Currently // End o’ September 2012

drinking more water than I have in a long time.

watching the Avengers. Yes. Just as good as it was in the theater, but better because I watched it in my pajamas. : )

laughing hearing the sound of laughing as four little kids wrestle with their dad.

eating and trying several new recipes lately. I need to do a recipe post one of these days. 

needing to make a final errand list of what needs to be done for a small get-together we’re having to celebrated N1’s 9th birthday with some friends. It’s tomorrow night. I should get on that.

thinking about my little kindergartener and how I can do a better job by her this year. Our year has not started as smoothly as I was expecting and I want to encourage her this year.

wondering when I am going to get to hold my brand new baby niece! A sweet, sweet little girl arrived on T’s side of the family this week and I have not been sent nearly enough pictures of the little munchkin.

enjoying pumpkins, pumpkin pie seasoning, pumpkin pie dip, canned pumpkin, pumpkin creamer, homemade pumpkin butter (oh my!), etc. I’m stocking my pantry full of pumpkin right now anticipating a yummy fall.

prepping for Classical Conversations and homeschool … never ending. 95% of the time I love that. 5% of the time I am over it. : )

opening boxes that are arriving in the mail for birthdays that are coming up in the next week. The big brown truck is a favorite around here, as is Amazon Prime. Worth every penny.

remembering that this time last year we had a little guy very, very sick with croup. One my scariest parenting moments. to date.

brainstorming about the next few months, things I’d like to do with the kids, etc. I’ve been inspired by Monica at Homespun Heart and her slow days posts. I need to make a point to include those more often.

wearing damp clothes. I just gave the boy a bath and he has discovered splashing. Or, more correctly, dumping water out of a cup on to Mama.

making some headway on finding the top of my desk today. A very good thing.

feeling tired, with a mind full of thoughts. But overall good. Life is good. God is good.

loving October. One of my favorite months is coming. We celebrate the oldest and the youngest this month, along with a cousin thrown in for good measure. And did I mention pumpkins?

listening now to little girls chattering their room before I go turn their lights off.

inspired by this series at Reluctant Entertainer on 30 days of Autumn Inspiration. She has such a way with words about hospitality. It doesn’t have to be hard to open your home to others. Good reminders.

reading hopefully more on this later this week if I can snag time to do a September reading wrap-up post. I did finish Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. It was just alright for me. The girls and I are over half-way through Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson and it is de.light.ful.

thankful for this little face and in strict denial that he will be turning two in a little over a week. The birthday has officially been cancelled. I can’t handle it.

Linking up with Ali Edwards and documenting today.

Project Life Week 36 // September 9-15

Week 36 is in the book.

The left:

• signs of autumn
• some much loved, much worn shoes (maybe my favorite card of the week)
• school
• Classical Conversations day (B’s presentation).
• a boy and his bath

I forgot to take a picture of the right side – sorry! A few close ups:
A shot of the dresser that tried to squash our boy and some journaling about how thankful we are.

A Saturday breakfast date with the middlest girl.

And week 36 is a wrap. : ) Making this work by having short and simple layouts right now – it’s about all I have time for – but stories are getting documented. That’s the part I love the best.
Project Life is a product and a system created by Becky Higgins and available on Amazon.com. It can be anything you want it to be. You can view all my posts about Project Life here. I'm always happy to answer questions about how Project Life works for me, if you have any.

Soccer Saturday

 

 

Love this shot with her feet off the ground. : )

Goal!

How did this cutie get in here? : ) We love watching B play ball (but we really wish we could run around out there and chase the ball, too!)

Weekly Homeschool Wrap-up // September 17-21

We had a lighter home-school week this week (which might make one think I would have time to blog more, but no). Some highs and lows to our week in our weekly run-down.

Scholastic Report

Looking at what did and didn’t get done on my planning sheet this week, the verdict is that we had solid school days Monday through Wednesday.

• The girls each got in two math lessons a piece.
  
  
  Counting peanuts into groups of ten. And eating several of them.
  
• We hit all of our Language Arts - Explode the Code, Handwriting, First Language Lessons, Writing with Ease.
• We read/listened to the audio of chapter 4 in Story of the World, learning about Ancient Egypt.
• We worked our our memory work for week 3 in Classical Conversations. Highlights of our memory work were learning the names of the Greek and Roman gods, the parts of an animal cell, and starting Latin noun endings.
  
  
  
  
  Typing up her notes for her CC presentation. A little appalled at the state of my desk in this picture so please avert your eyes from that!
  
• We finished (finally!) our recent lunchtime chapter book read-aloud, Little Town on the Prairie. There was some talk about jumping right into These Happy Golden Years, but instead we’ve picked up Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson. (He was also the author of Ben and Me which we’ve read-aloud and I’ve blogged here).
  
  
  
• B and I worked on her math and some letter recognition activities that I found in our school closet for her kindergarten. I’ve got the itch to pull out all our fall / apple books and do a lapbook with her so my hopes are to get that organized and lined up this weekend.
  
