A quiz for you....

OK, can you all tell me what these are?--------



















Well, if you answered "markers" you would be only partially correct. I know you are wondering what I mean. Let me put it this way:

Kids + markers = lightsabers

Here are some pictures to show what I mean:




















Here is Yoda with his red saber. I think that he is ridng one of those ton-tons (or whatever they are called).
























Here is a Jedi knight on another animal. In real life that would be a pink stuffed elephant. So I suppose I need another equation.

Kids + stuffed animals = Star Wars action figures

Hey, its called being creative and frugal! Nothing like killing two birds with one stone. It's frugal because we already have a ton of stuffed animals here in the house, so there is no need to go and buy the actual plastic action figures. Below you can see the very beautiful Princess Leah:






















You can see that the Princess has her own huge stash of lightsabers or herself.

have a great day!

Just hanging out

It's Sunday afternoon and we are relaxing. Yesterday was a fun day. We went to a birthday party for a little girl from our church. Flannery was invited and the invitation was extended to the whole family. Flannery was sooooo excited to be going to a birthday party that she, personally, was invited to. It was a beautiful day and they got to play some games outside.

Saoirse is getting a bit better each day. I am not even sure if I wrote about her. She was doing this "breathing thing". That's the best way I can describe it. Finally after two and a half weeks she is getting better. Everyone else has a little something, so maybe it's just her body's way of reacting to the germs. Who know! This week we go in to get Jedidiah weighed. I am excited and scared at the same time. Other people have been commenting on how he's getting bigger. My back is getting sore trying to get him and his car seat in the van. So it seems that he has indeed gained some weight. But the truth will be known on thursday. He has definitely grown, but he is still so small. We had lunch with someone today with a baby who was two weeks older than Jedidiah and he was soooo much bigger. i have to remind myself that each baby is different and God has a plan for Jedidiah. And if that plan if for him to be small all his life, then we need to accept that. I just want to do my best to give him the best.

Here are some pictures I took the other day that didn't have time to post the other day:
















The girls have this little tiny orange laptop computer from thier doll house. They love to play with it, carry it around pretend to use it. So one night Jerry was doing some work and I thought it would be cute to get one of them with it next to him. You can barely see it in Isabella's hands in the above picture. So we decided to take the next picture, using Jerry's new laptop. (His company had just given him a new laptop to replace his old one and he needed to transfer all his stuff to the new one.)



















The next one is of the girls playing store with the puppet theater. They made these lego ice cream cones to have an ice cream shop. They come up to the window and order their flavor of ice cream and pay for it. Isabella gives them the correct change. (Hey, nothing like using those math skills!) Moira has a vanilla cone in her hand. Saoirse is reviewing her food choices.

Check out....

Isabella's post on how to field dress a deer. I warn you ahead of time, it is pretty gruesome. But I figure it should count for a writting assignment.

We have been busy catching up on school. We got behind due to many things. Only a couple of days behind, nothing major. Jedidiah has been really fussy. We think he may have an ear infection. But not sure at this point. Giving it another day to see if he goes back to being his happy little self. Saoirse had this breathing thing going on. Really weird. She kept taking in these big breathes. It freaked me out to say the least. She did this every 5-15 seconds ALL day long! I took her to the doctors. We decided that since the benedryl was helping (at that point) we would wait to see what happened. Well she got worse the next day so I took her to after hours. They said she had an ear infection. I thought they were joking. Ok, not really, but it would be too long to get into here. So I took the presciption home with me, along with a bunch of other freebie meds. I got the inhler, but it didn't do a thing for her. So my sister thought that maybe she did have an ear infection and the breathing in deep was her way to pop her ears. Hmmmm, sounded good to me! No one else could tell me what was wrong with her. It's been 4 days of antibiotics and she is breathing better each day. Thank the Lord!!!!

So now we are trying to get back to normal here. I have some cute pictures to share, but will have to do so later as I hear Jedidiah crying. Poor thing is having a hard time going to sleep, even though he's been up for almost 6 hours!

