Saturday, December 28, 2013

Lack of clothing?

What do you do with a child who every. single. morning says she has nothing to wear?? Seriously, every morning!

And what do I say ever. single. morning? "Yes, you do. Go find something."

I admit that this child does not have a LOT of clothes because she is too skinny and it's hard to find clothes to fit her, but she has clothes to wear!!

I also admit that sometimes I am behind on the laundry, but she usually has SOMETHING in her closet or in her drawers or even in the laundry baskets in my room or on the dryer. She just has to find it.

I am also sorry that sometimes she just doesn't "feel" like wearing certain clothes that she has in her room.

I am also sorry that she has clothes in her room, but she just doesn't like them, but they fit perfectly!

After we argue about it for awhile and she sheds a few tears, I usually walk away and tell her to just go find something again. And you know what? Every single day she does!

I even took her shopping the other day and we bought more clothes for her!! Three bags between Walmart and Target!! And today, she still had NOTHING to wear! That about sent me over the edge....

I think I will say to her tonight, "If you say to me that you have nothing to wear tomorrow, I am going to take ALL your clothes and put them in a trash bag for a day. Then you will really have NOTHING to wear." Would that be too mean or would that teach her a lesson???

AHHHHHHH!!!!!


Friday, December 27, 2013

Friday!

It is two days post Christmas.  The mess is finally cleaned up from Christmas Eve and the dishes are finally put away!  The kids are loving their new toys!! We are all loving the free time, but honestly, I do miss the schedule! I have no reason to get up in the morning, so I don't. :)  I wait for all three children to get up before I get up!  We usually end up getting breakfast about 9-9:30 and we are usually out of our pajamas by noon. This is also my summer schedule.

Anyway, today I have something planned. We are going to the zoo!! It is supposed to be 50 degrees out today and I want to take advantage of the warm weather while I can.  My other reason for wanting to go is that we have been studying animals from around the world (mostly Africa right now) and I want to go see these animals.  We also saw on the news that Megan's favorite animals at the zoo are turning one this weekend. These are the lion cubs! I can never get her away from that display!! She thinks they are so cute!! And they are.:)

We are going to head out about 12:30 and stay all afternoon. It is also a great chance to go get some exercise.  We might watch an IMAX, I'm not sure.  Honestly, I just want to stay outdoors!

We still have three more Christmas parties in the next week and a half, so we're not quite done with Christmas yet.  I still need to get more presents.  Hopefully we can get all the decorations down and get our house back to normal before we start school on the 6th. 

Since school came up, I got asked today, "Do you ever wish your kids went to public school?" My answer, "NOPE!!" Then I listed off the reasons why I am glad they are at home and that was pretty much the end of the conversation!

Anyway, off to get ready for the zoo!

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Bedtime!

It's 10:25 pm on Christmas Eve and my kids are still WIDE awake!

They got new lego sets for Christmas and are determined to get them together before they go to bed.

Megan's set has 695 pieces and Courtney's has 423.

I think we are going to have to call it quits for the night and resume in the morning.

Mom and Dad don't want to stay up any longer. (Actually, I think Matt went to bed already!)

Ice cream!

I got a new ice cream maker this summer and I could never get it to work right. It is one where the bucket for the ice cream is already frozen and you just have to plug it in and it will make you ice cream.

The problem: the ice cream bucket does not stay frozen, therefore, it does not make ice cream.

I wanted to have ice cream tonight, so I came up with a solution.

I put the ice cream maker in the garage where it is nice and cold. (I thought about putting it outside.)

Guess what? It worked!!! I actually have ice cream!!

Too bad this won't work in the summer. :(

Christmas Eve!

This week has been weird.  No school. No outings. No dance class. Not much going on!

I think we are enjoying it though!

Today is super busy! We will go to church tonight at 4 and then come back home, have a nice meal together, and open presents. This is our night as a family!

