Outside time

A few days of pictures from the out of doors.

Just starting out.  Bucket in hand.

Leaves are always a good thing to fill a bucket with.

Jed becomes apprehensive over the goats.

This picture and the next are out of order.  This would be Jed after I have reassured him that the big goats are not in the middle area.

This is Jed worried that the big goats may come after him.  They have a tendency to nibble on his ears, and he does NOT like that!

Moira decked out in a dress and work boots.  Who says you can't have style when you are raking leaves?

Jed and Jonah love to push Aubrey on the swing.  Jonah prefers to twist Aubrey around.

As you can see, Aubrey doesn't mind one bit.

Jed's turn to rake the leaves.  He still prefers the two colored boot look.

Aubrey enjoys being on the ground now to explore.  Unfortunately that involves test tasting!  Yuck!

He was showing Saoirse his new found treasures, which dropped out of his hand right before I clicked the button.

Flannery's swing is up and running.

Trying for that sun flare look.

I had to ask Flannery to be still so I could take a picture.  Getting a still picture of Flannery is hard to come by.

Contemplating life.

The sky looked really beautiful the other day, with the moon out.

One of our favorite rocks (the big one on the left).

Jonah was very upset that he missed out on helping Daddy fix the porch pickets.  He had to make up for lost tool time :-)

He decided to dig up a bunch of dirt with the hammer.  At least I didn't have to worry about a banged up finger!

These wood boards serve as a ladder for the girls to get over our back fence.  Sometimes they have to catch a chicken, or an escaped goat, and with no back gate, this was the easiest set up.

I've really been into sky pictures lately.

Pippi. She's such a sweet goat.  No, really.  I never thought that goats had personalities....until we had some ourselves.

Our new addition to the farm.  This my friends would be a male.  That means we should have some baby goats in about five months, and that spells m.i.l.k.  :-)

Some two handed photography going on.  Ha!  I just went around taking pictures of all sorts of odd things.

Trees, lower branch in focus.

Now that lower branch is out of focus, but you can see the rest of the tree.  I love aperture :-)

Hammer.  All alone.  No boy in site!

Just some weeds up front.  But I thought they looked nice.  At least up close.  They reach about 6 feet or so.

The gate that children MUST stop at when we go fetch the mail.  They always run ahead and this is the designated stopping place.  The road that we live off of is 55mph. 

Walking, or running for some, back from the mail.

The majority of the trees around us are oak or pine.

Only two leaves were left of on this tree.  I really loved the deep color.

The next couple of pics are of Aubrey and I had to desaturate them as the orange in Jeremiah's shirt was reflecting off of his face.  With as round as cheeks as he has, he sort of resembled a pumpkin :-)

This sweet babe is getting his top teeth in.  Ouch.

Ok, I'm melting now.  I just want to eat him up.

Aubrey has learned a few handy skills, such as pointing.

And waving.

The sky above our house this evening.

I surrender.

Well, not before I find some more treasure.

Craft time

This year I decided that we should make some decorative items for the Christmas season.  Last year was taken up with the preparations of a baby coming (can you believe Aubrey will be a year old next month!!).  Only the essentials got done.  On top of that we have really been working on our goals to unify our family.  That includes no movies, or computer games.  We've already bought a bunch of board games for us to enjoy as a family.  Next up the sleeve are some changes in our focus in homeschooling.  Maybe putting on some plays, learning musical instruments, or starting a 'tea time'.  On shopping day I bought some cheap supplies for us to make some crafts.  Following the Charlotte Mason idea that handiwork should be productive (no pipe cleaner and paper crafts that do  not serve a purpose) I came up with a couple of ideas for us to work on.  We had a bunch of glass jars that I had saved, and I bought some tissue  paper to make the 'stained glass jars' you see below.  I also bought some felt and embroidery floss for us to make some ornaments.  This was the first time in a LONG time we all did a craft together.  Everyone enjoyed themselves, and everyone loved how they turned out.  I took a few pictures of the decorating, and some of the finished jars.

Jed and Jonah really enjoyed making these.  Jed's was quite unique in that he didn't want his papers to be glued flat to the jar.

I was surprised that he really stuck with this to the end.  I thought the stickiness of the glue may have overwhelmed him (sensory issues), but he did great!

Each of the girls had an idea of what they wanted theirs to look like.  Some wanted a color theme, some wanted their papers to be ripped as opposed to cut.  Flannery wanted only one layer of the papers with little over lapping.

I thought my middle kitchen counter may never be the same again with all that glue :-)  Thankfully we cleaned up right away and it was easy to clean.  Jonah was a bit obsessed with the glue.  He wanted to keep painting it on, and painting it on everyone else's jar.  That did not go over well with the others.

Here they are all lined up.  Jonah's is way in the background.  He kept coming over and moving it out of the line up.  Silly boy.

