Hannah's 7th Birthday!

Monday was Hannah's birthday! She has been planning this day all month.

Her first request for her birthday was that we get to watch a "girly" movie. She complained that there were too many movie nights that we had to watch a "boy" movie. She wanted to watch something really girly with Princesses in it. So after co-op today, we went to the store and bought "Barbie and the Three Musketeers." This movie fit Hannah to a T. Even Scott laughed and said that it was the perfect Hannah movie. Pretty much the story line is how Barbie wants to be a Musketeer but people keep telling her that girls can't be musketeers. She doesn't give up and meets 3 other girls who all have the same dream of being Musketeers and protecting the prince. Despite all the odds against them they uncover a plot against the prince and finally get their chance to rescue him. I love the twist on the normal Maiden in Distress being rescued by the Prince. Having the Prince in distress being rescued by the Maiden was exactly up Hannah's alley. :-)

She also wanted a funfetti cake with sprinkled icing. She asked me to draw a picture on the cake of a pink castle with purple doors. In this picture you can see what I managed to come up with. Hannah declared it perfect.


She also wanted a pinata. I let her pick one out while we were at the store. She originally wanted a castle pinata but decided that the flower one would hold more candy so she chose it instead.


We let each of the kids choose what they wanted to hit the pinata with. It was a lot of fun watching them.


Hannah went first. I think the bandana covering her face should have been rolled up thicker because they could see the outline of the pinata a little bit through it.


Elijah went next. I must say that something about being two just makes him extremely cute hitting a pinata. We didn't put the bandana on him, since we were afraid he'd hurt himself or somebody else. You can also see his big smile better.
He loved getting to hit that funny flower swinging on a rope.


Jonathan was next. He chose to use his numchuks which are soft. When I questioned the effectiveness of such a soft weapon on the pinata, Scott just told me that at least he won't hurt himself.


Ruth used sii to hit the pinata.


Joshua also used the sii. We teased him a little about the pink bandana on his face. He didn't mind the teasing at all. We had a good laugh though because Scott was a little more aggressive moving the flower up and down for Joshua. We kept telling Joshua that he was getting beat up by a flower. He was having fun right along with us and loved the challenge.


I wasn't planning to post this picture but I'll go ahead and do it. They all insisted that I take a turn. I felt a bit silly but I humored them. I preferred staying behind the camera but Scott had one of the kids take over the camera. You can see how big Elisabeth is getting. I've been told that she looks lower and I must admit it's getting harder to walk. I kind of go around with more of a waddle now and trying to avoid cameras. :-)

Scott decided to fight the pinata with his bare hands. We had a lot of fun laughing with him as well. Joshua got to pull the rope and enjoyed the sparring match between Scott and the flower. Of course Scott's barehanded fight inspired Elijah and he had to go over there and slap the flower with his hands when it was his turn again.


Hannah got to open her birthday presents at the end of all the fun. She was real excited to have gotten new sparring gear and a new gi bag to put her gear and uniform in. She even got a pair of house shoes that have a special floor cleaning sole on them.


Since Hannah put her gear on the others all geared up for a sparring match and I had them pose for this last picture.
Jonathan got Hannah's old helmet and a new set of gloves to go with it. Hannah had outgrown her old helmet. It won't be long and Jonathan will outgrow it and be passing it down to Elijah. Ah, how time flies these days!

I just have to add another advantage to having a large family, you always have a big party and plenty of game participants on hand. :-)

I had a Doctor's appointment yesterday. Elisabeth has a healthy heart beat and I'm measuring a couple of inches big. But my doctor didn't seem concerned about it. She simply told me, "Y'all just make big babies." So I'm guessing Elisabeth might be on the bigger side. I'm hoping she's not competing for Jonathan's 11 lb birth weight. All the others fell around the 8 to 9 lb range. I'll just have to wait and see. Only 2 more months to go!

Father/Daughter Date Niight and Mother/Son Movie Night.

This week past week was so busy. My last blog was about Monday, which was Elijah's birthday. Tuesday was a normal day with karate class that evening. Thursday, I took the kids for a dentist appointment. Our dentist is 2 1/2 hours away from where we live but it's well worth the drive to go to a dentist you like and trust. The kids were all excited and they all wanted to go first. They learned a lot from the visit as well. They learned about all the tools that the dentist uses and how to brush their teeth properly. They learned about cavities and what the dentist does to fill them. Joshua and Ruth both had small cavities. Ruth was able to have hers filled while we were there but I had to make another appointment for Joshua. We spent the whole afternoon there. I didn't take any pictures, since I was so busy keeping up with the younger ones that were waiting their turns.

