September 15 with my Kaity-Girl

Thursday:  "What are we going to do today, Grandma?" Sigh. Those are always the first words from Kaity's mouth when I pick her up Thursday afternoons. I'm never quite sure what we will do exactly. It's not that I don't plan ahead, but I'm never quite sure what will or won't work with Kaity on a given day.

We decided to drive up to 9Mile and Alpine to check out whether Schwallier's was opened yet for the fall season. It was! I told Kaity we would explore for a bit--see what they have going on this year, etc. So that is exactly what we did. I didn't have my camera with me, so these pictures are from my phone:

There was all of the usual stuff at Schwallier's: baby goats, kittens, bunnies, donuts, cider, mazes, pumpkins ... all of it! But Kaity isn't a little kid anymore, so much of that stuff didn't appeal to her. The hay stack, however, HAD to be climbed and explored!

We managed to hang out at Schwalliers for about 45 minutes and left with a chocolate cookie for Kaity to eat AFTER dinner at my house.

One of my PLANS for this time with Kaity was to help her memorize her Awana verse for the week: "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6.23

I didn't take any pictures of our work together on her verse; but I got some fresh dry-erase markers when at Meijer's this morning and got out my white board and wrote out the verse. I also printed out some color pages of that verse for us to color. AND I broke the verse down into phrases and wrote them on 3 x 5 cards to mix up and see if Kaity could get the order right. I prayed that Kaity would tolerate all of this "learning" stuff and that God would use His Word in her heart. 

God answered my prayer and much more. Kaity never once complained about doing any of our "verse games" and did really well with our time together. We had discussed the meaning of "wages", "sin", "death", "gift" as we drove to my house from the orchard. Kaity caught on right away that I was privy to her memory verses through Miss Jen (!!) but she didn't seem to mind.

A few weeks ago, I realized Kaity doesn't know her multiplication tables on a fourth-grade level, so I've been trying to figure out ways we could work on those together. Math is definitely NOT my strong suit. But I got out a bunch of pennies that I had in a little box in my closet and we made groups of pennies and tried multiplying that way for awhile. 

However, we got distracted mid-way by noticing the dates on the pennies and then we started putting them in order by date ... using a magnifying glass to help us see the dates on the really dirty pennies ... and we had so much fun! Below is a picture of Kaity cracking up--I forget why!

We had such a nice time together tonight and I am SO thankful for this dear child who continues to come over for visits even with a boring grandmother like me!