New month, new school year! This year I gave the kids the option to “chose” their school year… We get asked this question A LOT through the years and the kids never really know how to answer it. We don’t align to a specific grade and in Trinity’s case, I didn’t register her OFFICIALLY until she was 7 but she has been schooling much longer. (this saves us on testing until it is required by state law) I gave Echo Kindergarten and Trinity chose Grade 3. The boys, they got creative.

Emanuel went with Grade Dinosaur. Gavin  decided on Grade Minecraft. Zander went all out with Grade Mom is the Best Teacher. (mild suck up action there).

I even wrote my own “grade” level.

Poor Echo continued to get eaten alive by the mosquitoes.

I went all out and tried blue hair… it faded a bit too quickly for my tastes but was fun for the short time it lasted.

Note Echo’s temporary blue streak thanks to hair chalk.

September was also the month of our Uncle Ted and Uncle Sean visit. Ted was here 1 week and Sean 2. It was amazing to have 3 of my boys together for the span of time. So much fun.

With Cookie the new Fat Sheep

We also did Renaissance Festival with the boys and Shandai and Ravyn (no kids of course). Costumes for those who wanted etc etc. I will post the many many images and share the fun in a future post.

We ate out at our favourite Indian place.

Sean took Ken and myself out for a super fancy dinner as well!

Fancy outfit… ignore the bathroom

Super pretty room

Played with the Uncles.

Worked out hard.

Learned as much as we could.

I snuck in my craft time whenever possible.

At the pool

I think we all had fun walking outside to the park.

There was a robot kit to make with the uncles.

And Sean even taught Echo how to play WoW (World of Warcraft) which I hadn’t seen in AGES.

Don’t forget swimming.

And the most unusual students.

As well as some amazing sunsets.

New school year, new start! We made the most of it with lots of fun, workbooks and working together. Keep an eye peeled for an overflow blog post. There are just too many pictures to share!

Gifts from Ethiopia!

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!

June 4-5

Our dinosaurs have stacked up and with summer break here for local public school kids we are moving to half day work ourselves… so instead of a NEW dinosaur we went through and checked where all our previous dinosaurs have been located/found! Quite the imbalance. So now Emanuel has me on the hunt for dinosaurs in exotic locations!! You can find the map we printed out and used HERE thanks to Printable World Map.

map

For our math component we dug out our Cyberchase DVD (thank you so much Victoria!!! That was a great Christmas present way back when.). The kids all seem to get something out of it. I am definitely going to have to find some more so that we can do some fun math on the run!!

Like they are huddled around a fire or something, only it is the DVD player

Our lapbook work for Father’s Day has begun! From the humble beginnings of a simple church service to over 93 MILLION cards sent a year!

Overcast or not, we had some fun outside as well…

Echo had a walk with Nana and Baba all by herself!

Wednesday was a rainy day, but our boys are VERY observant, and noticed that across the neighbour’s lot on the other street there was a garage sale setting up. So… umbrella in hand we had to go check it out.

2.25 later and we had a new toy… which was promptly fought over, two tops for the girls and two books!

The toy

The highlight of our day was, of course, a visit from Bree and Lily!

I was able to give her her knotted headband, I made one for myself as well. You can find instructions for this HERE thanks to Maybe Matilda. I went to a much larger hook (I crochet tighter than most people it seems) and for my own added and edging of white. I am going to make a couple for Lily as the stretch will allow her to wear them longer!!! And of course for my own girls!

Bree and Lily and I snuck out to Target to shop while the girls here were napping and Ken working from home. It is such a pick me up to have a friend come in the middle of the week!!!

The kids did another wonderful session of reading together. I am so proud of everyone’s patience!

So rain has not stopped us, merely changed plans. Sadly though the mosquitoes are starting to show and like her sister Echo is allergic… the joys of bug bites that itch like mad!! Wish us luck!