A couple years ago, we started the tradition of having ham balls (Matt's favorite) and cheesy potatoes for a Christmas Eve meal.  I don't think we did this last year because there were too many yet on a strict diet, but this year, I am the only one left watching what I eat almost every meal.  We are going to make ham balls this year, but I will be doing some substituting. :)  Of course, Matt asks, "They are going to be REAL hamballs, right?" Sure thing!!!! I will try my best!!!

There is no way to substitute the sour cream and cheese in the cheesy potatoes, so I will make those and just not eat them. I think I am going to make myself a side of hash browns. We are also going to have real green beans (not frozen or out of a can).  For dessert, I found a recipe for hot apple topping using apple pie filling. I bought some REAL ice cream for the rest of the family and I will be making myself some homemade rice ice cream this afternoon!

We are also going to get out our good dishes (and wine goblets) and eat at the dining room table. The kids' favorite part is drinking the sparkling grape juice! I have two bottles on hand because it is just that good!

After we get done eating, we will all move to the piano room and start on the presents. Before we open the presents though, we always read the Christmas story out of the book of Luke. Matt always does this.  Then we each take turns opening presents.  The kids each get three and it looks like Matt and I each have three ourselves.  Well, the kids will have three if the post man brings their last one today in the mail. If not, they will just get two for now.

I'm looking forward to a memorable evening! Now to get busy!!!

PS The mailman did bring their final gift today, so I am happy and the girls will be happy too!!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Good bye corn....;(

Another food bites the dust! Ugh!!

This last month, I have had some major reactions to something. 
1.  new IBS symptoms
2. extreme moodiness. I am usually pretty patient with my kids (you need to be to homeschool!) but I have not been very patient or nice on  a couple of occasions lately!
3.  major sinus headaches. Remember, I have been having sinus headaches since May, but now they have been 10 x worse!!
4. breakout of acne
5.  fingers swelled
6. cyst on right knee hurt and painful
7. Drop in blood sugar after I eat
8. Fuzzy thinking/ can not think straight
9. Eye vision affected
10. heartburn

Some of these have been coming on within 15 minutes of eating, so I knew it had to be something I was consuming, but what??  I thought I had this all figured out!

These are a lot of my symptoms that I had experienced before I got diagnosed with food allergies, so I knew I was back to square one with something.

These symptoms have been building the last couple of months and finally I said enough is enough and I went to go see my doctor.

Her first question, "What do you eat a lot of?" My answer: corn! I eat a lot of corn chips, corn cereal, cornstarch, corn noodles etc.  I probably eat corn at least twice a day.  My doctor's next thought was that I had built up an intolerance to corn! She said that many people who go gluten-free usually come down with a corn intolerance because many people replace their gluten with corn. She said she has seen this before and this is probably what is going on with me. The solution: take out corn! NOOOOO!!!  She told me to keep a food journal for two weeks to see if I could correlate corn to any of my symptoms.  She also said corn is an inflammatory food and it will inflame parts of your body and could very well be causing all my sinus issues!

I wanted to see if this theory was true right away, so as I pulled away from the doctor last Thursday, I had a sandwich bag of Honeycomb in my purse. I was hungry, so I pulled it out.  If you don't know, Honeycomb is half corn/ half oats.  I ate about half the sack and by the time I got home, I could already feel the headache coming on.  For the next three hours, I could not see clearly, could not think straight, and I was on edge with my family.  It finally wore off early in the evening and I could see straight again.

The next day, we had a homeschool Christmas party at my house and we decorated cookies.  The person who brought sugar cookies and frosting happen to leave the leftovers at my house. Guess what I got into right before I went to bed?? the frosting!!! YUMMY!!! I checked the label and it had nothing in it that I could not eat, but it did contain cornstarch.  I ate quite a bit of it because it was so good!!! Well, 15-20 minutes later, I got a huge sinus headache again! I went to bed and thought that I would just sleep it off. I was wrong! Christian came into my room at 6:30 am and I seriously got mad at him because he woke me up! I also got mad at Matt because he wanted to take Courtney out for breakfast and I told him that it wasn't fair!! I was really mad! (This is where I realize I cannot control this and I stay away from my family!! This is very unlike me.)  By about 10 am, the moodiness had subsided and I felt like my regular self again! I think I actually took a couple of Advil that morning!

