The weekend..

Do you ever have those days when you don't feel like doing anything?? Yah, me too and today is one of those days.

We don't even know the last weekend that we didn't have ANYTHING to do! This weekend, we don't have anything planned! Ah, to enjoy it!

But there are many things to do around here. Clean the house that the tornado swept through, get groceries, get Courtney's grasshoppers (yes, I caughter her another one) a new home, get some fish, go shopping at Kohl's (I got my 30% off coupon!), go pick up books from the library for science next week, etc, etc, etc!

It is so nice though to sleep in and not have to do anything of importance this morning! The kids can play and don't have to go to school. I don't have to direct them to do anything, except they ARE going to clean their bedroom this afternoon, like it or not!

The Big Birthday!

It's always fun counting down to a birthday, isn't it? We look at a calendar everyday for school and my girls have been counting down to my birthday for the last couple of weeks.

They even had their dad take them to Hobby Lobby last night, which they have been begging him to do all week, to get me a present. Last night, I got kicked out of the kitchen and I had to go upstairs while they used my kitchen to "make" my present. I am kind of anxious to see what this is all about! I didn't mind though, I got to sit and read a book for about an hour. Kind of great present right there!

As for plans for today, we don't really have any. We thought about getting a babysitter and going out, but I didn't get that far. But then I thought, I want to be with my family on my birthday! (Don't get me wrong, a night out would be nice too!)  We still have to have school today. Since the girls were busy with birthday preparations and I wouldn't let them do their homework at 9:15 last night, they have to do their homework this morning. I still have to stare at my tornado-mess house, which hopefully will getting taken care of this weekend. I should really take some pictures because I don't think the girls' end of the hallway has ever been so bad. :(  Maybe we can do something fun tonight or tomorrow. We will see!  

sick day?

Can I take a sick day to take care of Christian?? It's almost close to impossible to teach school while your two year old is coughing, crying, and in need of mom's attention 100% of the time.

Is that included in my contract??

Finish School and a Packing sort of day!

We are going on one last camping trip today with some fellow homeschooling friends.

But before then, we need to finish school for the week, everybody take showers, finish laundry, clean the house up a little bit, and pack! Luckily, I just have to pack clothes and food. We are not going swimming, so we don't have to bring all that stuff along!

I did get all the clothes and shoes that I need for the weekend. The girls have new tennis shoes, Megan has new jeans off the clearance rack, and Christian has plenty of sweatpants and sweatshirts. I even found Megan a new jacket. (But most of this happened at Walmart last night while we were shopping during supper time- never do that again! We were all starving and the kids were complaining and even Christian, who is usually my best shopper, had terrible behavior! Somebody taught him to "boom" people, which really means hit. How do you discipline a 2 year old in the middle of Walmart??)

So we have a busy day ahead of us. We are going to Indian Cave State Park, which is about two hours away and we need to get there before dark.  I think we can do it!

Off to get the busy day started!

You know...

you don't want to work on your vocabulary words when you see mom curled up on the recliner watching TV  at 4 pm and you offer her a pillow hoping she will really go to sleep and you will therefore get out of your work.

Yes, Courtney, it worked this time, but it might not again!

PS I knew what you were up to and honestly, I didn't want to work on them either. :)

Break from school...

Ok, today we need to take a little break from school, at least for the morning.
We are going camping this weekend and I saw that the high is going to be 61 on Saturday. That's a little chilly!

Megan has no jeans, no jacket, only a couple long sleeve shirts, and no shoes besides sandals. She does have warm pajamas.

Courtney has jeans, a jacket, lots of long sleeve shirts and a couple pairs of jeans, and no shoes besides sandals.  She is now into the clothes that Megan wore when she was in kindergarten, so some of her jeans have holes in the knees (perfect camping jeans, I think!) and I think I threw away Megan's old tennis shoes because they were so worn.  I think Courtney will be getting some more clothes than usual this year.

Christian needs pants, including sweat pants and sweat shirts, but he has plenty of long sleeve shirts I found on clearance last year along with footy pajamas.  I think he has a pair of tennis shoes along with a jacket. He might be the easiest one!

We are going shopping this morning.  We have our class at the homeschool learning center at 11, so that works out great. If we need even more time, we might go out for lunch and then continue shopping afterwards.  I have also reserved a bunch of books at the library, so I would like to stop and pick those up too. Megan is determined to read every book in the Boxcar Series.  There are over 100 books and she has read quite a few of them.  I reserved ten more for her the other day from our library. She will be through those by next week.

We will get to school this afternoon.  We also have AWANA tonight, so that will certainly make for a short school day.

