Our Friday

Since my sister's family came up to our house last week on Thursday evening, we didn't do any schoolwork last Friday; we won't be doing schoolwork on December 2-3 as we will be at Great Wolf Lodge. Also, my friend scheduled a tour of an alpaca farm for December 4, which means we won't do as much school work that day as we typically do on a Wednesday. If we hadn't done school work today, we would have had twelve consecutive days off, which seemed like an awful lot for Thanksgiving even though three of those days count as field trip days since we were touring Civil War battlefields and such. There are days when the schools are in session, and my kids have the day off. The schools were closed today, but we had a typical school day. I didn't feel guilty because I knew that my kids had just had seven days off and that they'll have four more days off starting tomorrow. We finished Across Five Aprils today, which was a good book, but personally in terms of Civil War books, I liked Rifles for Watie better.

After we finished, I took Oliver

to the grocery store and the hardware store. I allow Nadia and Ian to stay at home alone for very brief periods of time (less than an hour) when Oliver and I are not any farther than a 10 minute drive from our house. If needed, they could call me on my cell phone via the Echo dot. The only thing we got at the hardware store was gift certificates. Every Black Friday you can buy up to $105 worth of gift certificates for $65. They had a Santa in a sleigh inside the store. Oliver sat in the sleigh and chatted with Santa for a few minutes and was given a candy cane. When Santa asked him what he wanted for Christmas his first response was sweet potatoes, and when asked if he wanted anything else, he said donuts. This child ALWAYS mentions food when asked this question by someone dressed up as Santa. In pervious years his responses have included potatoes and peanut butter cups. I am guessing that not too many kids tell Santa they want potatoes or sweet potatoes for Christmas. Can you tell this boy loves potatoes? Santa asked him if there were any foods he didn't like, and he said peppermint. He

had some sweet potatoes for dinner tonight as we had leftovers for dinner.

I've never been one for doing Black Friday shopping in a store. Last week I purposefully scheduled the appointment to get new tires for tomorrow instead of today as I did NOT want to enter a Walmart on Black Friday. Sometimes I have done more online Black Friday shopping, but that also wasn't the case today. I did buy one DVD online from Target for Ian for $4 (Lego Movie 2), and that was the end of my Black Friday online shopping. Not spending money is even cheaper than spending money on bargains, right? Usually Amazon has a $10 off book coupon around this time of year. I have purposefully held out on some book purchases in anticipation of that code. Maybe it will be a Cyber Monday deal.

The first picture is from Natural Bridge State Park. See how small my kids look in comparison to the bridge? It's 215 feet tall, 40-50 feet thick, has a 100 foot span, and is 90 feet wide. George Washington was part of the survey crew that measured it in 1750. Thomas Jefferson purchased it from King George III in 1774. He paid 20 shillings for 157 acres that included the bridge and a waterfall. The second picture is from the parlor where Lee surrendered to Grant in Appomattox, and the third picture is from the visitor center at Petersburg. The pictures below are of the kids taking their junior ranger pledge at Appomattox and of Oliver in Santa's sleigh at the hardware store today.