May 18-23

We spent a large chunk of our Sunday out on the hunt for treasure… and for a good park! The girls decided to go matching on their excursion. We actually found a special geocaching coin that travels and is tracked. It has been all over the US an now it is our turn to pass it along!!

Chipmunk!

Pioneer Park

So swampy everywhere!

We have continued our watching of Veggie Tales when we can get our hands on them. So on a cloudy Monday it was a great filler between the rest of our ongoing learning of Texas, reading, writing and math. Sadly we are running out of shows that include a set of Sunday School worksheets to use. So instead we drew our own fun pictures.

That evening Ken worked on teaching the boys Agricola (HERE) another strategy game that I honestly am not a huge fan of. The additional reading, challenging game play all seems to be helping them stretch their skills more and more.

Tuesday was a nature walk in our very own neighbourhood. Keeping our eyes wide open for some more signs of spring… discussing road safety and the difference between planned plants and weeds. I think in June or July we will do a walk through the neighbourhood and see if we can get a bunch of different leaves and try and identify what trees are actually local to us. Which gives the little guys the chance to do a favourite activity – leaf rubbings!

Of course around lunch time we had to head back outside to enjoy the backyard. Really we were stuck indoors way too long this winter!

Art for Kids has put tons of wonderful how to’s out for us to enjoy. (link on right) Even Trinity is gaining confidence with the use of these.

Miss Echo was quite adamant that it was an ipad anime day for her. I really do love my Crunchyroll membership. Affordable and fun for me too. Granted she doesn’t understand anything being said and can’t read the translation but she bops to the music and enjoys the animation.

We tried something different for mid week. Of course we continued reading Treasure Island together.

But I had Ken make me up a nice set of charts for us to go onto the ipad and use my weather app to chart the week coming up weather local to us and for Austen Texas. Using this comparison we opened the table for a discussion about how activities and such would differ for the days there than here. Then for each day recorded the twins settled in with a sibling and wrote basically a daily diary for what they would do in Texas according to the weather. Zander was super creative and one day played out in the rain only to have to stay in the next sick with a cold!

We dug out our box of fraction magnets just to enjoy the manipulation of the pieces and to see how they look as actual objects. The boys were discussing and quizzing each other and explaining to the littles so I just sat back and let them go at it (as long as the information was CORRECT!).

We rounded off our outside experience on scooters, bikes and fancy skateboards. Sunshine sunshine SUNSHINE!

Trust me we really ARE doing sitting down book work interspersed with LOTS of outside running and burning of energy. Gavin has been taking charge of the camera occasionally and taking pictures too! Mommy in front of the camera instead of behind!!

Emanuel and I stole some afternoon creativity time on Wednesday and made a car ramp out of stuff in the livingroom while the other kids went on a walk with Nana and Baba. It is nice to have some quiet one on one time with the kids.

We ended our school week with ANOTHER Geocache adventure to a small park with a terrific tree shaded walking path. The boys are definitely the ones to jump up and go into the woods. We girls tend to wander the paths closer too and enjoy the more tick and branch free portion of the experience. That is not to say that Trinity does not jump on in from time to time though!

We are certainly seeing portions of Minnesota that Ken hasn’t even seen. There are some absolutely amazing out of the way tiny lakes and pretty shaded places. And we are seeing all of this together which is absolutely another plus. One thing we have learned from all the sessions Ken is now doing with his counselor is that going out as a family and enjoying an activity is absolutely crucial for all of us! That time together getting out, exercise coupled with the ability to spend POSITIVE time as a family. Amazing!

And a touch of Texas facts

I swear I intend to catch up but we really followed through on our pledge to make every day count in May as much as possible. Living in the moment and finding the amazing in every second!!!

May 12-17

We are very blessed with our main penpal… Gammie has become instrumental in our writing and letter practice. We get more letters some months than we can almost keep up with but every one is answered! This newest installment came not only with letters but with a rainy day (and we have had a few) fun craft using pom poms.

She has added a new incentive for our school work… sending the girls their own work pages to mail back to her. Echo calls it doing her mail and I am happy to say she was VERY interested in doing it. We actually budgeted in curriculum overview books for the kids this month which includes one for her that she will start later in June or July.

There was also a new card game … whack a mole in card form?? The kids LOVED it!