Saturday morning, we had karate class. Then we bought a few items to complete the girls' wardrobe for the Father/Daughter date night. All the girls were dressing up in 1950s style clothes.

Then we stopped by the theater and picked up the tickets for us to go see the Movie "Monumental" produced by Kirk Cameron. I am looking forward to taking the kids to see it.

Saturday night, Scott took Ruth and Hannah to the Father/Daughter Night with friends in our Keepers of the Faith group.


It was a 1950s theme skating party. They had a lot of fun skating and playing games.


They also enjoyed Coke floats and Root Beer floats, hamburgers, and French Fries.


While Scott and the girls were gone, I treated the boys to a movie night. We enjoyed watching Spiderman 2, while eating French Fries and Fish sticks. After the movie ended, the boys and I enjoyed some ice cream.

After the ice cream the younger two boys enjoyed getting to have a bubble bath.

Scott called me to let me know they were on their way home. He let Hannah talk to me on the phone first.
That girl had me so confused! All she talked about at 90 miles a minute was crushing heads and baking cookies. The whole time she was talking I couldn't get her to slow down long enough to explain any of it. So finally I interrupted her and asked her to pass the phone to Daddy. He laughed at how confused she had me and explained that somehow he had gotten into a discussion with her on the French revolution. You'll have to go to his blog for her take on it.

My ears were better relieved when he passed the phone to Ruth and she actually told me calmly and cheerfully all the fun things they did at the party. None of which had anything to do with crushed or chopped off heads. :-) Thankfully!

Tomorrow is Hannah's birthday and I'll be posting pictures. She has already told me what she wants to do tomorrow. It should be a pretty interesting day. :-)

And yes, I'm going to leave you hanging. Don't you love suspense?

Elijah's 2nd Birthday

We celebrated Elijah's Birthday on Monday. We had a busy day filled with fun and excitement for our little man.

Our day began with going to our homeschool co-op. For those that are not familiar with homeschooling, a co-op is usually made up of homeschool families in an area that meet together and have classes taught by the parents. For instance in our co-op, I volunteered to teach a recorder music class. I teach the beginner level during the first hour class and intermediate during the 3rd hour. The second hour is a p.e. class where the kids have group games for about 45 minutes followed by a 15 minute break and snack time.

Elijah is in the 0-3 year old class. Jonathan is in the 4-6 year old class. Hannah is taking beginner recorder and embroidery. Ruth is taking science and sewing. And Joshua is taking Science and Legos.

This was our first week of co-op and I felt it went well. We meet once a week for 6 weeks.

After co-op ended we went to the store and picked Elijah out some birthday presents. I got him a stick horse from the dollar store and I let him choose the color hat he wanted. I also picked him out a toy gun, since he had been running around the house pretending to ride my broom and pretending to shoot with toy guns he took from his siblings. Now he has the full outfit.


After the store, we stopped by our friends' farm. They live real close to us and we let them know we were coming. The older kids got to bottle feed some of the baby goats. Elijah was still a bit nervous at that point. I had to take this picture of them in the goat pin. I joked that only half the kids in that pin were mine. :-)


We got to see a border collie herd goats. It was really neat to watch him from a distance obey the commands of his trainer, with just the sound of a whistle and the sight of a shephrd's rod. The kids asked lots of questions and learned a lot.

The dog won't mess with any sheep or goat that has a baby. We saw one he had left way out in the field and they took us in their gator to see whether the sheep had given birth recently. Sure enough she had a new baby lamb with her. Then we heard another lamb crying a little ways off and Joshua got to hold the lamb and reunite her with her mother.


Jonathan got to steer the Gator through the pasture. You know that was exciting for a 4 year old.


Then the kids each got to go for a ride on a horse. Hannah had been begging the whole time if they could ride.


Joshua went after Hannah. Then Jonathan rode with Joshua. Jonathan was a bit nervous as you can see by the picture.


After Ruth had a turn Elijah got to ride with her. I was amazed at how calm he was. Before this just the sight of a horse scared him. But after seeing the others ride he was saying, "My turn!" He looked so comfortable in the saddle he might would have fallen asleep if he had ridden much longer.


The kids got to sweep the horse area. They had so much fun that I told our neighbors that they should get themselves a couple of extra brooms and charge admission. :-)


Then came the tractor. Elijah climbed up there all by himself. He was so excited.


