Winter Storms and Getting Ready for TN!!!

We've been pretty busy around here the past couple of weeks and I just realized how long it's been since I posted..wow! Last week I spent quite a bit of time filling hair bow orders the website and just living life! We got dumped on with snow so we didn't do much outside of the house. The kids had lots of fun playing in the snow with Daddy for the first time this Winter. Maddelyn was definitely not quiet about how she had not been in the snow yet. Caroline was absolutely hilarious trying to walk through snow that was calf high to her...but the little trooper still had lost of fun. I was also able to get a few shots of the house through the knee high snow.

I was able to slip away one day with a friend from Church. Pam and I spen tthe day at the Lodi Outlets...well more like just at Children's Place! :D Gotta love when they have most of the store on clearance for $1.99 - $2.99...and you have a coupon! With 4 kids it's a great time to stock up! Besides all the shopping it was a great time to just hang out with another mom and just have fun. Both of our husbands were oh so sweet to keep all 7 kids at our house for the day. Talk about an act of service for their wives!

The kids had a nice time away with my parents the other night at the Mohican Lodge. While they had a grandparent night we took advantage of just one child and headed to Columbus to celebrate Nathan's 29th birthday. Nathan said he wanted to go to Gameworks (like Dave and Busters) and then a movie, so that's what we did. He was so sweet to let me run into Trader Joes to re-stock on some of their gluten free items like noodles and crackers and then to let me run into Archivers. When you've been out of the scrapbook world for several months...it can be overwhelming for you! I have always been amazed at how quickley the scrapbooking market revolves. With 2 major shows a year when scrapbooking companies are doing new relases...the market is just flooded with new product all the time. Great for scrappers who always want new products..bad for someone who steps back for a bit and then wants to start back again! Where does one start??? I am realizing though that this year's trends are very homespun, as in things you'd find in a vintage sewing box. Hmmm, some I like and some are too altered/distresses for me. I am loving though all the cotton lace, straight pins, polka dots, and vintage ladies in aprons. Kinda hard to scrap anything for Elijah with that though. I am sooo not used to a boy, even after a year!

I've also been busy scrapbooking believe it or not! I am starting to realize just how much I miss this hobby of mine. I have done a bit of scrap'n for myself but most of it has been for my classes at the twelvefridays weekend celebration! I'm pretty excited that I've even tried out a few of those vintage trends myself on these layouts! Hopefully I'll soon have some sneak peeks to share. Less than 2 weeks to go until a relaxing weekend away! :) This is my second time going to Tennessee with the girls and this year I'll be teaching 3 layout classes. We had such a good time last year and even though I really got nothing done scrapbooking wise (besides the layouts the other teachers were teaching) I still had a lot of fun. The gals I'm going with are such sweethearts and always loads of fun. Not only are we scrapbooking all weekend but staying in an amazing cabin and hopefully shopping! If you're interested in going I know the girls are running some pretty good deals for last minute sign-ups!! You can email me for more information. You can also take a peak at what we did last year here.

I was just realizing that last year when I went to TN we had been dealing with a house full of sick kids for quite some time and we had .... the first B-A-T in the house!! Well we are currently dealing with sick kids who have had some sort of cold virus for the past 2 months!!! Caroline has bronchitis and Elijah has an ear infection. I'm praying that the little furry flying mice stay faaaaaaar away, but with or without a bat run in I'm again ready for some time away!

So with just a few days left until I leave for Tennessee, Nathan heads out to Texas for work, and the kids head to their grandparents in Pennsylvaina it's a busy flurry of packing and such. It will be nice when Nathan gets home form a work trip tomorrow since we've had sick kids all week as well as me trying to get everything ready for next week. As I tell Nathan all the time it feels like I need a week's vacation to get ready for a week away and then about 3-4 days afterwards to get caught back up again! I guess that's just life as a mom!

And Just becuase he's so stinkin cute!

Lesson Plans 2.8.10

So things got a bit off track last week and I did not realize how many lose ends we had to tie up so we delayed the start of our doctor unit until this week. So this morning was our first day with the great I wanna be a Doctor unit I picked up from The Old Schoolhouse. LOVE when you can get 10 units for $19.99!! The kids seemed to have a rough time getting started while I was reading the narrative part of the unit. this is a multi-age unit so I had to water down a bit of it for the girls. I just can't understand when they didn't want to know what an oncologist and podiatrist do?? Haha! They did really get into it though when they were able to act out different types of things you might see a doctor for. I think everyone tried the broken leg hop at least once. Tomorrow we will be discussing germs and preventative health so I'm sure they will really get into that as well. Caroline for weeks now (after her run in with pink eye) has been going around the house saying "Don't touch me I have germs!" or "Don't touch me I have THE PINK EYE!" That's a great one to announce at Walmart when you actually don't have it. It will make more than a few moms turn there head in your direction. I am hoping that the week also allows to look a bit into first aid seeing how life with 4 kids always involves a trauma of some sort!