Geocaching is going to be life changing for this family! Now even and every day trip to the store could be expanded to include a treasure hunt as well! We quickly are doing up all the local (walking distance) ones.

And on these outings we are finding more and more examples of winter being truly done and gone. After such a horrible winter each and every little indication is so AMAZING!!

Tuesday Trinity was teaching Echo how to concentrate on her pages…

Zander finished ANOTHER journal. Each book has higher expectations of the writer. This newest book means he has to have a title for every entry, the date and around 7 sentences! Anything to get the creative writing juices flowing! Well done Zander!

Another chapter of Treasure Island later…

And later in the day we made another trek out into the parks of Minnesota to find more Geocaching locations. This time we took Echo and while she and Mommy did not venture into the wooded area we did enjoy our walk. And met a nice puppy.

Wednesday was full of paper work.

Osprey

With the boys in the pool in the evening. I am not sure when we will sign them up for the next series of sessions but man are they improving. We honestly  cannot afford the large number of sports a lot of kids are in right now but what we do do seems to be so appreciated lately that I feel like as long as we keep taking advantage of what we can afford and maybe create our own opportunities we will do just fine!

On Thursday we were indoors and watching BBC nature shows. The kids made a lovely poster after.

The boys assembled some amazing Texas mini lapbooks. The links to these will be in my Texas Resource entry at the end of May.

More Wild Kratts…

Roadrunner

And reading…

And a Dirty Jobs about mosquitoes (I had to share Gavin’s picture… that is one HAPPY insect).

Emanuel learned about South Africa as well.

On Friday since everyone BUT the kids and I were out and about I snuck out with Ken and brought them home CHOCOLATE DONUTS! Yup we miss our Tim Hortons!!!

And I mean we REALLY love the geocaching. I would totally suggest it to any family (or person for that matter) that wants something to do that is really on your own terms. We have downloaded an app for our smart phone but you can get a GPS unit (we want one one day). We have been picking an area that has multiple caches to find and do our best to get them all. We have our own special bag of things we need (that is still evolving and I will share the total list in the future I promise) and try to keep the kids as involved as possible.

Nature was out full force as well. Amazingly enough all this was close to Sam’s (ok so we combined a  good trip Geocaching with shopping…). A Saturday well done.

Spring has sprung full force here… and this is our best year yet for taking advantage of it!

I know I know… BELATED but I AM catching up and it WAS a special Mother’s Day for me…

May 11

It seems we have set a precedent with our busy May weekends. BUT this was Mother’s Day so it was a special kind of busy… First off we had to head to Sunday School. There was a parent meeting about VBS and the following year’s Sunday School during class. Even Echo came along to enjoy the various people at church. In fact, next year she is going to be in Sunday School for the very first time! And it looks like she will be in VBS this summer (end of June) as well.

After Sunday School we headed home to take our yearly Mother’s Day photos. I think we all looked rather spiffy!

And then it was time to change out of the finery and leave Echo with Nana and Baba for the first part of the really MOMMY centered portion of the day. We got out to Lochness Park (seriously! But no unknown monster in the depths sorry!) to begin what we hope will become a lifestyle change for us all – GEOCACHING!

I have wanted to try out this GPS based treasure hunt for a year now… but until we had to upgrade our phone we really could not do it. Amazingly enough Minnesota has thousands of cache locations for us to find and explore. Some are micro where you just sign a log, some larger where trinkets can be left and taken.

I sat down and made sure to make up a few marshmallows (crochet) to leave at the nicer caches. The kids have also grabbed some of their small and not favourite toys to leave behind as well.

Amazingly enough I was the first one to find a cache!!! Talk about appropriate. And the excitement, the working on keeping our eyes open… the out and out exercise coupled with a treasure at the end has everyone in our family absolute hooked!

We ended our circuit around the lake with lunch in the vehicle out of last year’s picnic bag (awesome purchase from Target). And it was time to head home for an amazing nap and dinner from the family’s favourite Chinese restaurant.

And boardgames with Daddy

Happy Mother’s Day to all you Mommies in our lives… a special call out to those titled ladies in our kids’ lives – Grandma Reinsch, Grandma, Nana, Great Grandma Rapp, the God Mommies: Darcy, Christine, Xinny Karyn, Esther, Ada and Bree… Thank you so much for taking on the responsibility of being a support to the kids. We love you all!!!