Two Weeks of Craziness

I didn't post last week because I was honestly so completely exhausted that I had no motivation to do it.  We still managed to stay on top of schoolwork, but by the end of the week, I had to drag myself to bed.  Here are the highlights (both school and non-school).

School pics/video

We had fun with a science experiment and were surprised at the strength of an egg!

Luke completed all of schoolwork this week, but we didn't take many pictures.  Here is what I have.


We've been reading about homes throughout the ages in Luke's Living Long Ago book.  Here is his drawing of a Viking longhouse.

He wanted to be cozy while working on his Explode the Code.

Gym
Luke has needed to participate in an organized sport so we signed him up for indoor soccer.  I love the program because it is very organized and the kids never stop moving.

Several times during the past two weeks, we have been able to go outside for walks.  We walk to the bank or our local market which are both just a mile or so away.  The kids come back exhausted and ready for naps.

They dragged these sticks for a mile.

Ben School

Learning how to make two digit numbers out of base 10 blocks.

He practiced writing his upper and lower case letters on the whiteboard (the best Target dollar section purchase ever!)

Assembling his Wedgits

"Me" and "my" were Ben's words of the week for the past two weeks.

N is for narwhal and O is for ostrich

Finding out that 911 really does work/The day we shutdown our street
Last Friday, Aaron had the day off and we planned to work around the house all day.  After finishing schoolwork, the boys decided to stay in their pajamas in order to fully relax. :) I was busy preparing for a Mom2Mom sale and had taken over every square inch of our basement with piles of children's clothes removed from storage bins and thrown into piles by gender and size.  The boys were enjoying their newly cleaned, purged and reorganized room by playing pirates.  This involved removing all of the previously mentioned organized toys and piling them into the living room (I assume this was their loot).  By noon, we were all getting hungry, so I began to make lunch and assigned the boys to return the stolen goods to their room.  One of them plugged in a lamp into a newly exposed wall (before reorganizing it was covered by their dresser) and blew the fuse.  Aaron reset the fuse and tried plugging the lamp into another outlet in the room.  As he plugged it in, the original outlet caught fire.

At this point, the boys came running out of their room screaming, "OUR WALL IS ON FIRE!!!!  OUR WALL IS ON FIRE!!!!" 

Aaron came racing out after them saying, "Quick!  Grab the fire extinguisher!!"

I grabbed my phone and dialed 911 while waiting to find out if I needed to hit the send button.   As I stood in the living room holding Olivia, I waited to see if Aaron was going to be able to extinguish the fire and yelled to Aaron, "Do I make the call??  Tell me when!!"  As he sprayed the extinguisher, I saw bright flashes of light coming from the room.  "Never mind!  I'm calling!!" I yelled.  When I made the call, I told the operator, "We have a small electrical fire in our wall.  We think we can handle it, but we would like for someone to come and check it out."

I put the kids (still in their pajamas) in their coats and loaded them into the car.  We parked across the street so that we were out of the way and safe in case everything was bigger than we thought.  As we waited, I looked in my rear view mirror and saw it.  We live in a relatively peaceful neighborhood where not much really happens.  Apparently, we were the excitement of the day (or maybe week), because all of a sudden two fire trucks, an ambulance, the truck of the chief of the fire department, and a police cruiser came racing down the street and parked in front of our house.  Everyone piled off the trucks in full gear carrying their axes and filed into our house.  The boys' jaws dropped.

Aaron had extinguished the fire and they checked everything out and confirmed it was okay.  In the process, they had to walk through our basement filled with all of the Mom2Mom sale stuff covering the basement floor.  Sigh.

It turns out that two wires in the wall were touching and they started the fire.  We were able to have an electrician fix it for pretty cheap and after a week, the boys have finally become convinced that their room will not spontaneously combust.

Luckily, the fire didn't spread past the outlet!

 

 

I managed to make it to the Mom2Mom sale.  I can't believe how much we've accumulated through the years!

 

Happy Birthday, Luke and Olivia!!

Luke and Olivia have birthdays in December, but we have their birthday party in November.  We figure that December is already packed for everyone, plus it gives a little space between birthdays and Christmas.

 

The beautiful birthday cake!

Lovin on Granny Bop

Olivia was very excited about her new boots.

Blowing out six candles

Cousins!

Nana and Yogi with all of their grandbabies

Luke is really into Legos and we had a great time assembling them together.

Pushing Sunshine and Lulu in her new stroller

Our little princess

Tradition!

Every year, we visit Frankenmuth as a family.  Each of the kids get to pick out an ornament from the thousands available at Bronners.  We then head to Zehnder's for a fabulous chicken dinner.  This year, my dad came with us and we met my sister and niece there as well.