  

Life Report

• We had a late night Monday night with the girls – unplanned – which set the tone for needing to slow down towards the end of the week. I had run to the store with a couple of the kids and got home right at bedtime. B came out to help me bring things in and closed the van door for me … unfortunately with one of her fingers still inside. My poor girl slammed it good and after calming her down and putting ice on it for about thirty minutes, T loaded her up and headed to the ER for an x-ray on it. : (

God again protected one of our kids (remembering last week’s update where the boy pulled his dresser over – I’m hoping this doesn’t become a weekly wrap-up theme!) The finger wasn’t broken – just very bruised. And as of this weekend, other than being a little stiff, most of her pain is gone. Although we would obviously not have wished this to happen to her, one perk was that she had a killer presentation at CC the next morning about her ER experience. : ) This was also a LATE night for the girls. B didn’t get home from the ER until almost 11pm, and at least one sister (the one she shares a room with) couldn’t go to sleep until she was back home. By Thursday they were all really draaaaaagging, so we had a very lite school day on Thursday and Friday of this week.

• I am feeling the need to shake our daily routine up a little bit now that the weather is a little cooler outside. The schedule I worked out for us has served us well the first six week of school, and I could probably keep using it, but I would like to be able to work in a morning walk each day. Still working out kinks, but we took a walk/bike ride on Wednesday morning before starting school and all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

• On Thursday, I escaped for a good chunk of the day! I have now warned my husband that I might need these “teacher development days” every six weeks or so! : ) A college acquaintance was in town giving a workshop on Thursday morning and I attended that. After checking with my friend who was staying with the girls, I found she could stay a little longer and I got to have lunch with T. By myself. With no interruptions. I have to fess up on myself – I give the girls a hard time about talking to me non-stop when I get one of them one-on-one to myself, but I think I did the same thing to T on our lunch date. : ) Much needed shot in the arm for Mama.

Breakfast : oatmeal, coffee, reading through Matthew with the girls, and one of our history timeline cards from CC. So far this addition to our schedule is working well! (We were doing this reading before, just upstairs in the schoolroom).

And with that we’ve wrapped up another week of school. It’s hard to believe that today is the first day of autumn, too! Today looks to be a normal Saturday around these parts, albeit with mid-seventy degree temperatures. I’ll take that! We have soccer for B this afternoon, a quick grocery run and stop at Staples, and our family pizza and movie night tonight. Typically that’s our Friday night activity, however, T hosted a music team get-together/rehearsal here last night and it was a loud, late night with a house full of musicians. : )

Happy Saturday.

Linking up with Kris and Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

Weekly Homeschool Wrap-up // Week of September 10

This week wrapped up our first month of school – it’s been another good week for the most part for which I am thankful.

Classical Conversations: We met this week to work on our week 2 memory work. I am still thankful to add this to our routine this year – the girls are enjoying it and starting our days with our memory work has been a good thing to get us all focused and off to a good start. Some days I have them up and moving – doing our hand motions or singing memory songs. This day (below) I let them sit and draw or color as we listened to our memory work CD.

The girls have to prepare a 3 minute presentation each week for their class. N1’s tutor gives a suggestion for her class (which I so appreciate as we are new to this!), but B’s class is more show-and-tell. This week she brought in her American Girl doll and told the class a little about it.

CBS/Bible Study: We had our first Bible study class last Friday, so this was our first week of adding in Bible study homework. N1 is pretty self-sufficient on her work this year and able to do most of her’s on her own. N2 needs a bit more help so I’ve gotten extra one-on-one time with her this week working on it. When N2 finished Kindergarten last year, T bought her a Bible and she has been dying to break it in with her own Bible study workbook. He also bought N1 a copy of the same Bible which is helpful when we work together. While I want them to learn how to look up verses on their own, it’s handy to be able to call out page numbers once in a while. : ) B has a Bible waiting for her when she learns to read that is just like the other girls, too.

Awana also started this week, so memory verses are back in the rotation as well.

Math: Each girl completed three math lessons in their respective books. B’s focus this week has been on patterns and sorting; N2 is rotating through several concepts – even & odd numbers, adding 2 facts, and the very beginnings of telling time; and N1 is working on reviewing calculating perimeter and still increasing her timed-test scores.

Language Arts: N1 and N2 each completed three lessons in their respective 1st Language Lesson books. N2 is learning about nouns, both proper and common. N1 is reviewing adverbs, adjectives and prepositions. I’m learning right along with N1 here, having somehow missed learning some of these definitions of basic grammar terms in my school years. We have just a few more weeks of lessons before we start her next 1st Language Lessons book and get to start diagramming and I’m a little excited about that. : ) The N’s each completed a week worth of Writing with Ease, handwriting lessons, and Explode the Code pages.

Ah, B and her language arts. Continuing to take it very slow. I’m seeing some big jumps in improvement in how she’s shaping her letters in her handwriting practice and that encourages me. She is still struggling with her reading lessons so we’re setting aside Teach Your Child to Read for right now. I’ve bought some spiral bound 3x5 cards and am going to put some sounds on those and see if moving away from the big overwhelming book helps.

