This has been an incredibly long, complex, extraordinary, surprising month. It seems like we’ve been kept on our toes from start to finish, with an occasional blessed moment to catch our breath, so surely in all that chaos, I’ve learned a thing or two, right?

I’m linking up again with Emily at Chatting at the Sky to share what I’ve learned this month, big or small. If you are playing along, let me know so I can see what you’ve been learning!

1. I learned how to make a bun in my daughter’s hair for ballet. It’s been a long learning curve because she won’t tolerate me trying to use bobby pins or anything but I’ve found some great easy bun maker type things at Target and H&M – one is kind of like an O shaped sponge that you wrap the hair along and then ideally secure with pins. The other which we’ve been using more lately is a sort of oval with hole in the middle that you slide the hair in and then wrap the pony tail up and then curl the ends to turn it into a bun. I’m describing it terribly but I’ve found that this method holds the hair more securely with less finagling need. These along with our favorite bun cover that hides sloppy work.
2. I learned that the stucco siding on the front of our house was not stucco siding or even faux stucco siding. It’s actually chip board and it was in rather bad repair. After planning to patch a hole that a woodpecker put in the siding, my husband found that there were other previous holes that were never fully patched but just covered with metal and after much deliberation and backs and forths we finally decided to have all the chipboard removed and replaced with vinyl siding. By the time we found a company to hire and got everything measured, estimated and sided – the crew came out within a week and finished the whole job in four hours!
3. I learned how to make molasses cake. The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom for our book club, I made the cake using the recipe she included in her book and it came out awesome! During the book club meeting, we actually got to talk to the author on speaker phone – a first for our club! It was very cool to hear her talk about her writing process and how the story came to her, and the steps she took to turn her ideas into an actual story! It was very inspiring.
4. I learned that my son is a terrific public speaker at just eight years old. During his class concert yesterday, some of the kids went up before the song to announce the song title and a little background info. Of all the 2nd and 3rd graders who went up, my son was the only one I could perfectly understand and the only one who seemed able to read all the words written down. Later that night at his class play, he had one of the lead roles and I was so impressed that he had memorized all his lines (he was the only one with more than two or three lines that had to have it all memorized) and was speaking into the microphone loud enough that everyone could understand him. Proud momma moment!
5. I learned this month that my daughter can count to 100. What? When did that even happen? She has learned so much over the past year and her kindergarten evaluation went very well. She seemed to really impress the teacher and perhaps more impressively the teacher could understand everything she was saying. Anyone who knows my soft spoken, mumble-prone daughter knows what a big deal that was! This gives me a lot of confidence that she is going to do well next year. I’m very interested to see what the next school year brings.

What did you learn this month?