Patriotic Weekend Away

I'm writing this from the Great Wolf Hotel in Cincinnati as we are going to the Freedom Concerts for Nathan's work tomorrow. It should be absolutely amazing and full of Patriotic pride. I'm pretty excited to not only see all these true patriots who are helping out with the benefit for soldiers and their families but also to spend an evening listening to some great Country and Christian artists play for a crowd full of Patriots.

We dropped off the 4 (yes I said 4) kids to my mother-in-law on Thursday so we could come down to the concert this weekend kid-free. Even though I hated the thought of sending little Elijah to Pennsylvania, Nathan is still working this weekend. The worst part is that not only do I feel awful for sending him, then I find out today that Maddelyn is sick. She's got a fever, sore throat, and throwing up. Poor thing and all when she's so excited to be at Grandpa and Grandma's, now she's feeling awful and not enjoying her time there. We will be picking up Elijah from them on Saturday night and then the rest of the kids will be staying until next Friday so I can have some time to work on homeschool lessons for them uninterrupted. I've got lots of planning and cutting/sorting/prep work to do before we start school next Monday. I'm really getting excited about the upcoming year. The more research online I do the more excited I get about all the neat activities and topics I want to cover with them. I have decided to do the lapbooking still but I will also be pulling Math and Language Arts for sure from a few other sources and perhaps throwing in a few lessons here and there for the other topics. Basically we will be doing as much as possible from Ohio's Grade Indicators using the lapbooks we do and then filling in where ever we need to with supplements.

I told Nathan there was no way we were coming to Cincinnati without coming to Ikea as well. Four hours later I left the store with tons of stuff for our homeschool room as well as our Mater Bath and even a few Christmas items for the kids. Man I love that store! I've come pretty far with the room already but I just needed those final items for organization as well as some bookshelves, the boxes and shelve for my workbook system, and I still need a good table for the girls. We had desks last year but I like the idea of sitting with them at a table to do their school work. I of course will be posting pictures of my room when it is done, but here are a few others online that I really liked.

Loving the words under each letter. I think I might just do that same idea under our alphabet train.





We bought these today for both the school room and the master bath. Mine are a tiny bit different but I loved these! The rails were only $2.99 and the baskets were only $1.99 each! Yeah LOVE Ikea!! ------>