**Edit**
**Orchstra rehearsal is calle off due to the weather. That settles it. Nice hot cup of hot chocolate for me!**
Last night's thunder and lightening has turned into fierce winds, dropping temperatures, rain, sleet, snail, and snowballs. Perhaps it will all give way to snow later on today. Right now, the winds are really STRONG. This is scaring the little ones a bit, and giving the living room a bit of a nip. Wondering how the weather will affect or not affect public transportation and whether or not I really want to brave the weather tonight to go to orchestra. The television has us under a lot of "chu-i"s (warnings) for strong winds, heavy snow (up to a meter is the forecaster said), and high waves.
Thought jump...
I have been thinking a lot lately, yeah no surprise there. I always think a lot. However, lately I have been thinking about essentially two things. Encouragement and courage. I suppose I am really thinking about that root "cor". The root is from the Latin which means "heart". Last school year, Skyler's schoolwork centered around the theme or courage. He even wrote a really great essay about what courage means to him.
I have been kicking the idea of encouragement around in my head a lot lately. I do not, by nature or by gifting, have a great knack at the gift of encouragement. Perhaps, that comes as a surprise to some, but I really do have to work at it. I am so much of a realist and a bit of a pessimist as well. I have also been trying to observe encouragement around me. Observing encouragement around me, has led me to the conclusion, that lots of people struggle, like me, to be genuinely encouraging, and that the world at large does little to offer people in the way of encouragement.
Therefore this year, I resolve to really work on this area of my life and in turn work to teach those around me to be encouraging to others. Real encouragement, not fluff and stuff. What does this mean? Looking at the word it means, quite literally, "given courage/heart; made hopeful". I think this doesn't mean to say words of flattery. I don't think it means telling a person what they want to hear. I think it means speaking truth in love. Yes, encouragement can be positive, but sometimes I think it is refining.

At any rate, some verses I will keep at the forefront of my mind this year include: Psalm 27:14 (KJV) Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.
Psalm 31:24 (KJV) Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord.
Joshua 1:6 and 9 (NIV) 6 Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them.
9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

Of course there are more verses that speak about being encouraging to one another. Those are important as well. Initially, I think I need to work on courage and encouragement on a individual heart matter. If I am to change others, it first starts with me. There you have it...
With some help from the kids, I created this "stained glass" reminder to "Be of good courage." Hopefully this will be a visual reminder to keep working on being encouraging.

Today has basically neither here nor there. A day with homeschooling, so pretty typical. However, the night was, well, hmmm.

It all came crashing down.

A certain child in this house was helping to put away dishes, when one of my dish cabinet shelves fell (I am guessing due to a little bit too much pressure applied by child to gain more leverage). You guessed it. It deposited the contents of that shelf onto the floor. Said child is fine, a little shaken, but fine. It seems one of the dishes might have hit the child's head, but after a thorough check over, I deemed the child just fine.

However, I cannot say the same for my dishes. It looks like most of my dishes on that shelf are now shards. It was mostly the bowl shelf, but they were bowls for various functions...rice, soup, curry, cereal, and serving bowls. The sound of them falling and crashing was not a pleasant thing at all. I am glad the kids are all fine. I suppose I will have to just go shopping now.

The last couple of days have been very nice, but now a front is moving through which is causing quite a bit of crashing outside in the way of thunder. The rain is also providing quite a bit of its own crashing noise as it hits the house.

What a noisy night at our house.

This is the picture of what remains of my bowls. At the time this was taken, we still had quite a bit of fine tooth cleaning to do. Even so, I am quite certain we will be finding tiny chips for a long time to come now.

I can hardly believe that my baby is three! Happy birthday to the sweetest girl.

Today turned out to be not so interesting, so I think I will share the misadventures of me.

Friday night is my usual orchestra time, and since I had missed the previous weeks practice due to not feeling great, I felt it imperative to get to rehearsal and practice with the orchestra. This is just a rough time of year, so in as much as I can make it, I really need to go. However, with nasty blowing snow, I wasn't sure if it was the wasn't choice. Traveling by public transportation means that I put a lot of trust that the trains and buses will be running as they say they will. This being the case, I bundled up and headed to the train station. The train, of course, was late. I heard the "we are really sorry the train will be late" message more than I wanted and nearly turned back at that point. I am a glutton for punishment because, I waited for the late train instead of returning to my significantly warmer house.

Once the train arrived, I did make it all the way to my destination. The blowing snow that collected on the outside of the train was a little worrisome because it means the wind is pretty strong, yet the train traveled on without incident. Trains do occasionally stop due to winds, and I prayed that would not be the case Friday night. Having arrived late, I missed my connecting bus. Rest assured that I knew of several other buses that would get me close to where I was going.

