie Primer which is based on the Little House on the Prairie books. I've used it in the past with Tess and Sarah for summer studies and loved it, and decided to build our year around it this year for Gracie and Hannah. One thing we learned about today was molasses and how it's processed. Laura Ingalls seemed to have loved molasses as she commented on how tasty it was on top of cornbread and corncakes quite often. Ok, let me just say honestly, some things are just flat out flops and this was one of those things. Thankfully, we didn't spend much time on it, but I think the biggest take away from it was MOLASSES IS NOT VERY TASTY. We had a "pioneer" lunch as though we were traveling across the prairie in our covered wagon. We discussed why we weren't eating freshly prepared foods and how they were preserved. We had corn muffins (admittedly not cooked over a campfire) and we each tried a little molasses on them. We came to the conclusion that butter and honey is MUCH better 😉

All in all our school year is getting off to a good start and as long as I don't try pawning off molasses as a condiment again, I think the girls will happily sit down each day for their lessons 😉