I believe that corn is my true culprit and every time I don't eat corn, I don't feel bad and I treat everybody nicely!!

I am so sad to have to give up corn, but if it makes me feel better, it is worth it!

Tonight I finally had a chance to sit down and look up the symptoms of corn allergies and sure enough, every single one of my symptoms are on the list!! Except for the heartburn, my doctor thought that was from eating too many tomatoes. :)

My doctor also told me that I should try to get back on a few other foods, especially the ones that weren't so high on my allergy test. She said I should try chicken, blueberries, peanuts, and almonds and any other ones that had a lower number. She told me not to try to get back on gluten because that is also an inflammatory (like corn) and would probably make my troubles worse at the moment.

Here I go again!



Thursday, December 19, 2013

Found Library book....oops!

Before we went on our trip, I checked quite a few books out from the library on all the cities we were going to visit. I wanted to learn a little bit before we left.  I even took some of them on our trip.

When we got home, I took the whole stack back to the library. I was convinced I had them all back, I had kept them all in one place and honestly, I rarely lose a library book.

About a couple weeks later, I noticed that I was getting a fine on a library book and it was a book about Boston that I checked out before our trip.  I called the library and said that I was positive that I returned it and they took the fine off my account (they will do this 3 times) and I left it at that.

Guess what I found today IN my couch today?? the library book about Boston!!!

Should I just put it in the drop box at the library and let them figure it out or actually go confess that I was wrong???

A 3 year old and scissors!

Guess what my 3 year old discovered? Scissors!!!

The problem is that he is left-handed and we only have right-handed scissors, but that doesn't stop him!

He sat at the kitchen table today for about 45 minutes and cut paper!

He started with a pink pair and then said those were "girl" scissors, so he ran upstairs and got a green pair.

Then he said those didn't work very well and went upstairs and got a pair that cut zigzag.

(I guess I shouldn't have let my 3 year old go through the house with scissors??)

They were all kid-friendly ones, so I wasn't too worried!

In the end, I had a bunch of cut up paper on my kitchen table today, but it sure kept him busy while I worked with Courtney!!

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Namib Desert

Tomorrow we are going to be looking at the Namib Desert in Africa. We are going to study the animals that live there as we continue to look at the different continents and their habitats.

One animal that our book mentions is the dancing lizards.  It states that these lizards do a special dance to keep their feet cool and they even swim through the sand! I found a video showing these dancing lizards on YouTube.  We are definitely going to watch it tomorrow! It is amazing!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rkkKyYCxio

We are also going to see how beetles get water for themselves in the desert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsMJNNshPOs

One last animal is the elephant and how they can survive in the desert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0v5MIdyxZc

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Christmas Shopping

I think I am about done Christmas shopping and I have only stepped into one store! I LOVE online shopping!! I have to admit though, I have probably spent more time in front of my computer deciding what to get than I would have in a store, BUT I could order items for my kids without them knowing! (And spend hours searching and searching for the exact Legos they want AND make sure I get them at a decent price!)

Boxes are starting to appear at the front door and of course, they want to know what is in them, even Christian has joined the fun! I found the easiest thing to do is to hide them right away and then they forget all about them!

Stocking stuffers have been a little bit harder, but I managed to get a few things online.  I don't really want to go out by myself for just one or two little things, so they are just going to get what I ordered online! I think they will be just fine with what I have planned.

I just hope everything that I need gets here by next Tuesday.  There are some things that I ordered that I don't need until the next week, so it is ok if they come after that.

