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“I need to go potty! Pause the book!”
– said by N, who may have played too many rounds of Minnesota Cuke on the computer.

Filed under: Family, Quote of the Day on July 9th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

This is H all dressed up in her 4th of July outfit. Or was that N waving his little flag? Either way our camera is definitely fried. I was starting to research digital camcorders in hopes we could get one of those soon, but I guess we’re going to need to get another camera before the camcorder.

My youngest sister (a third child herself) has mentioned several times that I really should make an intentional effort to snap plenty of photos of little H. This probably is not what she meant!

So here’s how you can help: What digital camera do you own and what do you like/not like about it? What would you get now if you could?

Filed under: Family on July 4th, 2007 | 4 Comments »

ONE promise to make good on:

• Take the kids skating

TWO things to do on the computer:

• Move our blog to a new URL
• Learn Ruby (or at least work through Chapter 5 in the Ruby book G bought for me)

THREE things to sew:

• Nursing cover for my sister (I’m getting a niece in July!!)
• Wool diaper covers for H (using recycled wool sweaters from Goodwill)
• Mesh sling (to be used in pools and lakes this summer)

FOUR home projects:

• Have a garage sale (and donate anything that doesn’t sell so we can have our garage back)
• Move E into H’s bedroom
• Remove weeds from our flower bed and actually plant some flowers
• Paint our bedroom

FIVE fun things to go to at least once this summer:

• Log Cabin Village
• FW Water Garden
• FW Botanic Garden (I’m determined to show the kids the banana tree when it actually has bananas on it)
• Cowtown Cattlepen Maze
• a local farmer’s market

SIX areas to declutter:

• Kitchen
• My closet
• G’s closet (poor guy – his closet had some extra space at one point but other stuff has found it’s way into those spaces and are now threatening to overtake his clothes)
• Masther bathroom cabinets
• Linen closet
• Laundry room shelves

Filed under: Family on June 27th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Yeah! Yesterday was Box Day at our house. E’s first grade books arrived from Sonlight. Unfortunately our camera messed up right after this photo so this is the only photo of the event. The kids are excited about the new books and E went to bed looking at one tonight.

We had issues with uploading photos last month so I didn’t get photos from our last day of Kindergarten posted. These are all the books we read and the kids are holding their favorites. I had serious doubts that the book N picked was really his favorite so I let them pick a second book and he then picked the book I expected to be his favorite: The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature.

I think we read Berenstain Bears all the way through almost 3 times. And we must have read the Fish of the Sea page once a day for a month straight. The kids had it memorized. “Sardine – bass – tuna – flounder – That sunfish is a thousand-pounder!” and “Dogfish bite but they can’t bark.” It’s a great book, but that was a bit much. It eventually was put away for a while and N had to start picking another book to read each day. Last year we started out using the schedule from Sonlight but I eventually started letting each kid pick a book to read from the school pile each day while I picked one or two myself. It worked out pretty well for us and we also added in several more books that weren’t from Sonlight.

Notice that of the top 4 books that they picked, 3 of them are science books. My dad will be so proud. One of the books Emily is holding is actually a book we’ll use this year too. We just happened to already own it and we read several sections before I realized we’d read the whole thing this coming year. Glad she liked it!

Enjoy the photos after the long photo-famine. Thanks to hubby for figuring out the problem with uploading the photos. And shame on me for staying up too late again tonight. Good night!

Filed under: Family, Homeschool on June 21st, 2007 | 5 Comments »

but George and I are fascinated with a caterpillar. If you’ve never watched a caterpillar go through the process of becoming a butterfly, you are missing out! It’s so amazing. We’ve watched parts of it several times but I’m still completely amazed every time I see a part of the process. My dad found 6 Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars on his dill plants. He put all 6 into a jar and sent it with my mom who came to visit us last week. Well, technically he only know about 5 caterpillars but there was one teeny, tiny bonus stowaway who was about a week and a half behind the others in his lifecycle. Tonight the stowaway is attaching himself to a stick before he loses his outer layer of skin and forms a chrysalis. Today we also got our first 2 butterflies of the batch. We had one boy and one girl butterfly. (In case you are wondering, the girls have more blue on their wings and the boys have more yellow.)

Feel free to check out our caterpillar posts from two years ago. I won’t be going into that much detail this time around, nor do I have any funny stories about losing any caterpillars. You’ll have to check out the old posts for those stories.

