13.5 Years Old

Ian turned 12 on December 12, but he hasn't had his birthday date yet because he wants to go bowling. His date has been delayed until Paul's back isn't giving him so much grief. Nadia's half birthday is on December 24, and she asked to go ice skating for her date. Since neither Paul nor I are up to ice skating right now, we changed her date with Dad into ice skating with her friend, Jill. Yesterday we left church with four children. We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts for breakfast sandwiches and then the kids skated for almost 2.5 hours. Jill had never gone ice skating before. With Nadia's help, Jill improved a lot during the time we were there. The boys hadn't been ice skating since the beginning of March in 2020, but all of the time they spent rollerblading over the past 21 months was very beneficial to their ice-skating skills. While the kids were ice skating Paul stayed in the van while I sat in front of the fire inside the building because the bench that I was sitting on bothered his back. Although we hadn't been there since the beginning of March 2020, we plan to return next Sunday afternoon for a Christmas party with Wendy's family and then weekly for ice skating lessons beginning on January 6.

This month is the first time that Nadia used some of her money to buy her brothers Christmas gifts. I'm not sure if she is giving anything to Paul or myself for Christmas. She made the largest purchase of her life recently when she bought herself a loft bed. Previously her most expensive purchases had been less than $100 each (Lego sets and a hoverboard were her most expensive purchases in the past). Nadia earns money through reading ($1 per 1,000 pages), babysitting ($5/hour), and Bible memorization ($10/chapter of Romans or James). So far, she has memorized Romans chapters 1-5 and James 1-2. She gave me $175 for the bed, and I paid the tax. She always loves sleeping on a top bunk. Now she is sleeping as high as if she were on a top bunk and has room to store large Lego bins under her bed. What had been her bed ever since she moved out of a crib many moons ago was moved to Ian's room to convert his bed into a bunk bed. Ian benefited from his purchase as he is now sleeping on the top bunk in his room. I purchased a twin mattress for the bottom bunk, which will be a guest bed when cousins are visiting us. Adam will be sleeping on the new mattress later this week. We are planning on putting two air mattresses in Nadia's room later this week for Susie and Rachel, and Grace and Wendy will sleep downstairs on a sofa bed. Milo has gone from sleeping in a crate to sleeping in a bed not far off the ground to sleeping on a bed about six feet off the ground as Nadia and Ian take turns having him sleep with them. 

Four other recent changes in Nadia's life would be that her first pet passed away, she switched from Saxon Algebra I to Teaching Textbooks Algebra 1, she stopped going to FBC's youth group on Sunday nights, and she switched from the flute back to the piano. She hadn't taken piano lessons for more than a year as she took voice lessons while she was in seventh grade. Right now, she's in the beginning of Level 4, Oliver is halfway through Level 1A, and Ian is at the very end of Level 6. Because she switched textbooks a little less than halfway through the school year, she has been doing more than one math lesson a day on the Teaching Textbooks app on the iPad so that she can finish it by the beginning of May. She's completed 13 lessons and one test so far, and on 12 of the 13 lessons she did much better than she was doing when she was using the Saxon textbook. Hopefully that will continue to be true. I had to purchase the Teaching Textbooks course for her, but thankfully Yvonne had loaned me the Saxon textbook, so I only purchased one Algebra I curriculum for her. We're not exactly sure of the reasons, but after they had to take a break from the youth group due to our vacation and then my broken ankle, Nadia and Ian decided to only attend the youth group at our church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights and stopped attending the youth group at another church on Sunday nights. For the time being we're all typically at home on Sunday nights.

Jenna was Nadia's first pet. I guess we should have seen it coming because Nadia had said that Jenna had been sleeping more lately, but still it was very sad and a shock to find her dead in the cage on Friday morning. She was a little over five years old, and the typical lifespan for a pet guinea pig is 5-7 years. Ian's first pet (Patches) died in February 2020 at the age of 3. He cried a lot over her passing. Oliver also cried when his goldfish died at the end of December last year. Patches had been put to sleep by a vet, and Paul buried her on the company's property as he took her to a vet on the way to work. I flushed the goldfish down the toilet. Paul didn't go to work on Wednesday or Thursday because of his back, but he did go to work on Friday, so I had the unpleasant task of removing a dead guinea pig from the cage. The things we do for our kids! I wrapped her body in towels, put her in a plastic bin, and put the bin in the garage. Paul buried her on our property yesterday. Nadia is more stoic and far less prone to crying than her brothers. I don't believe she cried over Jenna's passing, but she was definitely shaken up on Friday over it. I think it also helps that she still has Peppa (her guinea pig who will turn two in a couple of months) and Milo. Peppa and Buttercup didn't get along very well in the beginning. Jenna was the peacemaker who got along with all of her cage mates - Patches, Peppa, and Buttercup. We're hoping that Peppa and Buttercup will get along despite the absence of Jenna. We have two wooden houses in their cage as all three didn't fit in one house so they can either go in a house together or they can each be in a different house. Jenna was very loved and is definitely missed. 

In many ways Nadia hasn't changed over the last six months. For example, she still loves to play with Legos with Ian, listen to episodes of Adventures in Odyssey, and read. Recently she read The Hobbit, several books from the Mysterious Benedict Society series, and reread several of the Harry Potter books. The majority of the items on her Christmas wish list were either books or earrings featuring animals. She still loves attending overnight camp; she's attending a winter camp for a weekend in January for the first time ever. I can't believe that in less than five months Nadia will have completed middle school. She's very excited about having her first cell phone when she turns fourteen!