So from youngest to oldest, here are our creations.  This is Jonah's.  It has abut 50,000 layers of glue on it :-)  But I have to say he really did a great job.

Jed's creation.  I love the rough around the edges look.

Saoirse's.  The girls have been working on making things for each other for Christmas, and so a lot of time they are off in different rooms of the house to make their things in secret.  So this was a nice change for all of us to be working on something together.

Flannery's jar.  It was neat to see them all really taking care in the making of these.  It wasn't a case of just slapping on some paper and pouring some glue over it.  They really had a plan in their head that they were following, even if their goal was just to have a different color touching each other.

Both Moira and Isabella decided to put some shapes in theirs.  Hearts to be exact.  Here you can see one of the hearts on Moira's jar.  Her hearts were scattered over the jar.

Isabella's hearts were evenly spaced out.  Unfortunately it was hard to see when the lights went out.  She used a red background with yellow hearts on top.  In the light they show up, but disappear when the lights are out.

Even I got into the decorating spirit.  I decided to go with a rainbow theme.

I love how the lights reflect on the table!  We all really enjoyed our evening of candle light.

A new family record broken!

We have a new family record.  We have a new earliest walker!  Aubrey started standing on his own when he was 9  months old.  It didn't look like he would take any steps soon though, so I thought we would have a tie of our earliest walker being 11 months old, which was held by Moira.  However, it is official, Aubrey at 10  months old is now our earliest walker.  He's pretty pleased with himself.  He still crawls as fast as he can when he really wants to get somewhere.  But if he's already standing he will try walking first.  He only takes about 8 to 10 steps at this point.  I'll have to get a picture of him walking. 

Where does the time go?

Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We did.  It was just us :-)  We were invited, last minute, to join another family's celebration, but decided to just stick to home. Things have been a bit stressful over here and the thought of keeping track of my children in a house not familiar to me just didn't seem very fun/relaxing.  Not to mention all the food that would have been off limits to them.  We learned after last Sunday that it IS important to keep to the diet.  The children each had two meatballs at church fellowship.  Two meatballs from a bag.  That equals food coloring.  That then equals to four children totally out of control.  Big time!  I certainly did not want a repeat.  So we made our own feast right here at home, all GAPS legal.  And a feast it was!  We had roast chicken (we prefer chicken over turkey), "potatoes", "stuffing", cranberry sauce, squash casserole, deviled eggs and some amazing pumpkin pie.  This was very, VERY filling food.  Everyone took what they would normally take on their plate, but we filled up way before our plates were cleaned. I had made up a batch of vanilla yogurt to go over our pie.  It was delicious.

Thankfully I made sure to get a head start the day before.  This was good for a couple of reasons.  One being that a lot of these recipes were new to me, and that makes things go slower.  The other was that there was a lot to chop, cook, assemble.  But it all got done, in a relaxed manner.  All the kiddos helped out as well, making it go faster.  Below you can see some of our spread.   You'll also find some quick snapped pictures of us putting up our Christmas tree the following day.  Putting a fake tree together when you have 6 people helping really does make quick work!  When the kids were too little to help it would take Jeremiah and I forever to get it up.  For some reason we were short a string of lights, so a run to the store was in order.  Christmas music in the background, lights, ornaments and hot apple cider.  Oh fun!  The baby was amazed by all the sights.  He did a great job just hanging out and not getting into everything.  That's a plus :-)  Jonah, on the other hand....oh that boy.  Thankfully he's really cute :-)  Ha, ha!

Our cranberry sauce.  This was devoured.  No left overs.

The marshmallows!  Oh, yum!  More will be in our future :-)

Unfortunately the marshmallows melted too much, we will take note of that for future use.  In front is the stuffing.

Pumpkin pie. This was great!!!  Just like the real deal.

Aubrey was loving the action of putting up the tree.  So much to see and do.

Ooh, what's this?

Jed was a bystander, or sitter.  He was keeping guard of his dinosaur stocking.

Christmas music playing in the background on Pandora.

Flannery unpacking the nativity scene.

Jonah checking out the angel, and Isa trying to get in the picture.

Flannery had the honors of putting the top of the tree on.

She needed a bit of a lift.

After the lights were hung it was time to hang up the ornaments.  Lots of handmade ones.  Thinking we need a new round of ornaments to put up.  I may have the girls help make some felt ones.  I like non breakable :-)

Aubrey taste tested all of the ornaments for us.

Each of the girls have a few ornaments that are theirs only.  They made sure to get those up out of the way of little hands.

Everyone pitching in.  Seriously, the tree trimming gets done faster each year!

Saoirse decided to use the box that houses our Christmas things to get a better spot.

Some dancing was in order.

And no need for holly when you have a cute cherub to kiss.