Loving Life

My kids love to read and that makes me happy! The best way to get David to go to town with me is with a promise of a trip to the library. The girls are coming home from school excited to read books they got from school.  Ana is on a mission to read all 21 selected chapter books by the end of the school year so she can earn a Barnes and Nobles gift card.  She has read two books in two days.  I think she's well on track to accomplish that goal.  : ) Speaking of school, the girls are still loving it.  They come home every day excited to tell about all the fun things they did and learned.  The skip off happily to school every morning as well. It makes my heart happy to see their excitement for this new adventure in their life. Ana told me the other day that it seems like she's the only one in her class who really enjoys going to school.

We went to the library this morning for the preschool story hour.  Abby was the only preschooler there.  Ana was very delighted to join Abby for story hour and have another opportunity to do crafts. David did school work at a table with me at the library, however couldn't help laughing at the silly stories being read to his sisters.  Stories > Algebra. Books were brought home from the library Rule of "Do not walk while you read" was inforced on the way home Now it's quiet this afternoon as the kids are engrossed in their respective books. I love libraries.

School wasn't happening much at all yesterday, so I decided we needed to do something more enjoyable.  There was a bookfair at Barnes & Nobles for our homeschool group, so we decided to go and do that.  They had fun little games for the kids to play and win prizes.  David won a mind puzzler thing and the girls each got a smelly pencil (smelly in the good sense).  I also decided to let them each pick out one item that I would buy them - if they wanted more than that, they would have to cough up the dough for the extra items.  A portion of the proceeds everything we bought would be given in support of our homeschool group too, so I'm always happy to support that.  Abby very quickly picked some princess crap.  With my first two children, I remained strong and never even thought of buying into the commercialism hype of the newest, latest craze among children and their parents.  But somewhere along the way, Abby has fallen ...

I took the kids last week to a last minute photo shoot at Sears - our version of yearly school pictures. Can I just say my kids are cute? I had such a hard time choosing which pictures I liked the best and probably ended up buying too many. Here are some small pictures for you to look at - sorry about the Sears logo pasted across each one - I had to copy from their website until I get my own copies. But you can get the idea of how cute they are. I was also amazed at how old David looks in these pictures, especially the ones with the girls. Maybe I should get them cleaned up like this more often. :) Other fun things we did while in town: LIBRARY visit! The highlight of the kids' day. We walked out with only 43 books. I haven't seen much of David since. We also splurged on rainbow and carmel popcorn at the KarmelKorn store after such a great, well-behaved photo shoot. They also talked me into these nasty soda freezer pops while we were grocery shopping. They are pretty nasty in ...

Today, I get to stay home for the ENTIRE day! What a treat! I've hardly had a chance to be at home the past three days with various appointments, meetings and taking kids to various activities. So today is a day to catch up a bit at home. On the agenda for the day is to get in a full, unrushed day of school, get the house clean and to deal with this pile sitting in my kitchen. In "Ideal-Land", I would get all of them dealt with by the end of today and have many quarts of nicely canned applesauce to show off from my labors. However, Ideal-Land rarely happens. I've been chipping away at this pile over the last week doing a small batch here and there as I have time. I love having a pile of apples to preserve in some way. I don't love the process, but definitely love the end result. I made a couple of apple pies last night for our small group. They were so yummy - unfortunately, Aaron ate the last piece as part of his complete nutricious breakfast. So there is no mor...

When I married Aaron, I realized I had married a man who was addicted to books. This is not a bad addiction as far as addictions go. Through him, I learned that you can do all sorts of things while reading a book, such as play computer games, do the dishes, and even shower. Yes, Aaron reads in the shower. I tried it once to see what it was like. I don't recommend it. It's uncomfortable to hold the book out of the stream of water, very difficult to turn the pages one handed, and in the back of my mind I kept fearing I would drop and ruin the book in the water. Aaron, however has no qualms whatsoever about reading in the shower and almost daily uses up the hot water as he reads while showering. Here is an example of his amazing talent of reading while doing chores (don't worry - no shower pictures!). I also quickly realized that Aaron is the type of person who laughs outloud when reading a book. I didn't realize people actually did that until I married him. I would hear ...

I had quite the whirlwind of a day yesterday - hence no post until today. Today is a little more sane. Yesterday, I woke up bright and early for an early morning bike ride - we're giving our running muscles a break for a bit and doing some cross training. I, however, do not recommend biking downhill on gravel at dawn. It's very nervewracking trying to see where you're going in the pre-sunrise "light", trying to miss the loose gravel, and avoiding the enormously large and loud combine overtaking you from behind you. But I made it home in one piece. Once there, I got supper going in the crockpot for our small group later on in the evening, got things ready for school - which included waking up three very sleepy children. We did a quick morning of school, then off to take David to his science/writing class with other homeschool kids. I dropped my girls off at my grandma's house where they were to eat lunch before heading to Grandma Cindy's house (they "d...

Yesterday, we continued our learnings on prehistoric man by venturing forth into the wilds at my in-laws. Our goals were to forage for food and build a shelter with the things we had around us. The kids each took along their hunting bags and went looking for food. They found plenty of hickory nuts and some good smashing rocks to open them up. Here is David working on our nut supply. Here is Ana also trying to open up some nuts - she had more trouble with the technique and kept shooting the nuts out and hitting people with them. Abby didn't care to try to crack open any nuts. She spent her time watching and eating the raspberries we "discovered" and picked. Yes, they are in a very non-prehistoric container. We gathered a bunch of branches and large leaves and made a small shelter. We made our shelter near a water source (small pond), but decided to drink our non-prehistoric water from our plastic water bottles instead of the pond water. Finished product. Ana wondered ...