Have a great day!

A con to homeschooling in the south

Can you believe a die hard homeschooler is going to admit that there are inded cons to homeschooling? Shocking, I know!! Unfortunately it is a con for the poor children. Yes, sad but true. And this con is only found in certain parts of the country. You see I woke up this morning to this:




















That would be SNOW!!!! Now for all my northern family it still comes as a great laugh that when there is ANY amount of frozen white stuff, everything is CLOSED. So all the shcool going children have the day off. And this is where the con comes in. As homeschoolers, it was still a school day. Yes, my poor children still had to do their school in spite of the snow while all the other school going children had the day off. There you have it, true confessions of a homeschoolig mom. But I'm not all evil, I let them go out and play in the snow right away. You have to get to it right away, because there is no telling how long it might last! They spent about 20-30 minutes out there and came in for some hot chocolate. Hot chocolate before breakfast breaks all sorts of rules ;-)

And for anyone who thinks we are too easy on our kids, well here is a pic to prove that we work them to the bone:


















I'm only joking of course. Actually this is a picture of a 2 year old who didn't have a nap and had been given some benedryl an hour earlier. Poor thing. But it was too cute to not take a picture first before getting her in bed. Please pray for Saoirse. She has been having some breathing "issues" for about 8 or 9 days now. I am assuming it is only allergies. But it's been every day and sometimes it is worse than others. I am taking her to the doctors tomorrow morning. I don't want her living on benedryl.

Here is a picture of too cute Jedidiah in his own bed!! This is a new thing for our family. All our kids have slept in our bed. Jedidiah still does as well. But he is going to be able to roll around soon and needed a safe place to sleep. When he wakes up at night to nurse I will just bring him into our bed where he will spend the rest of the night. But for nap time and for the early part of his night time sleep he will be in his crib.




















And last but not least here is a picture of our stupid dog. She needs to go to a doggie homeschool or something :-)




















She is only stupid because she is sitting out in the freezing cold, all wet from playing with the girls when there is a HUGE dog house right behind her where she could be warm and cozy!

ok, Isabella is really wanting me to tell you all that she has learned how to field dress a deer. Well theoretically that is. They (Jerry and Isa) looked it up on the internet. It is pretty disgusting.

I am almost done with making a small crochetedbaby blanket. I wish I had better colors for it. I will take a picture of it when I am done.

Ok, I have to go. The dishes are calling my name. I'm trying to ignore them, but if I ignore them any longer they will get up and come after me!

Creations

I am showcasing some new creations. One is mine, another is Isabella's, another Flannery's and another is a friend from church's. Take a moment to look.

Ok, the copy and paste mode is NOT working on this bloggin site right now!! UGH! I wanted to put captions under each of the pictures, but will have to give my commentary off the side, or wherever it may end up once I hit the publish button.

The first picture is Flannery's rendition of her End of Game Tunnel. At the end of the girls' soccer games the parents line up opposite each other and hold their hands up to make a tunnel for the kids to run through. Here she made her Playmobil people make the tunnel. Very cute.





Here is Isabella's Old Life Cabin. You see there is enough room for a horse and some small farm animals. A lovely table for 3 (the other chair broke). And plenty of room for the cat to roam around. (The cat is on he green roofing above the lodging area.)










Here is something that we just received last night. A friend from church made this quilt, that Jedidiah is laying on. It was made for him. It's called a prayer quilt. She prayed for him as she made it. I think it is woderful! Jedidiah really likes it as well. I had it laying over the back of the couch and he was just staring at it.













Here are some hats that I crocheted over the weekend. I wanted to send them to the organization called Newborns in Need. They are for premie babies and the hats were very quick to make. The things on top of the hats are flowers. Well except for the hat to the left, it has some curly q's.








Ok, so this is not a manmade creation, but beautiful non the less. Just some cuties we have here in the house. :-)

A new look

OK, I'm not crazy over this one, BUT they are Jerry's favorite colors. So I thought I would change to this one, for a little while at least. For me, gray is depressing. It is the color of a cloudy sky, a drab day lingering on and on....But I shall persevere (hee, hee).

