Welcome to the end of my first week back after the Big Spring Sickness of 2024! Whew, it was a nasty bug—I’ve heard that multiple people in our area required medical intervention due to it. Ugh, so much exhaustion experienced by all. All in all, though, it was a good week full of good weather and a lot of productivity.
Top priorities this past week:
- Prom Dressses
- Garden tasks
- Driver’s licenses tasks
Creativity
Ren’s Prom Dress: I was still quite weak at the beginning of the week, so progress on Ren’s prom dress didn’t happen until Wednesday, but I put in about four hours of work and all of the basic elements of the dress (Bodice, lining, underskirt) are assembled in their basic forms and I can now move forward with attaching them to each other and doing finishing work. The end is in sight!
Rachel’s Prom Dress: I’ve not made any progress on this, which is extremely unfortunate because I was supposed to begin working on it in earnest this week. We’ll get there when we get there.
Garden
I actually used some of the rhubarb this week, which was good because it’s starting to become a behemoth of a plant! We had a lovely rhubarb/mixed fruit crumble for dessert one night. Soooo good.
I got caught up on starting seeds and direct sowing seeds! Renaissance helped me plant four different varieties of marigolds in one starting tray, and I planted sweet peppers, hot peppers, pepperoncini peppers, Big Daddy tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, and cilantro in the other tray. I still have a few spots open for some more seeds in the second tray, which I might use for some herbs.
I transplanted my started pansies and delphiniums into the garden, but they’ve been struggling for weeks in their trays and I do not know what to expect from them in the future.
I direct sowed the last bit of peas, and some Bells of Ireland and Four O’ Clocks. I also went back and fortified the trellises with better staples to hold them to the ground for the peas and sweet peas.
Caring
Driver’s Licenses: Renaissance is officially a licensed driver! WOO HOO! We finally did it! I took her to the DOL on Tuesday and she’s got the paper! We are waiting for our insurance company to get back to us on adding her to our policy, and once we have that confirmation she’ll be good to go. She can’t park on campus until she has proof of insurance, so we’re waiting on that task as well. Michael is also replacing the brakes on the kids’ car this weekend so they can be extra safe.
Rachel has been studying every afternoon for her Driver’s Knowledge test this weekend. It’s a good thing I made a note to make sure she was doing this—every afternoon has found her completely forgetful of the task AND I had to intervene at one point because she was playing video games while listening to a YouTube video about driving rules and considered it as studying. Uh, no. I’ve not been her favorite person this week because I keep insisting on nitty gritty studying tactics. You’ll thank me when you pass the test, girlie.
Emily hasn’t done any practice driving because I’ve been too busy with getting caught up with life this week, but I’ve scheduled daily drives for the next six weeks to get her back up to snuff.
Regarding the bridal shower and wedding gifts, I think I’ll just return them to Amazon and then re-order them and have them delivered to the couple’s new address. I still need to text the mom and get that figured out.
Renaissance and I sat down to talk about her post-high school plans and run the numbers. She qualified for every merit and music scholarship available at the colleges, but we are just middle-class enough to not warrant any financial assistance via the FAFSA, so she was going to be on the line for $17,000-30,000 per year to attend the four-year universities she was thinking about attending. That is simply not feasible for her, so she’s going to go with her alternate plan of attending technical college and earning an associate degree in culinary & pastry arts so that she can have a marketable skill that can then help her finance her future plans. She was really torn between studying music or studying pastry, so either option was fine with her. The pastry program is good in that she can then transfer to a four-year school and earn some sort of business and/or food science degree, if she desires. I think she wants to eventually open a bakery of her own, and that she wants to work with local high school students and the community to offer educational opportunities and/or internships in culinary areas.
I’m disappointed that the money couldn’t work out for a four-year option. I entered the financials into a copy of the spreadsheet that I had made when we did this for Emily two years ago, and I was appalled to find out that one of the schools they both applied to increased their tuition by $17,000 in just two years! It’s bonkers out there, and it led to some very serious conversations with Emily this week in order to adjust her expectations for the future as well. You just can’t expect an 18-22 year old and their family to cough out or sign up for loans in the amount of $120,000 for a college education at a Division 3 school! That’s almost the cost of our first house! Gross. The technical school option will end up costing just $8,000 a year, which is a sum we can work with. And HELLO…a pastry chef in the family? That’s just cool. Ren was also wise and applied to start in January so she can spend a few more months working to save up money to pay for it all. If you know of any bakeries hiring, she’s looking!
It was a really busy week, with a lot of important things happening, and I think it’s turned out well. Hopefully this weekend sees a lot of time for sewing, weeding, and driving practice!