In other news, yesterday H’s preferred mobility method was crawling. Today it may have been half walking and half crawling. I really wasn’t ready for this phase, but if it makes her want to be held less then maybe it’s not so bad. She’s so cute and has the sweetest smile, but my arms are getting very tired!

E has discovered her first loose tooth. I finally got a good look at it today and discovered that her permanent tooth is actually already coming in behind it. This milestone totally snuck up on me. Any been-there, done-that folks out there are welcome to send me some advice on this one.

N…hmm, I should write something about him too. We pretended to be Fire Eaters today. It was silly. We went on a bike ride this morning just him and I and H. (E is attending VBS with a neighbor friend this week.) I wasn’t looking forward to it, but it turned out to be a good little outing.

Speaking of N, he had a complete meltdown in the check-out line of a store yesterday. The kind where the kid is laying on the floor screaming loud enough for the whole store to hear. To which the cash register lady said “Are we having a bad day? Are you hot and tired? I think 7-11 still sells Slurpies. That might help you cool down. Would a Slurpie help?” WHAT!??!?? What part of that is supposed to be helpful? Luckily my kids have never actually had an official Slurpie so they had no clue what she was talking about. She then started talking to them about going swimming to help cool them off. Does this woman have NO clue? Putting ideas of Slurpies and swimming in their head is not going to make them feel all better inside. They were not hot, they were tired. VERY TIRED. Within 3 minutes of getting back in the car N was asleep. I know better than to try to go to a store when he is so tired. But I just needed to get something real quick and we were right by this store and we don’t have one near us anymore. Ughh. Maybe it wasn’t worth it after all.

If I don’t post this in the next 2 minutes it will be timestamped as tomorrow. So much for my new 10pm bedtime.

Filed under: Family on June 20th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

This is what I heard hubby say yesterday:
“Uh, she just took a step! Two…Three…Four…Five!”

Then she did it again and took 7 steps. Just this week I told someone I didn’t expected H to walk for at least another month, maybe 2. Shows what I know.

Filed under: Family on June 11th, 2007 | 3 Comments »

My mom and sister called to get the scoop on the new pet. Here’s what they got when they asked E about her pet (mainly wanting to know what kind of pet we now owned):

“Well, her first name is Goldie and her middle name is what she is. And her last name, well, we adopted her, so her last name is the same as our last name.”

“She’s a, well, I don’t remember what she is called.”

“*Mom, what kind of animal is she again?*”

Silly girl.

Here’s the real scoop: I received an email yesterday from a family that was moving out of the area. They could not take their pet on their journey so they were giving her and her supplies away for free. I halfway jokingly mentioned it to G and he took me halfway serious. We decided it would be good for the kids to have a pet and that’s how Goldie G. [insert last name here] came to join our family.

And the G. stands for …. Read more »

Filed under: Family on June 1st, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Sometimes we do crazy spur-of-the-moment things. Today is one of those times. I’m about to head out with the kids to pick up their first pet. (Unless you count chickens as pets.) If you’re lucky, we’ll get a picture up soon.

Want a clue? It’s a SHE.

Filed under: Family on May 31st, 2007 | 3 Comments »

Sweet little H and I are hanging out together this weekend while the older two kids are having fun at Grammy’s house. After sending the other 2 kids off yesterday, we went shopping just the two of us yesterday. I had several stores (5, actually) where I only wanted to pick up one or two things. It started raining on us, which is still a relatively new thing for H. On our trips to and from the car she would go between watching the rain fall and hiding her face in my shoulder. Even with the rain she was a real trooper. I really enjoyed spending some time with just her. Dealing with only one carseat and not having constant chatter from the back were nice bonuses too.

Today I did some picking up and cleaning, particularly in the bathrooms. You can now open the cabinets under the kid’s bathroom without fear of something falling out. My next project (best done when H is napping) is continuing my office file cabinet project. Maybe by the end of this weekend everything will have a spot.

Filed under: Family on May 25th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

We’re still here! And we’ll be back again soon after we resolve some technical difficulties. Like the photo spots on our blog that just say “NOT FOUND” and the adorable post of E’s first ballet/tap recital that disappeared and the Photo Gallery that only displays error messages now. You see, our stuff was moved to a different server and the promised seamless transfer was, well, definitely less than seamless.

Filed under: Family on May 16th, 2007 | 2 Comments »