Old Pictures

I'm going thru a folder full of pictures that were recovered from the old laptop when it decided to cannibalize all of the files in the My Pictures folder.  There were lots of photos on the old laptop, including many from years back that have long since been archived to cd's.  But I had to share a few of the babies - especially Tooter when he was still our big roly-poly!  (And I'll get pics up of his healing scar - it's looking good).

I guess I'm sort of forcing you to walk down my memory lane.  :-)

Family

I'm sitting here, after having spent a lovely, quiet hour and a half at a fabric store, blogging because my sweet parents came and picked up the kids to take them to the zoo.  This is after having a lovely Thursday with two Thanksgiving celebrations for which I didn't cook at all. And having my folks come pick up the kids and take them to lunch yesterday.

Now, I say all this not to brag.  Or gloat.  Or do anything similarly obnoxious.  Truly.  I just want to say how much I appreciate my family - the ones I'm related to by blood and the ones who I was blessed with when I married Jmk.  It is a true gift to be able to be physically close to family.  It's even more of a gift to feel close to family.  Those people who love you AND yours.  And those people who love you, even though. (fill in the blank)  :-)

Thank you to my family!!!  And I love you back.

Interesting Quiz.....

.....Regarding American History and civics .  I am not happy to report that I only scored 75.76%.  Boo me.  BUT, there were three questions that I changed at the last minute.  I had the right answer at first, and then talked myself out of them.  Silly me.  Even with those three, though, my score still wouldn't have what it should have been.

I betcha Jmk knocks this one out of the park.  He's a history guy.

One I hadn't heard before

(hat tip to Jimmy Stiglets, via my mom)

A Blonde is watching the news with her husband when the newscaster says "Two Brazilian men die in a skydiving accident."   The blonde starts crying to her husband, sobbing "That's horrible!!! So many men dying that way!" Confused, he says, "Yes dear, it is sad, but they were skydiving, and there is always that risk involved." After a few minutes, the blonde, still sobbing, says, "How many is a Brazilian?"

Happy Birthday Tooter!!!

Happy Birthday to our dear, little, banged up Tooter Pooter.  Yay for being three!!!  Thank you for sharing your day with the Thanksgiving play hooplah - you'll have lots of birthday cookies tomorrow!

We love you and we cherish the days we have with you.  Happy Birthday Son!!!

Unfortunate Tradition

Three days before Christmas (when Poodle was 2), she fell on the old rocks in the backyard, cut her forehead, and got stitches.  (Those rocks are now gone and replaced with deck).

Now, in another three-days-before-an-event accident, Tooter has joined the stitches club.  Three days before his 3rd birthday.  Poor fella!  We were outside for just a few minutes, in the front of the house, and he was headed towards the front door on the front walk.  He tripped himself up, fell, and made contact with one of the front steps.
Concrete + little boys = 4 stitches.
But, as you can see, there's hardly any swelling and just about no bruising to speak of.  Not too shabby.  Kids are beautifully resilient!

The fall happened Monday night, and I took this picture this morning as I was changing the bandaid and cleaning it.  Stitches will come out next Monday!

Like Jmk says......  Chicks dig scars.

School Update

A sweet friend reminded me on the phone the other night that I haven't talked much about how homeschooling was going, and looking back, I really haven't.  SO, to fill the bowl with grandparent gravy, I'll see what I can share about Poodle's year so far.

First - she has finished the primer book in Math-U-See! This dealt with counting, shape and number recognition, place value (units, tens, hundreds), introductory addition, skip counting by 2's, 5's, 10's, addition +1's, 2+2, 3+3, 4+4, 5+5, addition of hundreds and to make 10, tally marks, telling time, and a brief introduction to subtraction.  Everything in this book was presented in an "easy" fashion, and she was able to have a lot of fun with it.  She LOVED the telling time section.  And it's nice to see her be able to read a clock now.

We have read lots of good books using the five-in-a-row system, and we've had the chance to talk about countries like Russia, China, Japan, England, France, and Italy.  And, of course, the United States of America!  Nothing is terribly in depth at this age - it's more of a spray of information in lieu of a directed stream.  But she enjoys it and is getting a good geography introduction along with some new vocabulary words.

She practices handwriting - just using the "old-fashioned" tablets and lots of patience.  A couple of letters a day, along with some copy work.  Right now, her copy work is lines from the Thanksgiving play that she is doing with our homeschool group!  Usually, though, the copy work is Bible verses that she is currently memorizing.