As for our earthquakes yesterday, they were a big hit! We used cardboard, blankets, and Christian's blocks to build everything.  You know the girls are having fun when they say, "Just one more time, mom!"   I hate to put the fun to an end, but we really needed to get on with school! It was funny because later they had turned our cardboard "tectonic plates" into skates and they were skating around the house on them.

Earthquakes today!

The fossils were a great hit yesterday. We ended up doing science for about two hours yesterday morning!! We hadn't finished our lesson from last Friday, so we did that first and then we went to our lesson on fossils. The girls helped me make the salt dough and we had two cookie sheets full of "fossils" when we were done. We had to bake them for an hour to make the dough firm up. We made bugs, seashells, Courtney's foot (didn't they spot "bigfoot" oncet?), dinosaur feet, gorilla feet, and a wheel for Christian.  We had a great time thinking of things to make, we used mostly toys because those washed up pretty easily. I kept asking the girls, "What would people think if they found these in the future?" Heck, maybe somebody will find our fossils in the future!

Today we are onto earthquakes.  Again, our book says to go online and find the nearest fault lines, but I think we need more than that! I think I am going to find some cardboard, a blanket, and some legos.  I am going to put the cardboard on the floor first to mimic Tectonic plates, then a blanket to represent the earths crust, and then I am going to have the kids take the bigger legos and build some buildings. Then I am going to move the plates to represent an earthquake and see what happens! I will try a smaller earthquake and then I will make it huge! I hope this will be fun! I am sure the girls will want to try and all three kids will probably have fun building some buildings for the earthquake!

Reading, writing, and math...yes, we'll get to those too. :)

Fossils

Today we are going to study fossils in science class. Our curriculum gives us a recipe to make our own clay and then we can imprint our own fossils.  I'm not sure I have all the ingredients, so I'm going to try to make salt dough fossils.

http://www.allkidsnetwork.com/crafts/animals/dinosaurs/salt-dough-fossils.asp

I think this is worthwhile activity that might make a mess, but that's what school is about, right?
This is definitely something that Courtney will enjoy! She enjoys messes!

Hopefully I can post some pictures of our creations later!

Fossils from around Nebraska
http://museum.unl.edu/research/vertpaleo/necounties/index.html

Morril Hall and Ashfall Halls Historical Park

Second tooth gone!

As we all know, when you lose one tooth, you will lose the other one within a week or so.

That happened with Courtney this week, her second bottom tooth came out on Friday.

I love seeing the hole in her mouth with two lost bottom teeth. Too bad the tooth fairy keeps forgetting to come!

Last night she was asking for an apple and I was kind of complaining that I needed to cut it up for her.  She said, "No you don't mom, I'll just eat it whole."  I responded, "With what? You don't have any bottom teeth!"

I ended up cutting it up for her. :)

New Phrase

We have been working on a new phrase around here and Christian can finally say it.

It is "Green tractors are yucky!"

Yesterday went well!

Wednesdays are going to be our eventful days at our house.  We actually won't stay at home all day and have school! We have things to do!

Yesterday the girls started their class at the homeschool learning center and AWANA last night.

We got up yesterday and only got Bible class done before we had to leave for the learning center. Their class is at 11 am and they moved the learning center, so it is a lot closer to us now! (They meet at a church, so they just moved churches).  The girls decided to take "O Pioneers" which is a very hands-on class about pioneers time. (And yes, if I could, I would totally take it too!).  Courtney was very apprehensive going yesterday.  Megan had two of her good friends also sign up to take it with her, so Courtney was sad because she didn't have any friends in the class (and sometimes when Megan's friends are around, she tends to leave Courtney out.)  But I reassured her that Megan would take care of her in class. The class is for 6-10 years old, so they were together.

I took them to their room and met the teacher.  Courtney was still a little upset and I told her I would stay for a little bit. Well, I was in the way with all the other students coming in, so stepped into the hallway with intentions to go back in, but when I looked in, she was fine, so I let her be.  I went in the "Mom's room" for the hour and talked to another mom and watched Christian.  The girls had a blast.  They learned about covered wagons, read a book, and went outside where the teacher had pioneer supplies in her car.  They drew a square the size of a covered wagon on the sidewalk and had to figure out if they were able to fit all their supplies in the wagon or not. Creative!  The teacher was also dressed up in a pioneer dress.  Courtney was also worried that she would have to write, but they didn't do that at all.