Did I mention I have also been ordering some school curriculum along with the Christmas presents? Megan is going to finish her spelling book shortly after Christmas, so I just added that onto one of my orders. I also ordered a book of patriotic songs for school.  This is something I have wanted for awhile and decided it would be a Christmas present for myself. I can do that, right??

Matt also ordered my present online, but when it showed up at the door last week, it was already in a box, so they didn't put it in an extra box to hide what it was. They just stuck a label on the original box and sent it on its way! It is something we had talked about getting for awhile now, so he eventually got it for me.  Megan and I snuck out to get him something the other night and I got it wrapped before he could peek, I hope he likes it! I know Megan keep a secret!

I still have a list of other people to buy for which I MAY need to go shopping at a real store! I need to think about those presents some more and those parties are not until after Christmas, so I have a little bit of time yet. :)



Monday, December 16, 2013

Back to it!

We are back to school today. It is our last week, just like the public school kids. :)

I am not so sure if the kids want to take a break, but we are.  We might do some math during the break, but that is it.  Ok, I guess if the kid are begging to have school, we might, but there will plenty to do with the holidays!

I also volunteered to have a homeschooling Christmas party here on Friday, so I need to clean the house before then. Honestly, I think I volunteer to have parties just so I have an excuse to clean!!

Packages have started coming in the mail from my online shopping and the girls want to know what is in them so bad!! I think they have a clue what is in there when the box says "legos."  Hmmmm.

I also see kids' projects from Thanksgiving hanging around my house yet, I need to get those down and get more Christmas decorations up! I can't believe Christmas is just a week away!

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Courtney's turn

Since Matt took Megan to Narnia the other morning, Courtney thought it was only fair that daddy take her somewhere too!

For the past couple of years, Matt has taken the girls out to breakfast on a Saturday morning. He doesn't do this all the time, but maybe once every couple of months. He takes each girl separately for some one-on-one time with him.

Today, Matt decided to take Courtney out for breakfast to have some on-on-one time with her too! She had been talking about this the last three days and she was super-excited!  As soon as she woke up this morning, she jumped out of bed and before I knew it, she was dressed and ready to go!

I'm glad that Matt does these special things with his girls!!

I told him that he has to take me out next. :)

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Super fast!!

As many of you know, Megan is NOT a morning person!!

I have never seen her jump out of bed, get dressed, and be ready to leave in less than 10 minutes! She did exactly that today!!

About a month ago, a local homeschooling mom had put out an email saying that she had tickets available to the school production of "Narnia" that is at the Rose Theatre right now. I immediately thought of Megan and Matt.  They have read through the whole stories and loved it!  (Plus tickets were only $5.00 because it is for schools instead of the usual $20 we would otherwise have to pay!)
I sent my check in for tickets for those two and was able to get my check to her in time to still get tickets!

Today is the day of the play.  Matt had told Megan last night that he would take her out for breakfast too, so she set her alarm for 7:15 this morning and when it went off, she popped right out of bed! She was dressed and ready to go by 7:25!! I have never seen Megan move this fast in the morning!! She has such a reputation around here for being slow in the mornings that we nicknamed her "sloth" for awhile. " :)

They are going to go out for breakfast and then they have to be to the Rose Theatre by 9:15 to get their seats. It is a 2 hour production with an intermission.  They are going to love it!


(But then a couple of days ago, Courtney decided she wanted to go to. Megan said, "No, I am just going with my daddy!")

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Titles and Names of Jesus

Just need this for something we are going to do in school tomorrow. :)
http://www.abetterhope.com/whois/titles.html

Monopoly!!


This is how we spent two hours last night...playing Monopoly!!

We had been at home all day because it was just too cold to go anywhere! We had already put up the tree and all the Christmas decorations, we had watched too much TV, and it was only 6:30 pm!

I suggested we play a game together, so the girls went and got Monopoly.  By the time we got it set up and going, it was about 7 pm.  We sat around our table until 8:45 playing this game!

