The Ides of November
It has been more than a week since the last update. Last Saturday (the 8th) my kids and I went to a friend's house to pack meals for the homeless. There is a wonderful organization in Des Moines that delivers hot meals all over the city to homeless encampments and people on Sundays. Numerous families all over the city take a weekend and make 40 meals (there are maybe 5 families per weekend). The rest of the week, the soup kitchen is open, but on Sundays the meals come to the people. We used to help my sister-in-law every month with this, even after we moved away from Des Moines, but once she got married, and I had a fourth kid, we stopped doing it so often. It was a special feeling to be back and working again.
One Week Update
Tintin comic incoming:
The Advent-ure
Since Christmas is always here too quickly, I'm deep into Advent planning. Because I am homeschooling my oldest two, it feels possible to truly embrace and dwell in the Advent season. We are setting aside our Old Testament study just for the Advent season to do an Advent study, though I will be doing it when my daughter is out of school as well because this is important for the whole family.
No-Chill November
November gets a lot of weight put on it besides the impending Thanksgiving feast and Black Friday consume-a-thon. There's the recently-defunct NaNoWriMo, where people were challenged to write 50,000 words in a single month (something I'd often hoped to do but never really had time for). Then there's the weird "No-{blank} November", in which the blank could be filled with many other things like shaving. My former church used No-Shave November to raise money for adoption funds, for instance. So with this theme in mind, I was feeling severely unchill about the state of the world at the beginning of October and picked "No-Chill November" for my personal theme.