"A Stitch in Time"

The week is quickly coming to a close and I think I have FINALLY determined what we are doing this week – finishing! I found a couple of the older Prek workbooks the twins have been working on in the past and put them in their folders. We are actually trying something slightly different, last night I filled up a folder for each boy with their name on it with math pages, some dot to dots, unfinished PreK workbooks and such and had them choose what they wanted to do and how much.

Gavin went all out on his unfinished number workbook from Sesame Street and almost finished the whole thing, proving that his grasp on the number 13 is improving (for some reason when they count often they leave that number out??). Emanuel is continuing his work on his PreK lapbook!

Working hard

Zander did considerably less but volunteered to go out and do part of their daily summer/fall chore and pick up all the good apples and some of the bad. The hope is to get as many as possible cleaned up this week BEFORE the leaves join the apples on the ground. This also has me hopping on the applesauce trying to use up what are definitely BIGGER and REDDER apples this year. All that rain has done wonders on the apples but the raspberries… not so much.

Zander and Emanuel picking up apples... sort of

Trinity and Echo have done some more bonding, mostly Trinity discussing where Echo’s nose is, and telling me all about her. During my bath Echo spit up all over herself so she got an impromptu shower with Daddy that went rather well.

Explaining where her nose is

I left out a craft today in favour of another trip out to the fountains at the legislature. The weekend weather report is looking rather nice but with so much other stuff stuffed into it as well as the inevitable busier time at any of the “fun places” in the city we opted for today. Tomorrow I have promised (as long as the weather is nice) to put the sprinkler on and refill the pool… oh and slip them some freezies IF the apples are mostly cleaned up.

Emanuel, Zander and Gavin

Me and My BIG Girl!

Of course 5 min into that event – on a perfect day – no one else around at the little fountain and only one family over at the “pool,” Gavin starts crying… he jumped off of something and fell and hit his head! With swim shoes on and everything and right after I had said – be careful! Luckily we got him sitting down and holding a wipe to his head to see if the bleeding would stop, which gave me the time to get Trinity into the fountain for some play before we left or we would have had a 6 yr old in tears AND a VERY angry 2 yr old. It pretty much stopped bleeding but looked total ick so we packed everyone up, went through McD’s drive through (no supper yet of course), dropped the other 4 kids and myself off and picked up something for Gavin and Ken to do at the hospital and sent them off to emergency. Gavin was actually MORE upset about not getting to play more at the fountain than the wound. With our weather quickly changing I am not sure we will make it back but we will make it up to them – either the park or zoo or something!

Watching cartoons and waiting for Gavin

After a couple hours at emergency they were able to head home with the injury glued together (?), if that holds we are golden, if not he has to go back in to emergency and get one stitch. So fingers crossed the glue is the solution!

All glued up, Ken took a picture of the wound but I won't share that one here.

In order to keep my mind off the one child that was NOT here, I did a bit of crafting – one more page for Echo done and ready to go into her book…

Brothers and Sisters

and some dishes, tidying and chasing of the 3 that are here and mobile. Thank goodness for PVRed tv!

We got some mail today from my brother and his family. They were planning to make the trip up this weekend but Holly and my nephew Jimmie caught colds. Which is totally too bad – we have not seen them since last Christmas. But I have high hopes for us making it 3 hours south of here SOMETIME in the foreseeable future.

New clothes for Echo

Scrapbook and a movie for the big kids

So a relatively sedate day totally went wild by the end! But we are all in basically one piece and home for the evening which is a definite plus. The rest of the night I have to get back to work on that stocking and hopefully talk designs with Ken, who is now hours behind on HIS schedule for the evening. Serves us right for making an evening timeline when we have 5 kids!!!

I just can't help but take more pictures!

The start of a new week, the last few days of an old month… while we are not OFFICIALLY starting our homeschool year or anything (we are faxing our forms tonight and will find out about funding this week), I made my first go at pushing a few more educational activities to our day. Of course all this AFTER Echo and I slept in for a while.

With Emanuel and Trinity in nap the twins were settled down to do math pages and then moved to their Cars  themed number workbooks. Gavin, for once decided to continue on well past the couple pages I expected him to do! Zander lost interest and was sat down with a lined book to continue review on the alphabet. My goal is to get them all through the ABC’s and then work on everyone’s names and other words of interest. Anything to  get Zander interested in reading and have Gavin move into using his lower-case letters more while he writes (he is already reading more than Zander).

Numbers! (Gavin left)

Oh and don’t forget getting started on the Gardening Lapbook assembly! Ken just needs to add a page to the folder and we are done!!

Lapbook assembly (Zander left)

When Emanuel woke up from his nap he settled down with me to work on his PreK workbook which covers a variety of topics. Willingly doing more and more pages until we ended with colouring a fish picture together.

