Time flies when you're having fun!

We had such a great day that I actually lost track of time.  I'm pretty sure that's the first time that's happened.  The funny thing is...we didn't do anything spectacular, just a regular school day at home.  It's horribly hot and humid outside, and we didn't have anywhere we had to go (until evening when Sarah had gymnastics).  No phone calls, no screens, no friends at the house.  We started the day with our usual Bible reading and prayer, then we started our new read-aloud book, which is Davy Crockett's autobiography (finally finished The Scarlet Letter -- hooray!).  Since we had plenty of time, we decided to make a nice dinner together.  Sarah said she wanted to make Asian envelopes.  They are pretty labor intensive and time consuming, but we all love them.  I didn't have everything we needed to make them, so Sarah and I went to Kroger while Noah finished his biology and math.  Here's the recipe:

I haven't made it since I've been vegan, but I realized it would be easy to veganize it.  I just used vegetable broth instead of chicken broth, and chickpeas instead of chicken.  Sarah wasn't able to help, which I'll explain later, but Noah and I worked together and got it done in less than an hour.  He made the sauce while I chopped the vegetables.  He also helped wrap the filling into envelopes. They came out great, and he said the vegan version is just as good as the way we used to make them. I agree.

We also had this delicious salad I found at Kroger.  It had a lot of terrific ingredients that you just shake up in the bowl. It even came with a fork.  The regular price is $3.99, which I would be tempted to pay in a pinch.

And now for the best part of the day and the reason I lost track of time and Sarah had to go to gymnastics without dinner (Noah and I made it after she left).  I've been working on teaching the kids to read Korean.  It took less than a week, and today's the day they both started reading!  It was SO much easier and WAY more fun than teaching them to read English.  I started with teaching them consonants one day, reviewing them the following day, vowels the next day, and another day of review.  Then I taught them how to put them together to form syllable blocks, and today we could all sense that they were on the verge of reading.  They broke through and started reading at the same time, and it was just beautiful.  I got out their adoption paperwork and showed them their names in Korean, which I've done before, but this time they could read them themselves!  We spent some time writing their Korean names, and then all the sudden Mike was home from work and we hadn't even started making dinner.  I couldn't believe it was that late already!