Weekly Recap: With the scoliosis check-up

Well, fishing club has ended, and the other two kids caught their fish on the last day. It was a fun experience and the kids learned a lot. If you ever have the opportunity to join your city's local youth fishing club, we recommend it!

N decided one day that she wanted to make zucchini bread... all by herself! She did great!

We enjoyed listening to General Conference and the announcements are exciting! Hearing from church leaders is inspiring and we're all trying to be better at studying the messages.

We had a grilled cheese bar between sessions on Saturday again. I think this is going to become another favorite tradition. I had a ham and pineapple grilled cheese, bacon pickle grilled cheese, and tomato pesto grilled cheese.

M had a six month scoliosis checkup. Her doctor is impressed with her progress, and her curve is down! She stood in the x-ray then tried to "stack her blocks" but realized she wasn't doing it correctly because there is no mirror in there. So her thoracic spine and shoulders look a little different. Her last x-ray did show a change in the thoracic area, and her Schroth therapist has been adjusting exercises to address this. The doctor did a quick measurement (below), and he said that even when he wasn't trying to measure exactly, it still shows a decrease. According to the radiologist's report, her thoracic curve is down about 8 degrees and her thoracolumbar curve is down 15 degrees. If you look at the lumbar vertebrae in the image below you can see on the left side how they tilt into the curve, but on the right side they are holding straighter. Overall, we're happy with the care, concern, and attention M is receiving.

November 2017 x-ray on the left -- October 2018 x-ray on the right

I ordered a bunch of new crab shells for J's hermit crabs. I didn't like anything we found in local pet stores so I found a website with good quality shells. Sadly, the smallest crab died.. but we think that was because J figured out how to keep the humidity up and it was too much. I helped him do a major tank clean out, and then one of his bigger crabs finally changed shells! We were so excited for that, but she chose a smaller shell! She's got a thing for skinny jeans I guess.

Learning anything and everything I can about an animal (or thing) that interests me is something I've always done, and it's something I'm good at. I wasn't interested in hermit crabs but I've decided to learn all I can about them since they live in my house now. I'm taking steps to help J care for them in the best way possible. We've made habitat and diet adjustments and I hope we can provide a better home for them as we continue to learn.

A neighbor gave us a big box full of apples recently, and we decided to use my parent's freeze dryer to preserve some. That is a long process but I love the results! Freeze dried apples, when properly stored, will last for 25 years. But they make great snacks right now!

N got to go on her date night with Mom and Dad. We stopped at Deseret Book and she found the new Come, Follow Me curriculum for Primary. She wanted to buy it right then because that was one thing talked about in conference! We talked about waiting a bit for the book we'll use at home. She's determined to obey the prophet!

School highlights:

History: We had our last lesson on World War I, including the Zimmerman telegram and the Treaty of Versailles. We also had a lesson on the Roaring 20s.

Literature: We had a lesson on the Cinderella fairy tale, but we focused on the Native American version of it. We also had a lesson about Psalm 100.

Science: We're continuing our studies of kingdoms and classification and we recently learned about fungus, mold, and yeast.

Geography: We learned about air pollutant. Then we started our first lesson about Africa and learned about the climate regions on that continent. We'll continue that topic next week.

Art: Finishing up our Mary Cassatt study, we watched a tutorial about drawing faces and practiced sketching male and female faces.

Music: We finished studying Bach. We talked about how his family was a good example of some of the principles found in The Family: A Proclamation to the World.