Emanuel at work

I sent all the kids to the basement and set up the big excitement for the day – FELT PUPPETS! All 4 kids got their own puppet, glue and whatever bits and bobs they wanted to use to create their own little puppet. Messy, stuff everywhere, which means TOTAL fun! Now they just need to dry overnight (or longer depending on the amount of glitter glue all 4 kids were very free with).

Creating the Puppets (Gavin)

Completed Puppets (Emanuel, Gavin,Trinity and the yellow Zander)

Once the kids were bundled off to a relatively early bedtime (oh my did they need it!) I got in a tiny bit of scrapbooking time (before Baby Echo announced her wish that Mommy NOT leave her side) and did up Emanuel’s Canada Day 2009 page and his page for Nathan and Ada’s Canadian wedding. I still want to get Echo’s hospital pages done… but I want to do those two pages with Ken’s help. End of the month is simply not the best time to corner Ken on crafting time!

Nathan and Ada's Wedding

Canada Day 2009

In-between helping with numbers and letters I got most of my post baby thank you cards written out, the next step is to find envelopes for all the ones that need to be mailed and then sorting through whose I can hand deliver (always preferable with the cost of stamps now!!). Baby Echo has been welcomed so sweetly by people in person with hugs and kisses, compliments on her pictures and even lovely cards in the mail. I hope everyone knows how much we appreciate the support, compliments and love. One of the reasons our not so little family feels so manageable is due to the love and support of friends and family.

Thoughtful Sleeper

Of course I REALLY should put my attention to Echo’s stocking, I have 3 more time sensitive projects that I am waiting on patterns for but I have yet to miss the date on our baby’s first Christmas stocking and am determined to buckle down and get things done. Well, at least trying to be! At least the photos are ordered for the Great Grandmas and our long distance god-parents. And I have pictures already printed out to make 2 more scrapbook pages for Emanuel. So it is not like I have nothing to do, just much rather snuggle with the baby! Can you blame me???

Trinity and Anna

I think out of the entire family it is ME whose sleep schedule is out of  whack! Last night I could not fall asleep until past 3am… and was not up until noon… luckily I had things left out for the kids so Ken could manage without me and Echo. In fact the kids were very excited about this one – making bracelets! And Ken of course remembered to take pictures!

Busy Beaders (Gavin green)

Trinity is still very off her schedule and sleeping in in the mornings. So we are slowly working her back to up by 8/9 to nap by 11. The weather has become favourable so I sent the twins out during nap time to collect the “bad apples” off the tree closest to the house. It is sad as it produces TONS but we can’t find any use for them and if they are left they rot so quickly. It has been 3 days+ since they have done this chore so today there was more whining than usual. BUT the good tree has been producing too and I now have BAGS of apples waiting for the slow cooker and applesauce. Definitely one of my summer goals – to refill our freezer with applesauce to hold us  through winter. I am definitely going to miss the tree and the raspberries when we move in the spring.

Apple collecting (Gavin red)

Last night I finished ALL my thank you cards for post baby gifts… now to fill them out and get envelopes ready. But it felt good to finish it all in one go. One less thing on the list and now I can start thinking about the BAPTISM invites. Although we are thinking of having that around early October. My mom is in the middle of making the baptism gown so there is no rush – and Karyn is gone to Scotland until the 10th of September (lucky girl!).

I am actually feeling rather good about Echo’s stocking. I have managed to get a lot of the bits and pieces completed that do not include metallic threads and am hoping to see at least one of the figures done by the weekend. This is my 5th time stitching this particular pattern (and last). Once I get ahead on my projects and wish list I am going to start a stocking for Ken – just not THIS pattern!

Stocking to date

Of course heading out to get thread was the perfect chance to attempt a picture of ALL 5 kids in front of our “picture taking tree.” It is hard to get them all to behave but in my mind a picture with all of them in it smiling or not is a win.

All 5 together (Zander purple)

We are still waiting on our time for Friday’s 2 week appointment. It is hard to get in to see a paediatrician here in the city. Well at least ones we are ok with seeing. The doctor who saw Echo at the hospital was rude and the other doctor who was on call before that was the one that we absolutely HATED when dealing with him and Trinity. He refused to listen and acknowledge that breastfeeding was a good idea or that we had more than just the one child. It is hard to believe we are creeping up on 2 weeks with this sweet little baby in our lives, the time has just flown by.

Sleepy

I have also heard back from my commission that she received her piece and was happy with it! This is not one I will have up for sale or free download but I am definitely proud of it!! We based it on the two badges that they used for the missions and went from there.

NASA commission

We played around with some photo taking tonight… not too much as Echo was resistant to more than a couple poses. I think we have to wait until very late in the evening when she is REALLY relaxed to do our last few ideas for the newborn photos. I am still not sure what I will use as our announcement/wall photo for her…

One of the poses

Life is feeling rather close to home right now. Our days are filled with excited kids who are slowly coming back down from all the crazy that has gone on, and our brand new baby… Ken doing what he can when he can and myself just getting back the energy I had before I got pregnant. It feels… fulfilling!

Busy on his bike