First Sentence

Ryvre just wrote his first sentence!  Okay, so he copied it, but i am still very, very proud!  We've been having "trouble" getting him to write letters; apparently he's just bored of writing the SAME letters over and over, and so he writes it once or twice and says he can't do anymore, or he's too tired, etc.  i'm not surprised at all.  But he just wrote: The season is fall. ...with no trouble at all; he hasn't even "learned" to write most of the letters!  (He's only officially up to F, as far as his practice worksheets go)  AND it all fit on the line provided on the journal page print-out

Nesting is a Myth!

whyyyy am i not nesting? I've only got 5 weeks to go before this kid is born, and nothing is ready! The house isn't anywhere close to clean, i don't have any of the "stuff" here (crib, swing, etc), and the area i was going to use for the baby's stuff is stacked to the ceiling with toys to be cleaned (i guess i "nested" for one day, when i decided to clean all the toys in the house, but never finished). i'm exhausted just looking at this place, and Dale keeps asking "so...where are we going to put the baby?" hmm...i suppose on that pile of laundry, over there. It's just as well that i'm not ready for the poor little girl, she doesn't even have a name yet *sigh.*

Cool Table

Woo hoo!  Thanks to my good friend Sue, the kids now have an awesome easel table, with cubbies underneath for paper and stuff!  If i pull it away from the wall, there's room for four kids to paint at once   i have a feeling it will be a very popular place during Ryvre's birthday party!  It's almost as big as our dining table, only shorter, haha!  The current school room to dining room ratio of this space: 6:1

Ren Faire and Relatives

Over the weekend, we took our yearly trip to the renaissance festival in Bonner Springs, KS (KC-ish), and visited Grandma Mona.  It would have been nice to have time to see everyone, but we'll be back up at Christmas time.  We did have an awesome mini-vacation though. Saturday morning, we loaded up the car bright (err, well actually it was still dark!) and early, and were on the road by 4:20 am.  We got to KC at about 9:30 and took care of some business there (long story about our van and some crazy paperwork).  By lunchtime we were at the festival, and the kids were super excited! First we went to the big dragon swing.  Willow seemed to be as happy to get on it as Ryvre--until it started moving!  She decided pretty quickly she didn't like it one bit.  Ryvre had a ton of fun though.  After that, we walked around a bit, looking for things to do, but the kids weren't too interested in any of the shows or booths of things to buy.  Oh well, on to the kids' area. I think we spent 3 hours at one slide, which was attached to a pirate-ship-shaped apparatus.  Ryvre ran around the place, talking to all the young "wenches" who were employed to tell the little ones "the ladder is for up, the slide is for down" while Willow explored the little faerie homes.    We finally got the kids away from that place with the promise of souveniers--Robin Hood and Princess hats, to be exact.  Once we found those, they were eager to get going, and show them to Grandma Mona, who lives about an hour north. We got to Grandma's place, and she, of course, made a huge dinner for us; Kelly (my aunt) and Abby (cousin) came over.  Abby is quite a bit older than my kids, but she was so good with them; they all ran around and played together really great.  Sometimes i'm really bummed there aren't any kids closer to their age in my family, so it was really nice that she took such an interest in them.  People better start having babies fast though, before she's a teenager and gets bored of them! Sunday morning we went to Krug Park and fed the ducks; the kids thought that was the coolest!  Willow threw out some bread between bites, haha!  There's a really cool old playground we went to visit there too.  That really got their interest; slides, slides, slides!  When we (the adults) got tired of that, we went to another park with newer equipment, and more kids.  They ran around there until the started to get thirsty--water is in the car kids  and that's how we talked them into leaving. The rest of the day we hung out at Grandma Mona's house again, and said our good-byes the next morning.  We took our time going home, and the kids were really good sports about the insanely (to them at least) long car ride. Hopefully i'll figure out how to post pics soon :)

First Day of School

One day down...sheesh, how many more to go?   Ryvre's first day of kindergarten just about killed me.  It started off ok; we went to the library, and got tons of books (the lady checking us out actually seemed a bit annoyed by the 3 huge stacks--hey, it's not my fault they raised the check-out limit to 10 items per card!)  I've got enough material now for the first few units--if only i can get through them.   We came home and watched one of the movies the kids picked out, reasoning that it IS a classic faerie tale, so that's literature...we filled out a weather chart and talked about using the calendar, etc.  Then i got out the video camera to record the kids singing their ABCs and whatever else they would do...Willow can be heard crying in the background throughout the whole thing, because she kept nagging at me for a glass of ice (shaking the camera to the point i'm afraid to watch the tape), and my husband had the audacity to tell her "in a minute" which caused her to have a major breakdown.  Argh.  Ryvre was being a doll though, so i couldn't bring myself to stop him.    Ryvre had a major fit concerning WORKSHEETS.  These have always been his #1 obsession, and when i told him he needed to write his A's, a's, B's, and b's on lined paper before moving on to the C/c worksheet...all hell broke loose.  He claimed he was too tired to write the letters any more, but he DID want to do the next worksheet...surprise surprise.  When he's 18 and wonders why i can't pay for his college education, i'll pull out his homeschool portfolio, and calmly explain to him the cost of ink cartridges, back in the early 2000's   Later in the afternoon he was alot more receptive; he colored and cut out a leaf for the "fall word wall" which took an hour, he was so meticulous about it (this is a good thing, he usually breezes through everything i hand him to the point that i run out of things for him to do long before he is satisfied).  I love the way his mind works too--i suggested he color the stack of papers i handed him in "fall colors" (which Daddy helped him determine), and instead of scribbling one red, one yellow, etc, he used EVERY shade of red, yellow, orange, brown, and green on one leaf, creating a tie-dyed effect.  Awesome.    Dale also did a little math with Ryvre; he just wrote down a few addition problems on the chalkboard, and demonstrated them with potatoes as long as that held his son's interest--i laughed when Ryvre didn't recognize Dale's "2's" because he wrote them "wrong" hehe.

First Post

Hey everyone, as you can see, i'm keeping a homeschool blog this year!  I thought it might be fun (for people like me at least, who have nothing better to do than keep up with people, hehe) to check on our progress. Ryvre is itching to start "kindergarten" and i have to admit, *i'm* very nervous.  He's definately ready, even his sunday school teacher (lol) says he's ahead of most kids going to school this year (he can't technically start public school for two more years, because he has an October birthday, and he'll only be 4 this year!) which only further justifies the decision my husband and i officially made last year when we started "Preschool" with him. I'm not going to do anything formal with Willow yet (she just turned 2) because frankly, we have alot going on right now!  She already knows her alphabet, and can count objects up to 10, but she still struggles with colors and shapes.  No biggie, i figure she'll pick it up as she goes, and i don't think logging her learning time at this point will make a difference anyway...she's a little observer, and will be ready probably before i am ready for her! Anyway, i mostly want to keep family and friend up-to-date, organize my own thoughts, brag a little (hehe), and hopefully get some insight now and then from other parents.

Creepy-Cool

Sometimes my little man just amazes me. Last night, we were sitting at the dinner table, and Dale started to tell me about the land he and a friend looked at today, and mapped out using a GPS. Ryvre all of the sudden perked up and said "Ken got numbers from the sky!" Dale said, yes, he did; how did you know that? And Ryvre said "i saw it." Of course Dale kept asking questions, but Ryvre couldn't recall where he saw it. He does stuff like this all the time. He'll say he had a dream about, or saw, something he couldn't possibly know about. It's pretty crazy to think about how a little person's mind works--everyone knows their brains are like sponges, but he's getting information from sources so far out there, and in such vague terms, i can't believe he seems to grasp the concepts.