All In

I've been getting ready to hold early morning seminary with 15 students at my house.  After much thought my partner and I decided that we wanted to created the best learning environment that we could.  That meant sitting at a table.  I know, I know.  I can hear the groans now....especially the ones I already heard from my own kids.  Couches induce comas which means no participating which means no learning.  Now, I know my kids learned a lot while they were in seminary on couches, but I'm elevating the learning.  We've got a vision for the class and a scripture to go with it.  This vision is all about the students learning how to be learners and learning the gospel will be the natural byproduct of that.  

Now all I needed was a classroom.  I'm a function girl.  I take function over form almost every time.  I'm not obsessed with having a nice showy house.  I don't have all the latest trends and fashions, so it was easy for me to turn my formal dining room into a classroom.  Surprisingly my children are a little less sold on the idea of a permanent looking classroom in our house.  

There are some things I am doing so that a majority of the seminary stuff can be put away each morning when class is over.  I needed more table space so I ordered a "training" table on-line that will T my current table to accommodate all the students - that will be taken down each day.  I'm making 2 display boards that can be folded up and put away each day.  I decided to mount my magnetic dry erase board to the wall because it will be easier that way.  My goal is to get the kids digitized so I will also be using it to project onto.  We are going to use it for projecting the hymns,  scripture mastery, scripture squeeze activities and whatever else.  Here's where I start singing a little song called, "I love technology."

I am going all in for seminary.  I would have liked to have finally painted the wall behind the board, but....ain't nobody got time for dat.  Oh well.  I also discovered that the mirror that was previously hanging there provided lots of light and trickery about how big the room was.  It is looking a bit blah in there now.  I just may get crazy and paint because I'm not digging the bland.  But, I'm hoping that with the 2 display boards that I'm covering in a gray chevron print (Emma is so mad that I'm doing "that stupid overdone Ut and Az fake girl mormon print")  At least that is the only chevron print in my house.  I don't own a single shirt or skirt or anything else.  Haha.  That's funny.  It's like when her friend (who isn't a member) needed to borrow a skirt for church a couple weeks ago and she said "I'm really praying that you or your mom jumped on the mormon bandwagon and own a maxi skirt."  Too funny.  I can say that yes, I have jumped on the Mormon maxi skirt wagon for 1 reason only.  Long skirts are much more acceptable than walking around in yoga pants or sweats all the time.  However, the chevron print - gag me with how crazy people are getting with it, but I do love it in small doses.

After the boys grumbled through helping me hang the massive and heavy board, they discovered that it has faint little gray dots on it to help you write in a straight line.  Do you know what else those dots are good for?  Yep, playing dots.  

We had a little extra fun while we were playing dots.  We watched Nacho Libre a couple of weeks ago so we have been quoting lines from it ever since.  

"How you like?  My.  Stretchy pants?"

We started out playing with the entire board until the kids finally concurred with me that it was too large and made a smaller playing area.   We got a little crazy with the stretch pants line.  We kept saying it a million times.  Jared even took to clenching his butt cheeks.  We were dying and pleading for him to please stop.  Ain't nobody want to see that.....especially me doing that.  Emma informed me that I had a saggy mom butt and that she is scarred for life just having to see me in my swim suit.  Nice.  I'm telling you that you can't have any pride when you have kids.  Butt.  But.  I'm holding onto my self esteem the best I can and will use this information to further scar and torment my kids when needed.  You can bet that when my kids are being especially annoying, I will be clenching my butt cheeks in front of them AND their friends. Well, maybe not the friends.  I think that's probably considered creepy and I could get arrested.  

Instead of coloring in the squares that we won, we wrote our - my mind is blank - I can't think of the word for names that we made up - whatever - the letter of our fake names.  I think I may have the beginnings of dementia - which my family would concur with.

I started off just writing "M" for mom and decided that was boring and I would rather be "W."  Emma decided that it stood for "word."  I was thinking more along the lines of Wonder Woman, but Word stuck.  Emma was "G" for......not G like as in G, but G as in Gandalf.  Jared was "NL squared" for Nacho Libre squared and Ethan was "SP" for stretch pants.

While we were downstairs having a good time playing, Jordyn was up in her room creating this:

I love it!  The desk chair.  Awesome sauce.  The desk and everything on it.  Awesome.  This girl makes my heart smile.

When I went upstairs just now to snap a picture of it, I found this:

The girl goes all in when she gets an idea.  She has a fashion store and spa complete with money, coupons, and a punch card.....oh, and a client.

Speaking of "all in."  For the last week Ethan has been saying "picky hicken" all the time.  He uses it most when Jordyn is refusing to eat something.  I finally asked him to explain what it meant.  He said a hicken is someone who only likes only 10 things.  A picky hicken is someone who likes only 5.  After Ethan explained this to me Jared started busting up and asked if I wanted to know where it came from.  Well, yes!  Apparently while at Chick-fil-A a few days prior Ethan saw a sign that read

picy

hicken

He was intrigued.  He decided that it must be some new food and he had to try it.  Well, the first letters were covered when he saw the sign for spicy chicken.  Luckily Jared saved him from trying to order this awesome sounding new food.  Oh my goodness I laughed so hard.  It wasn't even picky it was picy.  

Next time, maybe, "we will talk of hhhholy things."