AWANA also went great last night.  Like someone said, it was almost like a first day of school!  Courtney was not hesitant at all because Matt is her small group leader. Both of them moved up to sparks and Megan and I moved up to T & T. Courtney's only worry again was that she wasn't going to have any friends in her group.  Well, it turns out that her best friend from church is in her group! Plus a couple of other of her friends from last year! I think that made her pretty happy!  She seemed to do well last night.

T & T also went well for Megan. I am a small group leader, but not of Megan's group. I don't want to teach her the verses and then have her say them right back to me plus I need a little break from my own children. :)  She ended up having a leader that is a good friend of ours, so that is pretty neat!  I am the leader of five 4th graders who I have never met before! I guess we'll get to know them.  T & T has the same structure as Sparks (handbook time, game time, council time), but they do it in a different order and do things a little bit more different. They also split the girls and boys up.  I noticed that the kids were more respectful of the teachers and when they were asked to be quiet, they were quiet. Amazing! It didn't seem as crazy as Sparks, but that might've been because I was with just the girls.  They also do the flag salute during game time instead of during council time, which was different.  They had some quick challenge games during council time, so they raced to see who could fine certain bible verses the fastest. Megan was one page away when another girls stood up.She was so close!  T & T just seemed a little bit more organized and you could definitely tell the kids were older and you could also tell there were more expectations put upon them.  It was nice!

Today we start dance, so we need to get school done! Sometime I have to get groceries again, seems like there's nothing to eat again! Oh laundry too, is somebody out of clean underwear again??

Big Day!

Today we start the craziness of extra-curriculum activities.

We are starting our class at the homeschool learning center this morning. They girls are taking a class called "O Pioneers." It sounds fascinating, I want to take it to! But Courtney informed me last night that since she won't have any friends in the class, she doesn't want to take it anymore. We'll see what today brings.

We are going to have school all afternoon and then tonight we start AWANA.  Matt is going to be a Sparks leader with Courtney and I am going to help with T & T this year.  It is really hard "teaching" all day, but I like being involved in my kids' activities.  By the end of the night, I will be exhausted.

Time to get the kiddos up, I am hoping to get some school done before our class this morning.

First tooth lost and lost again.

Courtney lost her first tooth yesterday. It's been loose for awhile and during lunch yesterday, it finally came out. She's lucky she didn't swallow it.  I got a little plastic bag and put her tooth in there for safe keeping.  I put it on the edge of the counter where I thought it would be safe.

Apparently my plan backfired.  I cleaned up the kitchen later, did the dishes, and threw all the trash away.

About supper time last night, Courtney says, "Mom, where is my tooth?"  I looked at the spot on the counter and it wasn't there! Oh no, I thought, I must have threw it away when I was cleaning up! So I went out to the garage and went through the last three bags of garbage- yes, gross and yet I did not come up with anything.
She was pretty sad and I felt pretty bad.  She also said she was playing with the sack, so maybe it is around here somewhere.

So last night, Courtney and Matt wrote a note to the tooth fairy explaining what had happened. The tooth fairy "forgot" to come last night and this morning, Courtney is convinced that the tooth fairy couldn't understand her note because dad wrote it and his handwriting was bad (As she is sitting here criticizing his handwriting- can you tell what we have been working on??)

So maybe we should type the letter so the tooth fairy can read it tonight or one written by me (this was Courtney's suggestion).  We'll see!

Much Achieved!

We got a lot achieved on Saturday.

1. Camper is cleaned out. Scrubbed down and vaccummed! It is ready to be put back into storage for two weeks.

2. I can see the playroom floor! Wow! With some help from the kids, that got achieved. The hallway is not done yet, but that is definitely a great start.

Megan cleaned her side of her bedroom, but Courtney's side and the bathroom are still disasters. (Should we make Megan clean messes that are not hers?? Poor Courtney, if she didn't make such a mess in the first place, it wouldn't take so much time to clean up!)

3.  Dishes are done and the kitchen island is still a mess.

4. Laundry is taken to the laundry room, but not started yet.

Along with all this, I found somebody to work the nursery on the 23rd, so our family can go on another weekend vacation to Nebraska City.

I also went to the eye doctor to see why my left contact is so uncomfortable to wear. I have had allergies really bad this week and that seems to be the culprit. They tried to sell me daily contacts, which were about $600 for a whole year! Forget that!! The doctor thought they would provide my eyes more moisture and be more comfortable. They are, but only during allergy season! I think I will take some benadryl, thank you!

Matt also made a couple trips to Menards and a trip to Scheel's to purchase some zero gravity lawn chairs that were on clearance.

Don't forget we watched the Husker game last night. Matt went to bed right before the safety and final touchdown. Too bad. Better luck next time!