But since you cannot finish a game of Monopoly in less than two hours, we had to let it be until today.  This was kind of hard to do because we all had properties, and houses, and we had gotten into a rhythm!

After we got home from a work event for Matt today, we gathered back around the dining room table to finish our game.  Matt had a couple houses on his properties, I had some, Megan had three on some of hers, but Courtney was definitely taking the game more seriously we were!  She was proud of her properties and houses that she had and she thought it was great that she was taking money from everyone in the form of rent.  She was also doing a great job counting out money and following along.

We had gotten to the point where we knew any move could send someone into bankruptcy.  Every move was calculated and there were certain spaces you knew would cost a LOT if you landed on them.  (Megan had three houses on some of hers!)  There was a point when you were glad when you got sent to jail just to avoid a certain part of the board!

I thought I would be out on a certain move, but then I sold some houses and mortgaged some properties and Matt had to do the same thing, but then Courtney landed on one of Megan's spots that had three houses and her rent was $700!!  Poor Courtney had less than $200 in her possession, so Matt and I said she had to start selling back houses. This poor thing started to sob and cry! No, not cry, almost wailing!! She did not want to sell back her houses!!  We sold them back for her and went ahead and mortgaged her properties and she was not taking this well!! 

Matt and I know this is how the game works, so we were just sort of laughing about it, we certainly did not expect this out of Courtney! (Megan, yes!)  Matt and I eventually figured out that she could not come up with enough money and she had to declare bankruptcy.  Game over! 

It took us quite awhile to get Courtney calmed back down! It was almost unbelievable, I don't think I have seen her this upset in a long time! She wasn't even this upset when we had to put Dell down!!

She then said that she wanted to play again- just her and dad, but that didn't happen.  Matt sat on the couch with her for awhile until she stopped crying and we were able to eat supper and enjoy the finale of "The Amazing Race" tonight.

I don't know how long it will be until we play Monopoly again!!  

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Frozen Pipes?

Around this time of year, I have to take caution when doing laundry.  Our pipes to our washing machine are located on an outside wall and we learned the hard way that when the pipes freeze, we will have a flood!! And it won't just flood around the washing machine, but water will run down the wall into the basement!

I wonder if they are frozen now with it being 3 degrees out!

I haven't done laundry all week and pretty soon, I will be hearing, "Mom, I don't have anything to wear!!"

Maybe I should get a space heater in my laundry room before things get too far behind!!

(If we have a flood now, it would be really bad because since our original flood, we have finished off an office for Matt in the basement which is directly under my laundry room.  Flood= ruined office for Matt, so I cannot let that happen again!!)

Friday, December 6, 2013

My thoughts for today. :)

1.  Days like this, I am really glad I homeschool and don't have to go anywhere. brrr!
2. I am also thankful that Matt doesn't have to go anywhere!
3.  But there are certain times that you just NEED to get out!
4.  It is going to be a long winter if we don't get out!
5.  I need to find some place I can take ALL my children to go run around. I saw that a community center was opening their gym up to homeschoolers on certain afternoons, which is definitely an option.  They were also going to open up their pool on Tuesday afternoons. Both of these options are really cheap, but they are also all the way across town!
6.  All our windows and doors leak plus the fireplace. Matt says we just need new windows and doors. :(  He said he could put plastic over them, but he said he would have to put the plastic over the shades, which means I couldn't open the shades all winter. NO WAY!! I would rather put more warm clothes on than not be able to see outside!
7.  Courtney had to write a short journal entry today for her writing assignment. I asked her to write four sentences and she burst out crying! She didn't want to do it!  After awhile, she came back to it and wrote it and was actually having fun with it!! I read over it and she had everything capitalized and periods at the end of her sentences!! This is something that we have been working on and I was thoroughly impressed! She only had three words wrong (she forgot the last letter) in the entire entry which was five sentences long! She is really putting things together when it comes to writing and reading. Yay for learning!! (She is also reading a lot smoother than she used to!)
8.  Megan also had to write a journal entries for her writing assignments this week, but she already has a journal, so I let that count. :)
9.  I am hoping to get the Christmas tree up this weekend AND get my Christmas cards/ letter out.  This always takes forever...
10.  We have been doing daily Christmas devotions and singing Christmas songs everyday during school. I really think they should know the traditional Christmas songs! They wouldn't be doing that at public school!! (Again, yay for homeschooling!)

