Jesse Bear

This week I finally got myself together to dig into my plans for Claire and "school."  I had planned to get this going much earlier in the summer but things got away from me.  I have to, diligently, put myself on a schedule next September and stick to it if I'm going to get anything done with Claire next year since, as of right now, I'm going back to the school next year and the craziness will all begin soon.  I hadn't planned or expected that, but nothing fell into place like we'd imagined and it looks like another year teaching at the middle school.  The plan is to save a lot and get a lot done and see what happens next.  I'm thinking I can teach Claire preschool at home and keep the part-time job but not really sure how that will work after that.  One year at a time. . .
Anyway, this week we "rowed" Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? using a "curriculum" called Before Five in a Row. I have curriculum in quotes because, it's not too structured, just a book a week and all kinds of activities that you can choose from.  The goal, for me, is to get Claire interested in "doing school."   You read the book of the week everyday and discuss the book, look at the pictures, go for walks, create art, tie themes in with Bible stories, science, numbers, letters. . . anything.  There are a few sites, also, that have free printables that go along with the books that I can choose to use or not.  i decided to try some out at Homeschool Creations. It was perfect!  Just the right mix of simple activities from the original book and "academic" activities from Homeschool Creations to make it interesting for her.  She likes to write and count but if it gets to the point where she is tired of it or would rather play than do these things this year, I'll stop.  Right now, she thinks each activity, whether it's an art project, tracing words and letters or counting and doing sequencing activities is a "game."  We finish one and she says, "I wanna do another game!"  As long as she has that attitude, we'll keep it going and I think this system is good for her "year 3."
Anyway, here's a few highlights of our week last week:

Verse for the Week: "A cheerful heart makes good medicine" (Proverbs 17:22) and a happy heart makes a cheerful face. (Proverbs 15:13).

Colors, Patterns and Combinations:  Since the story was about Jesse Bear waking up, deciding what to wear and then continuing to "wear" various things throughout his day, one of the activities we did involved colors and matching and putting "outfits" together for Jesse Bear. To prepare for this, I trekked over to Hobby Lobby and picked up some colored, patterned scrapbook paper and created little pants and shirts for our paper Jesse Bear.  The cool thing about this is it teaches color matching through "playing" with the Jesse Bear "paper doll."   She was actually pretty good at putting "outfits" together.  

Another day we did some activities from Homeschool Creations after reading our book. One was looking at Jesse Bear's lunch and doing some story comprehension.  On the page was a little chart what said, "Did Eat" "Did Not Eat" and Claire moved pictures of food items under the correct side of the chart.  Her HUGE smile tells you what she thought of this "game."

Then we played a game of memory with pictures of items from the book.  Ashlyn tried to help out with this, to Claire's dismay. . . 

During the course of the story, Jesse Bear takes a bath before bedtime so the next "game" was "Count the Ducks" and match the correct number with the number of ducks in the tub.  The academic virtues of this activity is obvious, but she had no idea she was doing "work" We got to about 12 this time.  She can count higher but doesn't recognize numbers past 12 yet.  

This activity was just tracing the lines from Jesse Bear on the left to the shirt on the right. She begged to do this one while I was making dinner. . . 

Another day we did shapes and potato stamps.  The floor of Jesse Bear's kitchen has various shapes on it.  So we discussed shapes and I made these stamps.  Apparently, I'm terrible at cutting potato stamps.  Good thing Claire doesn't seem to mind.  :-)  Shapes is one thing we are still really "working" on (I say this in quotes since I'm not forcing anything, just thinking about it more and talking about it more in normal activities and conversation.  She still has trouble identifying the names of different shapes.  She's got letters and sounds, numbers and colors but shapes. . . no so much.  Momma's not too worried ;-)  Either way, we had fun with the shapes and Claire gets excited about anything that has to do with paint (she really loves art). . . so excited, in fact, that the paint ended up in her hair :-)

 Last couple of "in the house" activities involved more "games" from Homeschool Creations.  She colored Jesse Bear's shirt red and pants blue after tracing a sentence and did some sequencing exercises that, again, she called a "game."  Love it.

Our last day of Jesse Bear, I took Claire out for a walk after Ashlyn was in bed.  One of the suggested activities was to take your child on a nature walk to discuss patterns, color and the way in which God puts colors together to make things beautiful.  It was really supposed to go with the "matching colors" activity but I wanted to save it for last.  Right outside our neighborhood, over a small hill, is a huge field and a dirt path.  We walked along there, talking about the big animal holes in the path, the corn growing on the other side of the path and the cows and horses on the dairy farm we could see not too far away.  Afterward, we sat on a bench in the park across the street from our house and watched the sunset.  So perfect that I almost feel totally ridiculous writing this.  But it was the end of our first week.  I know homeschool weeks won't always be this great and end so well, but I have this first week to look back on every time things get crazy to remind myself why I want to do it this way in the first place.