Another busy day today. Working the nursery at church (thanks to the person who I traded with yesterday), church, lunch, take camper back to Fremont and let Christian have his first combine ride with my dad and Uncle Shawn (this is all I heard yesterday "Uncle Shawn's house" or "combine, uncle Shawn"), and then our neighborhood picnic in the evening.

We also have some school to finish up from last week before we start tomorrow.  We start our class at the Homeschool Learning Center this week, we start AWANA on Wednesday night, and Megan has dance on Thursday. Let's get back into the swing of things!

This weekend agenda...clean!

The one thing I like about homeschooling is that I don't have the time to do a lot of housework.  I mean, who likes doing housework anyway, right? But the problem is that the messes keep getting bigger and bigger throughout the week and by Friday, everything is a total disaster that you don't even want to clean it!

Here's what we are doing this weekend:

1. Cleaning out the camper from last weekend. Yep, still haven't done that yet. And I think we are planning on going camping in two weeks, so we should really get that done.

2. Cleaning the kitchen. Yikes! Haven't done dishes in a couple of days and my poor kitchen island. I think things are piled about a foot tall in some places.

3. The playroom is a lost cause. :(  You can't see the floor AT ALL and now toys are starting to come out the door. Actually the playroom is a lot of my mess. Whenever we clean the downstairs, I take a laundry basket and I put everything that goes upstairs in it and then I take it upstairs. If I need the basket, I gently dump everything out on the playroom floor. I think I did this 3-4 times last week with the girls' stuff because I needed the baskets to go camping. I will help with that mess, but some of it is definitely the girls' mess!

4. The girls' bedroom.  Megan does not make a mess in there and Courtney has definitely let it get out of control. We didn't keep track of chores this week, so we didn't make her clean it every night like we should have.  Since the playroom is out of commission, the girls had went into there anyway, got their polly pockets, and took them into their bedroom to play with them. Guess what is all over the floor? Polly pockets!  Not to mention the usual books, clean and dirty clothes, and paper and pencils. When I put Courtney to bed last night, I realized that it is time to clean out her bed again. Clean and dirty clothes, hair clips, stuffed animals, books, I am going to be amazed yet again as to what I find in her bed!

5. The girls' bathroom. Not as bad as the playroom and bedroom, but definitely needs a good cleaning! The trash is overflowing.

6. Laundry. Wait, there is no dirty laundry in my laundry room. How did that happen? Oh, have I not picked up all the dirty laundry from around the house in the last couple of days? nope, I haven't. Maybe I should put away the two baskets of clean and folded laundry before I wash some more!

7. Not to mention taking care of two sick kids. Megan had a 102 fever on Wednesday night and is all better now, but Christian had a fever last night.  Courtney was complaining of a headache yesterday plus she feels she has something stuck in her throat.  I'm not quite sure what is going on there. I think she's making herself sick because we have talked about how we are going to clean all week! (I'm just kidding, I think she really doesn't feel good!)

Motivation

This last week, we went full force on school. Every subject every day, except in the middle of English on Wednesday, Megan started to run a fever and we didn't get English done for the day.

Thursday came and I needed to catch up. Usually Megan has a hard time with English, we didn't do a lot last year, so I feel we are catching up a bit (I changed curriculums!). She usually gives me trouble and I didn't want to deal with it on Thursday. I decided to bribe, I mean motivate, her.  "Megan, I will take you to the library as soon as we are done with English." You should have seen her get busy! She understood it all and in about 5 minutes, we were done! No messing around, no acting like she didn't know anything, plain and clear and that was it!

Ah, do I bribe to take her to the library everyday??

The camper and school

We went camping last weekend and our camper is still not unpacked. Usually we would get that done right away, but this time, I just don't feel like it.  It's a lot of work and it really needs to be scrubbed down this time.  I got the necessities out, but nothing else.

You know what I would rather do...teach school!!! I love that so much more than cleaning out the camper and I am almost wondering how long I can procrastinate cleaning it out....what do you think???

Why do we have to go to school?

Another mind-opening conversation with Courtney.

We were on our way home yesterday from camping in Fremont all weekend and we were talking about school.

Me: Courtney, do you really like homeschooling? Honestly?
C: Well, I don't like any school. Not homeschooling, not public.
Me: Why not? You know you have to go to school right?
C: Why do I have to go to school?
Me: It's the law, mom and dad will get in trouble if you don't.
C: Who's going to find out anyway?  (Said with a very serious look!)

Very funny Courtney! You are going to school one way or another!!!