I've been busy....

I got a great idea from another blog.....http://www.wearethatfamily.com/ to do silhouettes of each of the boys. I have always loved the old timey feel of them and I tried to do them last year but it was such a pain to try to trace them while they stood still - I gave up!!!! When I found this idea and all I had to do was take a picture of them I was immediately trying it but with a little flair of my own! For those of you who know me this should come as no surprise!!
This is what I did.......
These are hanging on the big wall in the kitchen and I love them!!! I still can't believe how easy they were to do!















I painted these wooden mini frames, reduced the size of the silhouette, added some ribbons and they are going to be ornaments for my christmas tree!














You guys should try this it was fun! If you click on the button on the side of my blog you should go straight to the idea for it! Have fun!
I have been working away at my advent calendar so I will be posting pics of that tomorrow after work! Work is putting a cramp in my crafting and painting time!!! I have a lot of things I want to get done - including christmas presents - and I just don't have enough time!!! AAARRRGGGHHH!!! Maybe if I wasnt so crafty and didnt want to do it all by hand....whose fault is that????

It is 10:45 do you know what your 3 year old is doing??

We are reading books mommy.......

Everything.....and Advent

Remember about a week ago and I couldn't decide if I was gonna like working or not?? Not! I didn't have any time before I started working and now I really don't have any time to get anything done! Especially blogging - I havent gotten to play till now and I am going to be exhausted tomorrow! But on the other hand because I am working in a bookstore my OCD is fullfilled every time I work and it is just OCD heaven!! I miss the boys - am I crazy??

We are getting ready to stop doing History and we are going to focus on the Birth of Jesus Christ and all the events and whatnot that led up to the day of his birth and I am sooo excited!!!

I am hoping that some of you ladies could pass along some Advent ideas??? We have never done the official Advent celebration and we are going to try to do it this year. I have some books to look through and pick and choose some ideas but I would really love to hear from others what they have done to celebrate Advent!

I have been putting up Christmas decorations and I just love being in the spirit of Christmas! I have forgotten about Thanksgiving though - are my kids going to be tramatized if Turkey Day always takes a backseat to Christmas because their mother likes Christmas better??? I keep reading things that say they will be but I feel like if we are thankful in our prayers and lives all the time they will get the idea and be okay...I mean look at them - do they look traumatized????

The boys......

Raking the leaves with Daddy......

My hubby loves to read travel mags and stuff he picks up whenever we go on vacation and he has a drawer full of stuff in his nightstand that the boys will lay in bed and look at with him at night if he is the one putting them to bed!!! And we wonder why our kids STILL come into our bed at night???? Aren't they cute!!!

Tears of Joy...

I am sitting here with tears and boogers and I am so full of Joy!! I have been scouring through my fellow bloggers blogs for about 3 hours(yes it is now 1:15 am and I can't explain where the time went) and I have just been filled up with love,joy,encouragement,sadness,friendship and lots of laughter!! I think it is so awesome how we can all share our good and bad in such open and honest ways and how much this encourages each of us without even knowing any of you personally(well maybe I know 1 or 2 of you - I think it is actually 4 that I know)!! God is so good and I am praising him with all of my being right now!!!

I am in shock...

that you people - except for Gwendolyn - don't like raw cookie dough!! It is not homemade(not much is in my house) by the way so the raw egg issue isnt such an issue - i think!!!
thanks Gqendolyn for sharing the love of dough!!!

Who has ever heard of such a thing????

This sweet little boy handed back his spoon FULL of chocolate chip cookie dough to ME and said - it is DISGUSTING!!! It was in my mouth and gone before he even finished the word! The other boys were all happily licking away at their spoons - this one must not really be mine!

Another day in the life.....