Not much going on here. It was a cleaning day. Although not much cleaning got done. Or so it seems. Sometimes it seems to get messier before it gets better. It was a beautiful day. I went for a walk. It seems the rain caused a bunch of salamanders and lizards to come out. Unfortunately the met their demise on the road.

We have church tomorrow. Then a quiet day. We have a lot of food to put together for the next day. I have been doing the soaking of the grains. We had the pancakes today. The girls LOVED them. They were soooo soft, you wouldn't think they were made of all whole wheat. It's a "keeper" recipe.

Have a great day!

A whole 11 pounds!!!

That's how "big" Jedidiah is now! Which is actually a good thing. That means he gained a whole pound in one month as opposed to only one pound in two months like he did between his 3rd and 5th month. He went down a bit on the chart in his height as well, but not too much. The doctor said that because we seem to have found the cause of his lack of weight gain and he is sleeping better and making more messy diapers then he should be o.k. We have to come back in for a weight check in one month instead of waiting till his next well baby check up at 9 months. As long as he gains another pound then we are fine, if not we will have to talk with a breastfeeding consultant. He feels pretty confident that he will catch up. Catch up to his head that is! His head is in th 50th percentile. His body is below the 1 percentile. So he needs to fatten up and sprout some (his height is off the chart as well---below the chart that is). He said that wherever kids are when they are 3 years old is where they stay. So we have a bit of time to get him caught up.

Today was a beautiful day. We had a picnic lunch outside. The girls decided they wanted braids in their hair. That led to them thinking that they looked like the girls in Little House on the Prarie. So they renamed themselves. Isa was Mary, Moira was Laura, Flannery was Carrie and Saoirse was Grace. They insisted that they were permanently changing their names that way! Ummmm I don't think so :-) If we wanted your names to be those we would have named you that ourselves. Ahhh children. After the picnic we had an unsuccesful nap time. Can we say, "Early bedtime."? I know I can. Then we did a quick clean of the house using the principles I read in the online book. She calls it the Clean Sweep. Very effective. Then we had a yummy dinner of taco salad, a family favorite.

Of course we had a sprinkling of school here and there. The girls actually did most of it on their own. Usually after I teach Moira's math lesson I will read each math problem to her for her written work. Her reading skills are improving so I thought I would see how she could do to do it on her own. She did pretty well. All except for the mixed numbers!! Which my sister knows about. Let's just say it's a good thing God answers prayers for patience! We have been working on fractions for some time now. Simple stuff. They have you color 3/4 of a square or they show you a circle with 1/2 of it shaded and ask you to tell them how much is shaded. She was a pro at that. Got the concept very quickly. However....they now added whole shaded shapes to the mix. So they color 3 and 3/4 squares and have her write how much is shaded. She doesn't get it! We go over it again and again. I say, "How many whole squares are shaded?". And she'll look at me like I have two heads! Go figure. She'll catch on shortly I am sure.

Good night all.

Just some ramblings...

Hey Angie-----I've tried posting to you blog, but it won't let me! Ugh! I will call you soon though.

Well not much to write really. Just had a few minutes. Jedidiah had a hard time going to sleep this evening. He had a nice long nap this morning-3 hours! But then we were out all afternoon and he only had a cat nap between the hours of noon and 7 pm!! Poor little guy. We went to get his birth certificate.....finally! You have to have proof that the baby is yours, so you need an ultrasound report or a letter from a pastor saying you were indeed pregnant. We had an ultrasound and our midwife sent it to us through email. However it was sent to the trash folder. Something yahoo mail will do sometimes if you have an email with an attatchment. So it got "thrown out". Thankfully we were able to get ahold of her to fax it directly to the vital records department. Then you have to bring some mail that has your physical address on it. So I got that together. But then last minute I realized that they would need the address to our last residence. You have to apply for the birth certificate in the county that the birth took place in. But we moved when he was 6 weeks old to a different county. Ugh. So off I went to search for old mail with our old address on it. It all worked out in the end.