Here is where I would like to interject a very important lesson I learned that night. If you have to choose between getting on the outer loop bus that is there and getting close to your stop in triple the amount of time, or waiting until the next inner loop bus that will drop you where you need to be and in less time; then absolutely it is worth waiting in the old and blowing snow for the next bus.

Ok, so lesson learned. The outer loop bus dropped at the stop that I planned on, but when it dropped me in front of a wall of snow, I felt a little disoriented. I had never needed to use that stop before, so I wasn't exactly sure where I was going. It was dark outside being that it was then 7:30 at night, and of course it was still blowing snow making general overall visibility more difficult. I find an opening in the wall of snow and managed to get myself onto a sidewalk rather than the street where I was dropped by the bus. I should tell you that while walking on the sidewalk there was a wall of snow taller than me on my right and on my left. Seeing over them to get my bearings straight was not really an option. I did look at the schedule to see when the next bus would go by just in case I needed to get on it and head home. Other than that I just started walking.

That night, because I was not going to be doing a lot of walking (so I thought), and because my snow boots were wet from shoveling some snow and slush on our street the day before, I opted to wear my everyday shoes. Unfortunately, my everyday shoes have holes in the sole of them. I know, I know, I should go get new shoes, huh? Or maybe a pair of waterproof snow boots? Although I was walking on the sidewalk, it was a snow side walk rather than concrete. Yep, you guessed it, I was collecting snow in my shoes.

I did find the orchestra rehearsal location. The website says that the walk from the bus stop to the building would take 3 minutes. I managed to do it in just under 20 minutes. :0 I arrived plenty cold, plenty late, and plenty snowy. My shoes, well, the snow in them, I just couldn't managed to get it out of my sole before I entered the building. I felt terrible that my shoes were dripping water as the snow in the sole of my shoes melted. I was really wishing at that exact moment that the building I was in required us to take our shoes off, but it doesn't.

Now I will say this. It felt so good to be practicing with the orchestra that night. I was glad to be playing. Turns out a third person has been coming to play viola with us. I am not sure if he will be there every week, but it was great to have a stand partner! For a change there were as many violas as any other instrument that night. Way to go violas!

Coming home from orchestra is a bit of a question every week. Sometimes a bassist can bring me home, but he told me had a meeting and couldn't get me home. Sometimes one of two ladies gets me as far as back to the train station. By 9:30 at night no more buses stop in that area, so I never have a way to get anywhere unless someone helps me. Someone always does. One of the ladies got me back to the train station. Thankfully the train I was taking started from that station, so it was there waiting for me when I got there. This also meant it would leave on time! I was grateful for that. As we traveled back towards my house, the snow continued to blow, but this time the snow was blowing through the not so airtight window and landing on the seat of the lady sitting across from me. I could also hear the snow scraping / crunching along the outside of the train as it traveled along the rails. It wasn't must fun trip, but again I did make it to my tiny little country stop without incident. I was very grateful to be home. Thankful to be able to jump into my warm bed and and warm my feet on the hot water bottle.

So ends my snow tale.

This weekend was super busy. Fun, but busy. This left the kids very exhausted come this morning. Once they were up and rambling about, Tomo informs me that his leg is bothering him. Upon looking at his shin area of his leg, he had a blister about the size of my pinky finger. It looked red all around,and it was not hot and not itchy but painful. I asked him a whole litany of questions trying to figure out where this came from. Conclusion...we don't know. Not being too sure what we were dealing with, I was leaning towards running him to the doctor. We finished getting ready for the day, and I checked his leg again. Still not hot, still painful, and it had grown to the size of my thumb. Yes, run him to be safe. Corey took him in, and then used the time afterwards to spend some special one and one time with him. The doctor drained the blister and sent him off with anti-biotic cream and oral anti-biotics as well. Still not 100% sure what that was all about, but we are going to keep an eye on it for a few days.
For dinner, we had Stone Soup. Skyler gathered the stone for the soup. I make Stone Soup about once a year and either Corey or I retell the tale of Stone Soup to the kids. It makes for quite a discussion, and I really enjoy moments like these where we all share in a nice pleasant dinner conversation that does not involve ranking the dwarves from the Hobbit in order of who we like best on a daily basis. Yes, that gets really old. Literary of a topic as it is, it gets old.
Not a bad day, just a little odd in some spots.

Thought about blogging today. See, I have even typed a few things just now. Hoping for the day that homeschooling three children isn't my every single moment thought, or that I am not too mentally exhausted at night to sit and type. Just taking life day by day.

I did just go on a homeschool shopping spree and got the kids their books for the new school year starting in April. Am I crazy, or what?