Yesterday was a horrible day!! Well,the morning started out good and then the afternoon went down hill until they were all in bed - even my hubby! I think at one point I was even stamping my foot like a little baby and yelling VERY loud(I am fairly certain that fire and smoke were coming out of my eyes,ears and nose) at the same time! It was horrible and I am thankful I can contribute some of it to PMS but the rest of it is a gift from God - my lovely personality!!! I am so grateful that each day the Lord gives us another chance to wake up refreshed and start over again! Praise God for his forgiveness!!!

School.....We have strayed so far off the original course with our curric! This is only our second year so we still have a lot fo learning to do but it seems that everytime I hunt and look for what I think will work with the boys and then it doesn't so we are back to square one! I think we have finally figured it out - for now! We started with Adventures in My Fathers World (an awesome U.S history curric for 2nd-3rd or even 4th graders) and we will continue to semi follow this for the rest of the year - the boys really like what we are learning! We have veered off course majorly though - first with the vikings and now with the american revolution and indians - we will be doing unit studies of all the wars from this point on. The 2nd grader asked if we could just learn about the wars and of course I said yes - isnt this why we are HSing??? The Bible in MFW is really good too - we are learning the names of the Lord. But we are adding in some devotions and other topics on occasion.
Sailing the Nina,Pinta and Santa Maria....
















Learning to fold the American flag which they then wnated put up on the wall in their bedroom!




We started out using saxon math 2 and some k math from target but we have switched to horizons math for both boys and we like that much better!


We started out with learning language arts through literature(red) for my 2nd grader but I am getting ready to purchase Explode the Code to finish his reading skills with him! He HATES to read and LLATL is just too much for him and I am not about to fight him tooth and nail - he will get it in his time and in the meantime we will step the pace back a little and just read,read, read(me to him more than him to me) and do ETC. Now - the K/1st grader LOVES to read to us! He is just breezing through ETC and wants to read Bob books to us all the time!

Science is on the back burner right now because they are just loving all the history stuff! We get different books off the shelves every once in a while and read about lots of science things but nothing more exciting than that right now!!!

Off to break up a fight about who gets to be Yoda on Lego Star Wars because YES my children are playing video games - again - while I am blogging!!!!

One last post before bed....

of course it is 1am and here I am on my blog....but I do have some questions for my fellow bloggers in regards to Blog Etiquette! I am compelled to answer every comment I have gotten so far - it is the OCD in me but it is also the need to build relationships and I just love the nice things and the comraderie that has already been shown to me! So - what is the protocol on answering back to comments? How do you get involved in things I have been told are called memes? Any other blog rules I should know about please pass them along!!
I hope all of you are sleeping comfy and cozy in oyur beds - I am outta here!!!

The Reason I am Homeschooling......

Look at those faces! This is 2 brothers who didn't know how to PLAY together until we started homeschooling and this is the happiness I like to remember when I am having a frustrating day!!

Work...

I just came home from my first day at my new retail job! I am working part time to pay for all the thrift store visits and the doctor bills we have accumultaed this past year - 2 broken collar bones in 1 child!! I can't decide if working is a good thing or a bad thing - the first thing I told my hubby when I got home was how nice it was to be GOOD at something and get the instant gratification of knowing I am good at it and not having to wait until they grow up and get married and then they tell me I was an okay Mom and didnt fail them too miserably!!! That was quite a bit of rambling - sorry! It was nice to go to work and be around other people but I did miss my morning with the boys! I just have come to love being home and have truly enjoyed the time with the boys - except of course when they are fighting and driving me crazy!!
I am going to watch Kung Fu Panda with the boys!!

I am addicted to blogs....

I woke up this morning dreaming about HTML code and all this other lingo - I didn't even know what any of it was until yesterday! I was up till almost 3 am looking at blogs, how to's, getting ideas and then I found some free digital scrapbook stuff and I was off on another crazy tangent! This world is new to me and I CAN'T STOP!!! I have ignored my children the majority of the day - we did a little school(for about 20 minutes) and then they did their math on the computer upstairs so mommy could continue to scroll through blog after blog after blog! How do I stop??? It is now 130, I am still in my pj's(that part is not so unusual) and the only reason I am getting dressed is to leave the house and help a friend with her blog!!! Not that I know that much but I feel like I should after all the looking I have done!! I am going to be unstoppable once I figure it all out!! One good thing - it will keep me from going to the thrift stores and spending money on other peoples trash that I can't live without!