We also began a week's study on Valentine's Day. We read a book on the history of St. Valentines and how America adopted the holiday. I was going to show them a video on it as well, but I felt like I would have to censor it too much. I was amazed at how vulgar the Roman roots of this holiday were? We did though talk about chocolate being a Valentine's Day treat and we watched 2 videos on how chocolate is made. Emma was amazed at how they shake the almond trees to harvest the nuts for candy bars. On Friday we will be having a little Valentine's Day party of our own. We had done a Valentine's Card exchange with some other homeschool kids whose moms I met on The Homeschool Lounge. The past 2 weeks we've been getting little packages in the mail filled with Valentines cards and candies that our kids have been storing in their little heart shaped baskets waiting for the 14th. I know that we will be doing some crafts that days as well and I am hoping to make some gluten free heart shaped cut out cookies as well. We'll see how it goes and if the cookies end up being jello jigglers instead?

Homeschool Lessons Plans Week of 2-1-10

This week should be a fun one in school since we have finished up our Civil War/Abraham Lincoln unit with Maddelyn and now are starting with our Health and Safety unit for Miss Em and Miss Maddie. Over the next three weeks we will be working on learning about:

Doctors (their professions/first aid/germs/hospitals/emergencies/different types of doctors)

Fire Safety (firefighters/protective clothing/stop-drop-roll/stay-low-and-go/911/fire prevention/tools firemen use)

Police Men (strangers/only good things for your body/police dogs/helping others/different types of police officers/neighborhood-street safety)

We will be pulling resources for lots of different places including Homeschool Helpers Fire Safety Lapbook, Making Learning Fun's Printables, Prekinders Activities and Links, and the great ebooks we picked up from the Old School House Magazine while they were running an amazing sale last week, 10 studies for $19.95! Totally worth me stepping out of the "never bought a homeschool e-book before" phase! We also found a great video on fire safety on where else you tube. This one really seemed to keep the kids attention and had them asking lots of questions!We will be ending our study with field trips to the Fire and Police Departments. Kinda helps when Grandma is a police dispatcher and Grandpa and Grandma as well as several other family members are firefighters!

This week Caroline is working on the color green and we will be of course taking Tuesday to learn about Groundhog's Day and Weather Prediction. Emma is working on the letter "D" since we started over with the alphabet after New Years. Long story but the previous curriculum just was not keeping her attention so we started over with a great new "Letter a Week" program and she seems to be enjoying it as well as retaining the info! Maddelyn is also going to be working with the Starfall website that I have heard is wonderful extra practice while learning to read.

Relaxed and Ready to Start the Week!

We had a wonderful time at our marriage retreat in Amish Country with our church. It was a great time of not only relaxing and spending time with my husband, but also spending some quality some with other couples from our church as well. We got home on Saturday just in time to get ready to host our first Bible study in our new house. We have started a young couples Bible Study on Saturday nights and the first book we are working on is Love and Respect by . Nathan and I did this book about 3 years ago with another group from our church. We really enjoyed it and have both said how much it changed our marriage so we wanted other couples to benefit form it like we did. Nathan and I are very excited to be hosting our first small group in our house. We knew from the time we first looked at our house that if we got it for the bid we wanted...this house was definitely God given and to be used for ministry. Part of that is using the over 4000 sq feet for small groups and young couple fellowship. So last Saturday was the first small group Bible study of what I am sure will be many over the next years to come! I think at this point we have 9 couples signed up so obviously we did hire our babysitter Ashley to sit for all the kids upstairs each week while the parents have our discussions downstairs. When doing any type of study or class for young couples, babysitting is a must...unless you want 1 or both parent missing most of each session while dealing with their kids. Thank you Ashley for being willing to help us out!!!

This week started out very smooth or at least smoother than expected for a busy Monday! The day started out with ADT setting up our security system and trying to teach us (me) how to use it. I'm afraid the local police department is going to get tired of the false alarms coming from the butter cream house on the corner??? So between me forgetting that I set the alarm and the girls tripping the motion detector or opening a door....we'll see how the week goes!