Social Studies: We listened to chapter 3 in Story of the World and learned the geography of the early Egyptians.

Science: Thanks to a recommendation from this blog, I downloaded a nifty Creation Science for Kids pdf that correlates with our memory work for Classical Conversations. Well worth the $4.99. This week we were learning the five kingdoms of living things so we read the sample lesson. The author has Bible verses scattered through the lesson for the girls to look up – I loved that. We also learned that you can find several of the kingdoms of living things on your pizza. My girls thought this was fun. : )

Still working on boy management during our school days. He enjoys staying in the school room when we work on our CC memory songs, trying to do hand motions on with the girls. It’s pretty cute. We had one scare with him this week. The boy managed to pull his dresser over on top of himself on Wednesday afternoon when I thought he was quietly playing in his room. We are so so thankful that he wasn’t injured. When N1 and I found him (after the big thump and crying) he was completely under the dresser with just the top of his head peeking out. I lifted the dresser and N1 pulled him out. I knew we were headed to the doctor for a broken bone somewhere, but he was completely fine other than very scared. We are so thankful for God protection of the boy. And, after he was calmed down, N1 and I took a mini-school break and moved and reshuffled anything and everything in his room that we thought might possibly come tumbling down on him!

As you can see, he was up to his normal goofy-ness in short order, somehow managing to get himself stuck in the doll bunkbed from the little girls’ dollhouse.

Happy Saturday. : ) This is our one weekend off from soccer for the foreseeable future so I’m hoping for an uneventful day full of school room straightening, laundry, grabbing a few groceries, and hopefully some time with a book! Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

A mid-week shot at my desk. Disaster!

Linking up with Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

September Reading Plans

It’s been almost three months since I’ve caught my reading plans posts. For shame. Way back in July I made a few reading goals and I had about a 50% success rate with what I planned to read.

My goals were:

• to participate in Carrie’s Narnia reading challenge. I’m planning on reading one of the Narnia books out loud to the girls. I had to go back and look at old blog post, but apparently we started The Magician's Nephew last summer, but didn’t finish it. Must rectify this. (This is also the book selection/theme for July in the Reading to Know bookclub, fyi). We read and finished The Magician's Nephew at the very beginning of August, blogged here.
• I’m considering picking up The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, and reading it for myself. We shall see. I moved the book to my to-read pile, but that’s as far as I got. Ha.
• I started Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I on our way home from vacation on Saturday and have been dying for a pocket of time to get back to it. The cover artwork on this book drew me in when I spotted it at the library (and I think I remember a mention of this title on Melissa Wiley’s blog months ago.) Delicious. Fans of The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series would be delighted by this book as well, I predict.
• I’ve also been slowly reading through The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had and want to keep plugging away at it. I’m getting inspired to read all sorts of classics.  Still unfinished. Need to get back to this one.

What was actually read:

• Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book 1) (N1 asked if she was old enough to read this and I read it myself to remember – it had been a while. Then I was sucked into book 2).
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery (Flavia de Luce Mysteries) Enjoyed this light mystery. This was my 2nd attempt at reading it and got into it a bit more this time.

In August my only reading goal was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making for the Reading to Know bookclub. I made it somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 way through the book before I fizzled out. The book itself wasn’t bad (i.e., bad language, inappropriate) but it was more non-sensical that I was able to focus on. Someone else may love it. I just couldn’t follow it.

I also read:

• Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected--A Memoir by Kellie Hampton
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4)
• Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix
• 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker

As you can see, I continued the trend of being sucked into HP. To be honest, those made the list because I have read them enough that I can pick them up and read 1-2 pages (if that’s all the time I get) and still stay with the story. For the most part, the month was just too crazy.

That said, of the two new books that I did read, I am glad that I fit in time for both of them. 7 was good. Really good and hard and gave me much to think about. I read this in three days while we were in Chattanooga, in the evenings when we sat in the hotel room. I couldn’t put it down. Still process on this so much and what I will be taking away from it. Hopefully I can blog more on it later. The incourage book club (bloom) is reading through this right now, and on my to-do list to it get over and watch the video discussions of the book.

For September, I would like to read:

• A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story. I purchased it for my Kindle for a song and it’s waiting for me to dive into.
• I still want to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver … not sure this is the month, but…
• finish Little Town on the Prairie with the girls and start a new chapter book. I’m thinking we may return to Maud Hart Lovelace and a little Betsy-Tacy, but not sure…

Right now, it is hard to make a reading list (for myself) when the days have been so full (and good) that I have had next to zero minutes to sit and read. It just been a busy season! I’d love to participate in Katrina’s Fall into Reading Challenge and may to spur me on a bit more. This Saturday we have zero events on the calendar, besides the normal home-upkeep, pick up a few groceries, etc. I have grand plans of sitting on our patio during a little boy’s naptime and just reading something this Saturday, even if only for a few minutes. We’ll see how that pans out for me. : )

Past 2012 Monthly Reading Goals:
January
February
March
April
May
June/July