We use readers like the BOB Books that help her with her individual reading.  We even have some Dick and Jane books for her to use as practice.  She continues to develop her reading skills.  I'm not sure when you can say a child is officially "reading", but she is certainly on her way.

And we play.  :-)  It IS Kindergarten, you know.  With one of our books, How To Make An Apple Pie And See The World, we ended our week with actually making an apple pie.  I had pictures of it!  But, they were lost on the other cpt, and then some of them were recovered, but all of those pictures are completely unorganized now.  So, they'll be hard to get to in general.

We've had lots of field trips and parties.  And we're currently knee deep in practices for the Thanksgiving play (that I previously mentioned).  Poodle is playing a pilgrim girl named Charity.  :-)  One of the things that I'm beginning to notice about homeschooling is we're not home a whole lot!

We don't do EVERYthing every single day.  Both school and life have to be flexible in order for them both to work.  Sometimes life has to give.  Sometimes school has to give.  But whoever gives tends to get it all back eventually.  So, it's cool.  So far, I'm really enjoying what we're doing.  I'm enjoying not only spending this time with her, but also watching her develop right in front of me.  It's humbling and extraordinary all at once.  I still will never say that we will homeschool forever and ever amen, because only God knows what the future holds.  But, for now, it's working for us.  She's growing in knowledge and love for God, she's growing in her basic skills, and she's continuing to develop friendships.  It's lovely.

She's still a "very active" 5 year old  ::ahem::, but we try every day to work on self-control.  And, we may even begin ballet lessons next school year.  :-)  We'll see.

So, that's a quick run down of what we've done so far, and it's a good indication of what we'll continue to do until the end of this school year.  And, now, you know!

Mom's 70th

We are super busy right now with school things, Thanksgiving plays, etc.  Not much bloggin' goin' on.  But, here's a little diddy from Mom's party.  :-)  And one of these days, I'm going to figure out how to embed these durn videos.

Happy Birthday to you.......

Happy Birthday Mom!!!

I've gotten out of the habit of wishing happy birthdays on the blog, BUT, one doesn't turn 70 years young every day.  Oh, to look as good as you at any point, but certainly when I turn 70 myself!!!

Happy Birthday MooMoo!!!

We love you so much - 

The Zoo

Happy Fall....

YA'LL!!!

Okay.  Listen.  Awhile back, I went on a rant regarding the word "voila".  Fair warning, I'm about to go on another rant.

It's not Ya'll.  It's y'all.  It's a contraction of the two words "you" and "all".  Not "ya" and ...... oh, you get my point.  I have a cousin-in-law who will go on a rant from time to time about it's and its and your and you're (and etc) and I will admit that I tend to do the snoopy dance when he puts that out there.  He hasn't quite gotten around to the y'all/ya'll thing, so I'm jumping on his verbal bandwagon.  And I will freely admit that I'm sure I make many grammatical errors - that's not what I'm discussing here.  Just contractions.  Come on.  We can do this people.  We can all be smarter than we seem to be at the moment.

:-)

Happy Fall Y'all.

Grandparent Gravy - Halloween

I know they've been waiting to see pictures of the trick-or-treaters!

We had a lovely time with cousin Audrey, who came and trick-or-treated with the Zoo babies.  She was a cute farmer girl, complete with freckles.  Tooter, who didn't know what trick-or-treating really was and couldn't tell me what he wanted to be, got to be a "black-eyed Pea".  And Poodle, who had a costume to be a princess ballerina (what she told us a month ago she intended to be) and even had a "real" Snow White costume, said one day before Halloween that she wanted to be Cinderella.  Uh-huh.  Okay.  So, scrooge Mommy, who wouldn't go out to buy a costume at the last minute, helped her pieces-parts a costume from what we had at home.  The wedding dress was from SueSue two years ago, the gloves are from sweet Allison at church, the shoes came from Maggie, the headband...  (gosh, was that Allison's too?  Maybe that was from Kimberly.), and Poodle and I made the ribbon necklace together.  Honestly, I thought Poodle was pretty creative!

It was fun - we trick-or-treated on Thursday night, instead of Friday, because our county wanted to leave the sheriff's department free for the football games on Friday.  But our whole neighborhood was out.  We had a lot of customers that night!

And Tooter now asks for his "treat treat treak" candy.  It's cute.  To us, anyway.  ::grin::  We think that he'll be all over this T or T thing next year.  :-)