Books,Books & More Books

Ever since I started homeschooling I have become a book junkie!! I have finally been convicted by God that TV is not the best way to entertain my children(even though they do seem to leave me alone a little bit more if they are glued to the TV) - my hubby jumped on board and we have really minimized the TV in our house and added a few bookshelfs!! Now - don't get me wrong - I am still completely and totally addicted to almost every cop show that is out on tv these days with Bones and Criminal Minds being at the top of my list and my husband is a History channel junkie - it just happens after the kids are in bed or on the internet! You have to understand that this is huge for us - we are big tv watchers as well as movie watchers and it is almost harder for us to not be glued to the tv than it is for the boys!
All that to say - I have become a total thrift store book junkie! I am always looking for books - mostly for my kids and homeschooling and I have found some awesome deals on books my kids may not ever use until they are in high school but it was such a good deal I just had to buy it now - no wonder I had to get a job working part time!!! Again - all that to say a friend turned me on to this awesome website called paperbackswap.com You register and have to list 10 books to get started. Each book you swap is worth a credit and with those credits you can order the books you find on the site that you want to get. It is amazing!! It is also very time consuming but I am not afraid to stay up until 3am looking for books!!! I have already listed a bunch of books and have orderd 2 and I have 4 to mail in the next day or so and I just signed up today! The catch is that you cna print the postage at home also through paypal or through the paperback swap site!Now I can go book crazy and I don't even have to leave my house! I will though because it is all about the thrill of the hunt!!!

Getting caught up.....

Now that I have gotten this blog thing figured out I am going to have to get caught up for the out of town family! Here goes.......
First and foremost are these excellent photos of the boys with their colored hair! Alex had wacky hair day at school and of course the little ones had to be a part of it - too cute!




Alex leaves way too early for Mommy to drag herself out of bed so I didn't get pics of his hair but the word is it was AWESOME!

To Georgia we went.......
Mommy and the boys drove to visit Aunt Robin and the boys a few weeks ago and we knew Grandma needed to see pics so here they are! We got to go to the Georgia Aquarium and Stone Mountain - it was so much fun!! I am not sure if the boys had more fun at those places or just playing with their cousins Evan and Cody! It was so fun to watch them all together. We have always lived too far away for them to play on a regular basis so it is nice to see how much fun they have together when we do get to see them!
The aquarium was our first stop.....


Aunt Robin was able to take the days off to join us but her boys had to go to school so we did the touristy things while they were at school!

The next day was the day to go to Stone Mountain but it was raining and gross out so we thought we would have to pass on it! Thomas was sooo excited to be able to ride a real train (that was all he talked about for the entire 8 hour car ride and the 2 days we had been at Aunt Robin's) so we had to rethink the rain issue and we decided we were just going to have to suffer through the rain for the train ride!! We all put on our rain gear and headed out! Now remember we were doing this for Thomas.....can you tell he was a little overwhelmed by the REAL train when we got to it?????
But....after the ride he was happy and mommy was so glad we suffered through the rain!








We had an awesome visit with our cousins! Grandma - this picture is for you! Don't worry you will get one!!

Here we go again

I am trying my hand at this whole blog thing one more time! I originally had a blog on another blogsite but had some trouble navigating and getting pics up so a fellow blogger led me to this site! It has been much easier and so much fun getting it all set up!
I have just returned from an amazing and refreshing weekend away at the Ladies Retreat for my church. The speaker was fantastic and boy was God in the house! It was an amazing time of renewing my love for the Lord!
I missed the boys and daddy but it was nice to just be away from all the screaming, fighting and chaos of everyday life for a short time! If I am away too long I tend to actually miss it all - go figure!
Looking forward to this new adventure!