The others all got to go for a ride in the bucket. I think they couldn't have had more fun if it had been a Ferris wheel. I was afraid that Elijah would panic so I held him down below. Don't worry, they didn't go anywhere just up and back down. :-) In fact Hannah was in that bucket so good she almost didn't want to come out.


I had to take this picture because Jonathan is petting the dog that he had been terrified of when we first stepped out of the car. The kids also enjoyed playing fetch with her.


At the very end of our visit, I had the kids all get in the back of the gator for one last picture before we left. We had so much fun and learned so much.


Elijah fell asleep before we even left the driveway good. Jonathan was out as soon as he found the recliner. :-) Sure signs that they had a really good time on a farm.

Spring Break with Family

This week has been good. Monday was Scott's first day off for Spring Break. We enjoyed sleeping later than normal and just having an easy Monday. With our normal schedule, every morning has a reason for our alarms to be set. Even Saturdays even though it's not set as early, we still have to make sure we get up in time for karate class. So when Scott gets a day off, we enjoy leaving the alarms off. Which is especially nice when you have to get used to the time change.

Tuesday was park day for our homeschool group. I think this was the first time this school year that Scott was off. He and Joshua brought their Skateboards, Jonathan brought a little bicycle with training wheels, and Hannah had her "heelies". Technically they are not the name brand but they look like regular shoes with hidden wheels inside the soles.

Elijah didn't want to be left out, so he put Daddy's helmet on and commenced to doing tricks.

And he looks so little on that big skateboard. He didn't even fall off. Although it looks like he should while popping a wheelie. :-)

After our time at the park, we went to a mall where we met with another homeschool family that was interested in making new friends. We enjoyed visiting with them and the kids all had a good opportunity to try out their communication skills. :-) It can be hard to get conversations going with other kids without knowing anything about them. But I thought they did very well. The children were all in the same age group. I was especially pleased that our normally shy Ruth had actually started a conversation without any prompting with the other girl her age. I thought back to five years ago and how I worried about Ruth ever making friends. Now she is able to start her own conversations and make new friends.

We had about 45 minutes to wait before karate class began, so we walked around a sports store. There were some kayak's hanging from the wall, which Jonathan was positive were war boats, especially the camouflage one.

The store was close to where the karate class is located, so we arrived at the class early enough for Jonathan to attend the little kids class. Normally we only go to adult class and participate as a family.
.....................
Uh oh, I fell asleep blogging! I guess any "todays" I wrote you can realize was yesterday. I'm just going to publish this blog and write another one to tell about the rest of Spring Break later on.

Working on Organization

This week we have been working hard to get our house organized. We moved Elijah into the smaller bedroom with his brothers. We will be getting him a toddler bed soon and I wanted to get him used to the change of room before we change his bed.

In order to make it all work both the boys' and girls' rooms needed major work. There were clothes all over their floors. This hasn't been a new problem. In fact I've had to go through their clothes fairly often. I decided we needed to go through them again and see if we could get a handle on the problem.



Elijah loves it when I try to organize clothes. Piles of clothes are mountains of fun to him.

We started off with sheets and blankets. I even had them take the sheets off their beds. I put those in piles. Twin size sheets and pillow cases in one pile, baby bed sheets in another pile, towels that somehow got into the mix in another pile and crochet blankets and quilts in yet another pile. I then got a basket and had them put their favorite set of sheets in it. I started that load to wash.

Then I had them pick out their favorite blankets. Once we put the first load in the dryer, we started a load of blankets washing. I had them pick out a second set of sheets each and the rest will be either given away or stored in another location. (If anyone needs sheets let me know soon.) :-) We had sheets and blankets washing all day.

After getting that major work done, I had the kids take a break to work on their lessons.

The next day we started gathering the clothes off their floors. I'm still working on getting that organized. I have to figure out what fits them and what doesn't. I'm automatically throwing away clothes that have holes. I hope to get done with this task before Spring Break next week.



I want to share a couple of cute pictures from the past week or two. In the one above, Elijah had fallen asleep while playing in a small box. I took a quick picture before rescuing him from his cozy quarters and laying him in his bed.



And this next picture, I took after karate class last week. Hannah is wearing her new green belt and Elijah is trying out a black belt that belongs to one of the students in our adult class. Elijah liked the belt so much that he almost wouldn't part with it. :-) Maybe one day, he'll earn one of his own that will fit him a little better.

Now to get back to work organizing. Maybe next week, I'll be able to post pictures of nice, neat rooms.