 

Helping their cousin pick out her ornament

Mmmmm. . .  chicken!

The whole trip was exhausting.

 



Week 13 - Learning Together

The first week back from break is always a little rough.  After battling our way through Monday, the rest of the week went fairly smoothly.  I'm starting to evaluate how Luke's curriculum is working for both of us, and I'm contemplating making a few changes.  I love Sonlight's core curriculum.  Luke is being exposed to great literature and we've had really good discussions based on the stories.  He loves the Usborne books that we use for History and Science.  I feel that he needs a little more structure, however, with Spelling and Grammar.  I may be making some changes after our winter break. 

Most of our school stuff was status quo, but here are highlights from our week.

YouTube Fun
Luke has been excited about his upcoming, castle-themed birthday party, so he was very excited when we read about castle life in his Living Long Ago book.  His favorite facts were about moats.  He learned that moats contained spikes, crocodiles (in stories), and human waste.  Afterwards, all three kids watched a documentary on Windsor Castle which they loved.  I love my little nerds!

Luke looks bored, but actually he was just completely engrossed in the movie.

We also have been studying fish in Science, so they watched a few videos on how to gut a fish.

Bible
Our church has begun an Awana program and our boys count the days down to Wednesday night.  They love earning badges and playing games.  Ben especially loves listening to his Awana Cubby cd and I found that he and Olivia will listen (to the same story over and over) while I work one-on-one with Luke.  Bonus!

Military Appreciation

This week, we wrote and mailed letters to three US soldiers serving our country and away from their families.  I think this is my favorite project this year.  We researched the different branches of the Armed Forces and Luke made each picture represent that soldier's branch.  Aaron even played "boot camp" with the kids!

Ben's Letter of the Week
This week, Ben learned about the letter M.  He loves his letter crafts!

M is for mouse!
 

A New Skill
I decided to teach the boys a new (and helpful) skill this week.  They are learning how to do the clean up process after lunch.  They are officially in charge of clearing the table, rinsing the dishes and loading the dishwasher.  Ahhhhhhh!   At the moment, this task is new enough that they are actually arguing over who gets to do it.  I know that problem won't last for long!

Sibling Time
Thursday and Friday were nice enough to actually get outside for a little while.  After a month of crummy weather, sickness and hospital visits, they were anxious to get out and I was anxious to have them out!  On Friday, all three kids played together for almost and hour!

I had to remind them at least a dozen times to keep their hats on their heads!

As part of Ben's letter M practice, he made the letter M out of play-dough.  Olivia was very excited to play along with him and Luke finished his work faster than ever so that he could participate with them.

They have also been enjoying looking at Christmas catalogs brought over by my mother and grandmother.  Luke and Ben even circled items in the books they thought Olivia would enjoy!

A Week off?





This week was supposed to be our break week, however, it did not turn out that way.  I had a list.  We were going to clean the house from top to bottom.  We would visit the zoo to see the fall colors and the animals walking around and awake.  I was going to make a homemade dinner.  Every.  Single.  Night.   Olivia and I came home on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning at 5:45, Benjamin was in a full asthma attack.  We tried controlling it with albuterol, but couldn't, so we ended up at Children's Hospital for our third overnight visit this year.  We have love/hate relationship with the hospital.  We love the care, but hate having to go!  Aaron and I are so thankful to his brother and sister-in-law and my dad who watched Luke and Olivia while we were gone, as well as our friend, Joy, who brought us dinner the night we returned home.  We are very blessed with friends and family who love us so much!

 

 

Hanging out in the trauma room

Relaxing in observation while playing with some toys from home

His spunk returned and we got to go home!

Once we came home, Ben had to do breathing treatments every 4 hours - yuck!

Learning All the Time
Our six weeks on and one week off has really been nice, but I always feel weird when we have the week off while everyone else is still in school.  I have to remind myself that we started school at the end of July, plus curious kids can learn all the time.

Our neighbors got a new roof and the kids spent quite a bit of time watching the workers out of our living room window.

We went to a show titled, "How I Became a Pirate".  The play was amazing.  The kids were entranced and the parents laughed just as much as the kids.  After the show, the cast sat down for a Q&A.  The boys talked about it the whole way home and has officially requested that I make a pirate coat for him for Christmas.

The kids spent time with their Leapfrog world map.  The pen is programmed to give country names and factoids. 

We started working on letters for soldiers that we plan to mail next week.  I love how projects end up providing our best opportunities to learn.  From discussing which soldiers would be receiving our letters, Luke and I ended up discussing the branches of the armed forces, purpose of the military, and geography of the middle east.  If we had read this information in a book, the information would not sink in quite as well. 

We needed the week off, but I am definitely ready to go back to our structured week on Monday!