Order In Chaos

Today is…Monday July 13 2011

We started the day with a Gospel Message, and discussed ways Teancum and Moroni and Helaman fortified their people against an attack:

Not a well thought out Gospel Lesson. In fact, I only just realized that this chapter contains the middle names of all my sons. Writing this blog, at first I thought that the Gospel Lesson could have been so much better had I tied it in to the Nature Learning Activity, finding a scripture about how “God made grains for man” (see below) and so forth.

However, sometimes I find it’s better to just do something than not. Or, as a quote I love states: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.”—And that is the sad mantra of my life. Actually, I like it! It quells the perfectionist tendencies in me and helps me keep what’s important in view. And then, when I look back on the day to make sense of it all, because I made the effort to stick some imperfect Gospel learning in there I am struck again by the awe inspiring words describing three mighty men (after which we have named our sons), working together to fortify their people against destruction. Exactly what I would have my sons work together and strive for—strengthening up each other and those around them, placing strongholds and fortifications against the Destroyer.

And I have the awesome privilege of being their mother. I am so thankful for the patient (and repetitive) teaching of a loving Heavenly Father who teaches me as I try to teach others.

Giant read up on some Nature studies while I reconciled our budget:

After lunch and little ones were sleeping, we learned about Grains:

And we even tried grinding our own flour!:

Okay, not really a big and unusual event in our house. In fact, until I started having issues with my Retsel (and then Retsel’s customer service), we’d grind flour pretty much every week.

But this activity had a picture of a mortar and pestle.

And that was cool.

Giant grabbed the mortar and pestle off the oven where it is kept, ecstatic to have an excuse to play with it:

That took a LOT of work!

We celebrated with some whole wheat buns:

Then I brought up laundry and a robot.

We played around with attaching a button touch sensor to the bot:

Okay, what Giant really wanted to make was a race care with four wheels that could break apart and have guys fix it again.

I didn’t know how to do that.

I didn’t really know how to put on a touch sensor.

But Giant like that idea too, so we went with it.

The boys had a great time making the robot go and stop and go and stop (after DaddyBear helped us figure out the right way to code it):

(Why do I really want to put a dog costume on that bot? …Tomorrow!)

And yes Galoot was madly trying to eat the robot the whole time we were showing it off to Daddy: