To Iowa and back

(I wrote this last night and am just not posting it.)

Jeremy’s sisters are visiting Illinois this week. It’s a rare treat. I don’t think we’d seen them since Rachel’s wedding last year. They’d never even met their newest nephew….who they’ve had their fill of by now.

We’re on our way home from Iowa as I type this. We visited Jeremy’s grandparents who we haven’t seen since Zedekiah was about a month old. We miss them living in Decatur. Grandma is one of the best cooks and we ate more than our fill of her yummy yummy cooking. The boys loved getting all of that special grandma love. They got to hang out with their great grandparents and great great grandma as well as their aunts.

I think my favorite memory of this trip will be playing “The book game” with Jeremy’s sister, Jamie. It’s a unique combination of chutes and ladders and bible trivia. We had to make up the rules since the instructions were long lost. As you play the game you can “backslide” or “bring your grandma joy” as well as many other Christian faults and blessings. Then right before the end there’s a space called “The Joy of Giving” where like 6 spaces before the end you give your spot at the end to another player. Seriously. I’m sure you can imagine how well this went. Michael landed on the space, cried, threw a fit, proclaimed that he didn’t have joy for sharing his space, etc. Then Joseph started crying because Michael didn’t share with him. Oh it was great. What’s even funnier is that they seem to love the game anyways. Later Michael played the game again and landed on the “joy of giving” space again. He didn’t like but he didn’t cry. He did say with a very sassy attitude “Well, I definitely didn’t have joy about it!”

Now we’re tired and we’ve been on the road wayyyyy too long. Unfortunately I like to get out of the car a lot…. sometimes it makes a trip take twice as long as it should. Today was one of those days. On the bright side, we got to eat at Bennigan’s today. Ours closed down unexpectedly while I was pregnant. I had such a craving for their pineapple dip they use on their appetizers and it has went unfulfilled for far too long. Oooh that dip was yummy! Zedekiah cried for a long time…. too long in the car and too many days of too much stuff. He’s ready to spend some time at home.

I’m ready to spend some time at home. I have a renewed desire to spend time at home. I think I’m finally ready to spend quality getting our house cleaned and organized as well as getting back into the swing of cooking our meals again. I miss eating food at home. I miss not spending tons and tons of money eating out. Hopefully I manage to stick to it this time.

New pictures…on Facebook

Facebook has made it way too eassy to upload pictures there now. Here’s our last two months worth.

The mid-August update

I know I haven’t posted pictures in 2 forevers. I don’t even know where our camera is right now…but I have a suspicion that it’s at church. Michael and Joseph both graduated from their respective Wednesday night clubs. Joseph is no longer a Missionette for Jesus. Ok, no one is a Missionette for Jesus anymore…but he’s not in the new and improved Mpact club either. He finished up his Rainbows career becoming an Honor Rainbow. He couldn’t care less, I am really excited. He and Zedekiah are the only honor kids I’ll ever have and only at the Rainbow level since you have to be a girl to move above that. We’ll be going to the statewide award ceremony later this year. Michael has moved on to “Discovery Rangers” where he’ll learn lots of scary things like building fire and other caveman accomplishments.

Zedekiah has been finding a new skill just about everyday. His most recent accomplishment of note is de-capping markers. I was allowed 3 happy homeschooling days where I could just hand him a marker like the boys had and he was happy. Then, on day 4 he uncapped the marker. In reality he’d uncapped like 7 before I noticed what he was doing. I’m an awesome mom like that. He also gave himself a fantastic Hitler mustache. He’s cruising around things, and starting to let go of one thing to get to another thing to cruise around. He can climb a flight of stairs, he can move his firetruck, or a chair or a box to a strategic location so that he can climb and get stuff that’s even higher up. I think my point is that he really likes to climb. He has developed an intense love of balls. I’m pretty sure he said ball earlier today.

His language skills aren’t picking up very quickly. Sometimes he’ll say something resembling “bru-bru” to indicate his brother. He never says mama and may or may not say da da. I’m not sure. He makes fantastic faces when his nose is a little stuffed up. I think he gets that from me. We have nights where he only wakes up once to nurse. We have nights where he wakes up way more frequently than that as well. He still has just the 2 bottom teeth. I’m wondering if the last time I thought he was teething if it was really an ear infection. Either way, he’s feeling better now. He’s also crawling like a normal baby now. He learned at the pool since sliding along on your belly isn’t really all that great on concrete. Plus, you get more wet.

Thursday night we went to Pony Express Days to enjoy armband night. Joseph was excited to find that he’s tall enough for a lot more rides this year. We rode our bikes as we often do, forgetting that it’s like another 1/2 mile from where we park our bikes. Next year we’ll pay to park our bikes closer. It’s only $2 for parking so totally worth it if the 4 bikes only count as one car. This was my first time back on my bike since I was a few months pregnant with Z. This was Z’s first time in the trailer ever. He is not a fan. His helmet made his head sit all funny and it was really uncomfortable looking. I’m going to be trying to figure out what to do about that. It was really nice to get out and ride with the family again.

Time to get back to work.

Back to School Shopping

I’ve bought a lot of curriculum to add to the 2nd half of our year but we didn’t need *ANYTHING* in the way of school supplies this year. That’s taking into account that they’re not going to be this cheap again for a year. Nothing. I was excited to get the opportunity to go “back to school” shopping to donate but it’s just not the same.

Well, today Joseph gave me something to be shopping for. He wrote on our dry erase board with something we call a “permanent marker.” Funny thing about those is that they’re pretty permanent. So, I get to buy some new small marker boards. We use them all the time so it’s convenient to have a few located in different areas of the house. I could be a spokesperson for dry erase boards

Slow and Steady….

The 2nd half of our school year started this week. I decided to stagger when we started things so that we didn’t get completely overwhelmed on day 1. I’ve added a lot to our day over the summer and I know the kids and I would have become very frustrated had we dived head first into all of it.

So far we’ve done very well. We’re just doing math and grammar/phonics and sometimes bible and handwriting this week. Joseph is doing fantastic. We’ve gotten through a month’s worth of math lessons in the last 3 days. Seriously. We started a new math program called Math U See with him and I love it. He’s way past the beginning lessons so instead of spending a week on each lesson like you’re supposed to, we’re spending a day, and one day we accidentally did 2 lessons due to a page turning error. He’s also still working on his “Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading” book. We just started reading words with lk, lb and lp in them. Big stuff! We’re continuing with Hnadwriting Without Tears as well.

Michael isn’t having such a good week. We started on the 2nd workbook for our 2nd grade math curriculum. He has decided that it’s much too hard, that he doesn’t know how to add and that subtraction is rocket science. These are all things he’s actually quite good at if he would just stop whining about doing his math, start using his brain a bit and buckle down and work. Luckily today I held getting to go to an extra swimming lesson over his head and he finished nice and early. We’re going to switch him to Math U See as well. He had previously said that he didn’t want to switch but I’m not willing to deal with his attitude every day so we’re switching as soon as I either find a good deal on it or manage to get my credit card out of the van to order from the official site. He’s working through the parts of First Languaged Lessons that he doesn’t know in the first grade level so that hopefully we can move to the 2nd grade level by Christmas….when he’s in 3rd grade. I’m totally not worried about that though. He’s continuing to do Handwriting Without Tears as well. I’m not sure that he’ll ever have legible handwriting because he doesn’t like to work on anything. If it’s not easy for him, he’s not doing it without a fit. Not that I’m already frustrated by that on day 3 of the semester….

Our great find for the year so far is the Bible Study Guide for All Ages. It rocks and even the kids love it and hover around the binder for it just hoping that it’s time to work on it. It has coloring pages, a time to read the bible story from an actual bible, memory work, review, a timeline, map work and more. It does most of that every day and yet it doesn’t seem like it’s taking very long. Right now we’re reading the story of Joseph. It is broken into short parts, like today was Genesis 39. We talked about how it hurts other people when we tell lies and did some work based on that chapter. It’s good good stuff.

Ok, Z is awake tiME TO “”"fix supper! He’s helping

Summer is ending…

I can’t believe how fast our summer has gone. I thought we would be “doing school” sporadically all summer but I can barely keep our house from falling into disrepair….let alone keep up with schooling. We have been quite busy!

Actually I’m quite ok with our lack of schooling because we’ve done plenty of real life learning. The boys did the Earth Adventures camp out at Rock Springs that ran for 6 weeks, attending one day a week. They learned quite a bit about nature and the importance of recycling. They loved it. We are definitely doing these camps again next year. We’ve even signed up for an additional astronomy class since that’s what we were and will be studying at home.

We also started participating in a class at the Children’s Discover Museum in Bloomington. They offer homeschool classes once a month that usuallly have something to do with Science. We’ve done a water one and an astronomy one so far. We’re signed up for the next four classes too. The boys love the class and the opportunity to play at such a cool museum afterwards. We’ve been spending some time at a bookstore before we come home too and I was really surprised to hear that the boys look forward to it almost as much as their class! Who knew?

Michael went to church camp for a WHOLE WEEK at the end of June. He cried when it was time to go home. No tears were shed when it was time to go to camp, just when it was time to come home. He wanted to stay at camp forever. Gosh, who wouldn’t??? Well, what kid wouldn’t, I should say… church camp is exhausting for adults… I should know since this was my first time in like 5 years *not* going to camp! We missed Michael a lot but it was also nice to not have all of that sibling bickering going on.

The summer reading program was keeping us busy for a few weeks there with their Wednesday afternoon activities. They had a safari guy, someone from the conservation district, and I don’t remember what else. We ended up missing a couple of the classes due to me having a scatter brain. We also didn’t remember to fill out our reading time cards so we could get prizes. Heck, I don’t think we’ve even been to the library in like 3 weeks.

Two weeks ago we started swimming lessons. Joseph had to re-take the “Gus and Goldie” class because his class was full in all of it’s time slots. No big deal, I felt like he needed a refresher in that class anyways since he’d passed by the skin of his teeth. Zedekiah got in on the action with the “Mom and Tot” class. I figured I was going to have to chase him around anyways if we weren’t in the water so we might as well spend the $20 and enjoy all the chasing. Michael joined the “Advanced Beginner” class where they teach you diving and the back stroke and stuff. Well, Michael tried really hard but is having a hard time with the advanced topics in his class and Joseph goofed off the whole time and was being a big fat show off so neither of them passed their classes. I think Z and I only actually went to 1/2 of ours but they were a fun 1/2. We just signed up for the next 2 weeks this evening. This time we get to take the much coveted late morning class and the Matlocks will be joining us. Last time William took the last gus and goldie spot in his time slot so we had to go to the evil 9am slot. The water is cold and the mommy is grumpy by the time we all get to the other side of town at 9 for lessons 4 days a week. Yay 10:30 class!

So all of that plus a bunch of trips out of town, not nearly enough bike rides, and not nearly enough time playing outside and you have what we’ve been up to this summer. I think. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind.

Home again, Home again, Jiggity Jigg

I’m going to admit that I’m only blogging because I assume that starting this will guarantee that Zedekiah will want to go to sleep soon.

We have had a crazy busy couple of weeks. Last week my cousin was home on leave so we spent Monday in St. Louis playing with her and her daughter. We all went to the City Museum in the morning/afternoon. We *love* the city museum. It is the source of endless entertainment for us. They recently opened up their rooftop that has a ferris wheel, giant slide, a fun pond and a school bus dangling precariously off the edge of the building that you can actually go into. So fun.

That evening, Erika and I headed to St Louis Mills for some fun shopping. We bought gobs and gobs of stuff. Last time I was at this mall I wasn’t impressed. This time was much better. I was sorely disappointed at the gymboree outlet though. I didn’t buy a thing. The prices were insanely high for stuff I bought last year for 75% off or so.

At the same time, my husband took Michael Joseph and my cousin’s daughter out to Six Flags for a fun night riding roller coasters. Sometimes he is a very brave man. That or he just really loves amusement parks. Sometimes it’s hard to tell

Michael turned 8 this week. I’m the mother of an 8 year old. I didn’t feel old when I turned 30 this year, but having an 8 year old definitely makes me feel old.

Michael doesn’t have many friends, and definitely no male friends that are near his age. He doesn’t realize this. We managed to convince him that he’d have much more fun going to an amusement park or something rather than having a birthday party. So, even though we were just at Six Flags on Monday, we went to King’s Island in Ohio this weekend.

They have a fantastic new coaster. The kind where it’s actually worth it to wait in like for 90 minutes. Not that I did, the park as an odd baby swap system which we took full advantage of. I rode my first roller coaster in the last 3 years. The Diamondback was awesome. The others were a bit too jerky and since I wasn’t feeling very well at all this weekend they did a number on me. I made it though Joseph was able to ride a coaster or 2. I don’t actually remember anymore. Looking back, I can’t remember one that he did get to ride. Poor guy. Well, not too poor, he did pee his pants twice and had to go back to the hotel with me. That lost him about 3 hours of park time. Zedekiah rode his first amusement park ride when we rode the Diego Train ride… I had to buckle him into his own seat and everything. It was a good time

We made it until midnight at the park. With 20 minutes left until closing, Michael and Jeremy got in line for “The Vortex” only to find it was shut down….but might re-open before closing. Well, they waited it out. After waiting for a while, and noticing that the park was closing in 5 minutes, we headed over to the exit of the ride, knowing that being fast was my only chance to get in on one last baby swap. Well, they let Jeremy’s coaster go twice without getting off at the end. Then when they got off they were going to be closing the ride, but my husband convinced them to honor the baby swap. Michael and I got to ride in the front car and be the only ones on the train (save for an employee apparently, but Michael doesn’t need to remember that). That is an awesome memory to share with him I loved riding roller coasters with my dad as a kid. I”m sure MIchael will have many many memories of riding coasters with his dad, but that memory is just ours.

Today we spent the entire day coming home. I have had a nasty bug for the last 3 days which has zapped most all of my energy. I’m hoping for a restful few days at home coming up.

Super Saturday

We have had a fantastic weekend today. It’s 5 am and I thought I’d blog about it It may not last as I don’t think Zedekiah actually *wants* to be awake right now. Friday we went to Jeremy’s cousin’s birthday party…he’s about a year older than Michael and the boys had a blast. We were planning on going to church for family movie night afterwards but there was a crazy storm so the movie on the lawn was canceled.

*Woah* just had to save Z from having 3 feet of books fall on his head!

Yesterday I really wanted to head out to the farmer’s market in Urbana and Jeremy really wanted to go to the Hobby Shop over there so we all headed over there nice and early in the morning. (OK, not quite as early as I’d hoped….but considering Jeremy went along it was early). We had a great time in the sweltering heat. Ok, there was a nice breeze….sometimes. We found lots of special treasures. I think my favorite is the giantest cauliflower ever in the whole world. If i remember I’ll take a picture of it sometime. We got more veggies, bread, cookies, peaches and steaks and grabbed a few things from the co-op there.

When we got done we were crazy hot and hungry so we decided to check out an Indian restaurant in Campustown. Zyggyz turned out to be really good. (45 minutes later, Z is asleep.) I really wish that Decatur would get an Indian restaurant. Oh and Zyggyz is really cheap for Indian. It was $25 for all 4 of us that eat real food which is really very reasonable these days. The boys liked their food and Michael even said it was better than Chinese buffet. That may be because they sat at the counter by the register and scored themselves some free goodies including some un-spicy fries (yes there were fries, they were seasoned with indian spices and I was insanely curious about what “masala fries” might be so I ordered them for the kids) and a mango lassi. I actually heard Joseph say to them “That’s enough food for us!” We left very full.

We then split up with Zedekiah and I headed to TJ Maxx and Barnes and Noble and the big boys headed to the hobby shop. Oddly enough that split didn’t work out. Joseph started crying because he couldn’t go with me. No matter how many times I explained that they were going to go have fun and I was going to go look at clothes, he would not be persuaded. Maybe he was fondly remembering the days when he was the baby that had to go with me and not do cool things with dad. Maybe he was just being a stinker. The world will never know. I did find myself a new outfit, Cars Crocs for Michael, a Jedi hat which was for Michael but is now Joseph’s due to fit Michael threw, and a bunch of History Channel DVD’s.

We ended our trip at Cozy’s Custard which was recommended to Jeremy by someone at the hobby shop. It was pretty good but rather expensive for what it was. I think I would have rather tried the new frozen yogurt place that we drove right by at some point during the day…and that I recommended to Joanna so she’s actually been there.

So it was quite a nice day trying new things and spending time together as a family. Nice enough I’m blogging about it at what is now 6 am. I’m trying to decide if going back to bed is really bad idea. I could sleep for another hour. But then again I’m hungry…so I could get a head start on breakfast. Hmmmm such decisions.

Hmmm

I told you my heart just wasn’t in blogging right now. How weird to say. Funny how that happens pretty soon after I get a shiny new blog. Maybe it’s all the pressure….

I actually have gobs and gobs to share. I won’t be doing that today. I’m just going to share my excuses for why I’m not blogging.

#1 Zedekiah is really mobile now. He is into everything so it seems we’re spending tons of time chasing him and taking things away. We’re spending a significantly smaller amount of time baby-proofing. I feel like I never make any progress.

#2 It’s summer and it seems we have gobs more to do. The boys have summer reading program at the library, camp at Rock Springs and all their normal boy stuff.

#3 I’m lazy.

#4 I’m getting to spend more of Zedekiah’s naptimes away from the bed….today he slept for about 90 minutes without me.

#5 It’s garage sale season. Oh I have the love. It also consumes our friday mornings, sometimes the afternoons and sometimes saturday morning. We do love it though! The boys are playing with their Transformer Walkie Talkies right now from a sale this morning.

That’s really all I have to share right now!

Garage saling! YAY!

Garage saling was a good time today. It was just the boys and I this time and we did quite well. We hit Macon’s town sales today. Macon is really small…much smaller than I remember we were done a little after 10 this morning. Which is crazy.

Garage sale loot.

Here’s the loot:
3 levels of Developmental Math for ~$6
“I can do All Things” art program ~$4
4 3rd grade lifepacs for ~$5
Keys to Metric Measurements, Keys to Measurements 50c
Math U See Zeta DVD $3
Phonics Pyramids $1 (This goes with Phonics Pathways which we didn’t like but Joseph will really work well with this book!)
some multiplication book $1
2 DVDs for $1
Jeans for Michael $1, 50c
Shorts for Joseph 50c
pyjamas for Joseph $1
pyjamas for Zedekiah $1,$1
pants for Michael 50c
a few books for the kids 25c/each
leap pad game 25c
AAAHHH!! I forgot the Bionicle….it was the big kind in a box…potentially unused for $3.

And this last part is a total God thing. Yesterday we were at Kmart and Michael found a transformer that he “really really really really really really really wanted”. I convinced him that he should really wait until after we go garage saling and after our upcoming chicago trip before he makes a big purchase like that. Finally he agreed with me. So today we’re out and about. The boys are being so awesome, Zedekiah is sleeping, Michael is finishing his homework. A great day. At one of our last sales we found all that homeschool stuff plus the Transformer we all know and love…. “Brawl”. He was a whopping $5 but I let Michael buy him anyways because it was new and shiny and a nice lesson about slightly delayed gratification.

Since we got done so early we went down to my Grandma’s for a nice little visit. It was nice to get to see her. Going to grandma’s is really complicated for our family. I need another person to go with me just in case there’s an incident. Someone who’s not busy with something else. It’s extra awesome to get to see my grandma on mother’s day weeknd

Tomorrow we might be going to Urbana’s farmer’s market. I’ve been wanting to go since our midwife told me about it last year. This is the 2nd weekend and seems the perfect time to get over there.