We got a new to us extra fridge for free!!! It's huge! We got it off of free cycle. I am not ure the whole story of why they didn't want it. It had a bunch of mold in it. But Jerry sprayed a bunch of bleach on it and it is on its way to being a useable fridge. It's a nice one too. The only 'problem' is that it doesn't fit in the space that we hoped it would in the laundry room. Oh well, that just means that our laundry table needs to stay out in the family room. I think once Jedidiah gets big enough to where he's not napping so often then I could move the table to our bedroom. We have a lot of room in there for it. We have the room in our family room as well. Its just when we have company over....well ya know it's a bit odd to have stacks of clean, folded laundry on a 5 foot table in your family room. But i could imagine that the table being out of site might mean that the laundry goes out of my mind...so maybe moving it is a bad idea.

Jedidiah has his 6 month appointment tomorrow. I'll let you all know how that goes.

I've "enrolled" Flannery in our school. I decided to start her off after the holiday break. I'm starting small, just reading and math. Of course Saoirse is feeling left out now and insists that I teach her to read as well. Her attention span was longer than Flannery's! But for us that's not too suprising. Flannery has a big heart. She loves to hug and show her love for you in physical ways. She's a ball full of energy, the energizer bunny all the way. She can sit and draw for a long time. Or when she gets the notion in her head she will copy letters over. But when it's not in her timetable....well keeping her bottom on the seat is close to impossible. She knows how to write all her letters and knows what they are. The funny thing is that I've never spent more than a minute here and there teaching her!! Her sisters have taught her as well.

The girls are all enjoying their new sign language words. The videos we got them for Christmas had a lot of animal signs on them. We also got a series of videos called "Creatures that Defy Evolution". We learned a lot from those videos.

Ok, I need to talk myself into getting up and start preparing for tomorrow. Jedidiah's appointment is at 10:30.

A new year

HAPPPY NEW YEAR

Well we started new years eve with anticipations of having a chicken fajita dinner, and brownies. We had bought some sparkling grape juice for us to clink in the new year. We had planned on putting the kids to bed at normal time and then waking them abot 10 minutes before the new year. BUT.....my first clue that something was up was when Moira only asked for a small piece of browie (she asked me to cut it smaller!). Then on our way to get milk Moira started crying that she felt she had to throw up. Oh fun. So she cried the entire time until we got home. I left them with Jerry and I ran out to get some popcicles. By the time I got home Jedidiah had just woken up and he was crying up a storm. He was evertired from a long day. He settled down. Phew, no some quiet time.....yeah what was i thinking. Isabella later stabbed herself with a pencil (she walked into one that was on the floor) in the foot.

So we did NOT wake the girls up for the new year. I fell asleep and woke up at about 12:01. Oh well, bet luck next year. We did have a funny for the night. Right after I woke up I heard Jerry ask Moira if she was o.k. She had come out of her room. I jumped up thinking that she was sick to her tummy. Jerry repeated himself, to which Moira answered, "I think Saoirse has the clothes." Haa, haa, she was sleep walking. So anyone have any new years resolutions? Me? ummm, I'll have to think about it! No seriously I do. After reading all of those free online books that I linked to about a month or so ago I really want to draw closer to the Lord. My walk with Him has been a bit slack. The other thing would be to revise our way of eating. I will be glad to be rid of the last of the brownies and be clear of sweets. I can really notice a difference in how I feel when I have sugar running through my veins. Yuck!

Well I hear the baby waking. I have a long list of things to do today:
Do a "clean sweep" of the whole house (includingcleaning the bathrooms and kitchen)
Totally clean the laundry room.
Move the laundry table back to the laundry room (it's been in our family room due to dogs lodging in our laundry room).
Take Christmas tree down.
Make grocery list.
Go grocery shopping.
Check to make sure I have everything ready for tomorrow for school as our school break ends.

Ok, I'm tired just thinking about it all! :-)