Behind behind behind… the blog is so far BEHIND! BUT looking back at our accomplishments and fun of months past is actually rather fun. AND a great way to boost the creative planning gears for continuing our learning fun! So please enjoy the overflow of December memories.

Trinity and her very special Christmas ornament from her penpal Ella!

Dancing away during our Christmas song practice

Emanuel has some lovely creative journal entries!

The art of Echo

OH and of course a dose of Mystro or our kittlyess household….

Just so much fun kid stuff.

We had some marvelous fun with friends too!

Decorating cookies with the Novaks

Celebrating with the Schwartz Family

Receiving some sweet gifts from James, Holly and Jimmie too that I HAVE TO share! 

And dressing fancy!

Just a December in Minnesota! 

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!

March 8-12

Another weekend, another series of visits. Saturday afternoon/evening Ken and the boys went to a sleepover at Joe and Faithe’s. Total boy time. That left Echo, Trinity and myself to dinner and a rather quiet evening of a movie and popcorn.

Oh and dress up!!

We have some fairy hackers coming along it seems.

Trinity and I even took some time to start her Hello Kitty scrapbook.

And at bedtime we called Daddy to say good night.

With our ride gone overnight there was no Sunday school for us. Just some quiet play time before we had to get ready to go out.

Ken and the boys picked us up around lunchtime so we could head over to Aunty Judy and Uncle Jim’s for a visit. And to return their now fixed computer. Robbie and Jessica were there also, along with all sorts of puppies, a kitty, ducks… fish… and so forth.

We had pizza for lunch and hung out until almost dinner time. It was a great visit on a beautiful day.

Monday was the last session for the  twins’ first set of swimming lessons. With all the weather delays we actually went almost a month late. So the next session that we decided to schedule all 3 boys into gives us only one week grace to get Emanuel’s swim gear ready. They are all very excited to get to it. The twins have a little more work to move out of the beginners group to advanced beginners. But they are learning and loving it. Which is all we can ask!

Trinity was so excited… she completed her first addition AND subtraction book! With minimum tears and fuss no less!

With all the visiting and excitement we had gotten behind on our Art for Kids (HERE) drawing instructions so we had an art session using a variety of the newest ones.

We had penpal letters to illustrate…

And India to learn all about… a light lesson as sadly EVERYONE was getting sick.

Oh and I have to share our follow up on Paul Bunyan! Quite the interesting legend and a perfect chance to discuss how a story can be real or really cannot. I used two library books:

• Paul Bunyan by Steven Kellogg
• The Story of Paul Bunyan by Barbara Emberley

We had three worksheets from Education.com:

• Tell Fact From Fiction HERE
• Coloring Page HERE
• Write a mixed up fairy tale HERE

We are finally seeing some spring like weather… Perfect opportunity to go out in our light clothes and scrape some of the muck off the driveway. Now let’s not get too excited about this sudden warmth… it IS Minnesota and spring is not something winter allows easily here!

Ken and I got around (finally) to assembling a long forgotten shelf and organizing our school stuff even further. Organization is always a calming influence on my soul I swear! And now with some labels thanks to my Christmas present from Ken I even have some spiffy LAMINATED labels for three of our section. The kids were impressed by the fact that they could now SEE some favourite games and puzzles on the bottom row and keep better track of their workbooks.

Pre labels

I am loving the bigger boys helping the little kids. Their reading skills have smoothed out enough that at time they will VOLUNTEER to read the other two their workbook assignments!!

Ken and Trinity did our grocery shopping for the day on Wednesday… and Trinity made sure to come back with a special treat just for me! So sweet!

We finally got around to decorating our Valentines Day folder. It is also more full than expected! But everyone had a blast colouring hearts and messages on our folder.

Of course Echo had to bring out our 100 day markers and draw us up something nice. I think the past 100 school day have had their rough patches but were honestly very nice!

We are forging right on through the weeks with school mixed with fun! March is certainly following February’s lead!