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

My little Native American girl!

If I post a cute picture of Christian, I should post a cute picture of Courtney. :)

If you ever wondered if Courtney was creative, just look at this picture.

 
 Things to note:
1.  Her bow and arrow is made out of pipe cleaners and she was serious about it!
2.  She stored extra "arrows" in her quiver she made that is on her back, this too was tied around her neck by pipe cleaners.
3.  I had braided her hair, but she made her headpiece out of construction paper and a real feather she had in her playroom.
 
Creative, huh? I think she is pretty cute!! 

Sweet Dreams!

This was a picture I took of Christian two nights ago. I really wanted to post it on Face.book and say, "You know you are having sweet dreams when you fall asleep next to your tractor magazine!"


New Internet ....and cable?

We have known for a long time that Cen.tury Link would be coming into our area. C.ox Cable just raised their rates again and it's kind of ridiculous what we pay for Internet! We don't have phone or cable, but it was still expensive.  There were also some other reasons we were looking into switching.

The other day, somebody from Cen.tury Link knocked on our door and said they were finally in our area! We were pretty excited!!! 

We signed up and today, they came and hooked up our new Internet AND television cable.  We only did this because it was $5 more per month to bundle it. We really don't want/ need cable, but we went with it anyway. They even have three months of free DVR/ HD TV!

Do you know the last time we had cable?? We cancelled it when we were still living in our old house!  We moved to this new house in 2008, so it has been over five years! And have I missed it? nope!

Tonight, as the cable was being hooked up,  guess what all five of us were doing? Sitting in front of the TV! Exactly the reason why I don't want/ need cable!

I hope my kids continue to turn the TV off unprompted and continue to play and not sit in front of the TV!!

This deal goes on for a year and then it goes up by $50, I can tell you already that we will have the cable cancelled by then!




Monday, December 2, 2013

Thanksgiving is over...

We had a great thanksgiving celebration!  Three parties, three trips back home, lots of family. :)
We have so much to be thankful for this year!!!

But now that is all over and we are back to life! Matt had a four day weekend, so he was back to work today.  We took Thursday off from school, but did do half a day on Friday (remember, I have to do four days of math, spelling, English no matter what!), so I finished those subjects up then.  We got back to school full time today  I could tell the girls had a good break, they sat in their chairs, they didn't argue or complain, they learned and it went much smoother than we had left it last week!

Now that we are into Christmas season, I changed things up a bit with school.  A couple of weeks ago, I bought a book on amazon called The Christmas Countdown. For every day in December, it has a short Bible reading, a devotional, questions, and a family activity.  I thought this would be very appropriate for school! (We are going to put our bible curriculum away until January).

Today the reading was from Malachi and it talked how we should be anticipating Jesus' coming.  It talked about not getting so caught up in the commercialism of Christmas, but to get our hearts ready for Jesus! The craft was to make an advent wreath, which we didn't get to today. I can either go to Hobby Lobby and get all the pieces or I can cheat and order one off of Amazon. I wasn't quite prepared for today, so neither one got done! Hopefully I will get this done though, I think an advent wreath would be a great thing!  We will not do every family activity, but maybe 2-3 times a week. As I was looking ahead today, I noticed that we need to make gingerbread cookies at the end of the week. That looks like fun! I may call a few friends over to make them together. :)

Anyway, off to science!