This morning, during breakfast, Claire says to me. . . Yellow Ball this week?!  Yup on to Yellow Ball!

Faith, Music, Laughter and Grace: Roots and Heritage (Reed Family Reunion)

Did I mention these blogs I've been posting lately are "catch up" blogs?!  A week or so ago we got back from our trip to Colorado for our family reunion.  The last reunion was back when Claire was about 5 weeks old and they had agreed to do the next one 3 years later.  It was a little hard to believe that the tiny baby I was holding would be a preschooler the next time we all got together but, sure enough, even that next reunion has come and gone.
I had been excited to go on vacation and do something for a long time and the fact that nearly the entirety of my mom's family was going to all be on this vacation was really exciting.  I love this family. Love them.  We are not without drama.  Any of them will tell you that, but we all really do care about one another and when everyone is together, there's no shortage of "faith, music (who else has a family that will spontaneously start singing hymns around the piano?!), laughter (um, yeah) and lots and lots of grace."  The event planners really got it right when they picked that theme.
But first, we had to get there.  Our original plan was to take a long road trip.  We had planned on driving out to Zion, staying at the Zion Lodge with the girls for a night or two and then driving out to Colorado.  I was so excited to share Zion with the girls and be back there at one of my favorite places on earth.  But a few weeks before the reunion, we sat down to plan and the more we planned and priced things out, the more we discovered that the trip would cost more if we drove than if we flew due to all the hotel stays, gas, food and Christian not getting paid for a large chunk of the trip.  So, reluctantly, we looked up some tickets on Frontier Airlines and booked three tickets to Denver (Ashlyn is still free).  Bummed, but it also meant more time in CO with family so it turned out to be an okay trade off.

Mary and Claire looking out our room window

The girls did fine on the airplane.  It was Claire's second flight and Ashlyn's first.  Claire travels like a champ. I wasn't concerned and I had not reason to be.  She read, looked out the window, colored and talked to the poor woman that got put next to her on the flight out.  Ashlyn, however, I wasn't so sure about.  But she surprised me.  Ashlyn did ok looking at books and eventually fell asleep on the way out in my arms.  Luckily, it was only a 2 hour or so flight.  Hats off to those of you who take babies and toddlers on international flights.
Our reunion was at a place called "The Hideaway"  in Monument, CO.  The property is in a really nice, quiet location.  Most of our family made it and we really felt the absence of several of our family members who could not. There were things for the younger kids to do, a playhouse, a playground and lots of space to play and run.
The girls did pretty well with the schedule disruption of vacation and adapted fairly well to the new scenery. The girls really didn't do too back sleeping in the same room with us, although, there were a few naptimes where I watched on the monitor where they were doing significantly more playing than napping.  My favorite morning was waking up to Ashlyn, standing in the Pack N Play The Hideaway provided for us, with her little pj pants half down.  She was jabbering away, looking out the window at the Colorado morning.  While I'd have liked to sleep a little more, I won't forget her wonder anytime soon.
Reunion activities consisted of lots of catching up and talking, games (a Family Feud game for my generation fueled by answers from my parents generation and grandparents' generation, Minute to Win It) and mealtimes.  We became reacquainted with each other and with the history of our family, even history that delved several generation and hundreds of years back, thanks to my cousin and her hard work on our family's history and our ancestry. 

  One thing I appreciate about my mom's family is their concern with and recognition of the fact that leaving legacy is a very important thing.  To bring many of my readers up to speed, the reunion centered around the Reeds, my grandma's family.  My grandma is in the middle of 6 (5 girls and 1 boy. . .the last) and the family that comes to the reunion are the descendants of those 6 siblings.  There was a lot of talk and storytelling during the reunion about Mamaw (my great-grandma) and Papa (my great-grandpa) and the legacy they left.  I remember looking around the room at this fun, wonderful, yet totally imperfect, group and pondering the legacy those two left raising those 6 children.  They told a story about how the youngest, the boy, when he was very young, nearly opened the front door of the house for a church member when Mamaw was bathing in the living room.  Why was Mamaw bathing in the living room?!  That's what you did.  No separate bathroom with a shower or tub and not a whole lot of money to do anything about it.  And yet, these 6 children grew up, married, raised children of their own, who, in turn, grew up raised children and now 4 generations of people sit and talk and laugh and share grace and stories of the legacy of faith, music, laughter and grace this family of 8 left.  I find it crazy what we expect, as a nation and as a generation.  There's such a sense of entitlement.   Parents don't want to raise 1 child, let alone 6 without making sure all of their financial ducks are in a row.  Riches in faith, love and legacy last longer and produce better fruit than anything else. I remember when Mamaw died when I was in high school, one of my mom's cousins, spoke at the funeral and said, "You know, we Reeds aren't perfect, but when we are all together there's a lot of laughter and a lot of love." I've seen this truth with my own eyes, this very summer.
 I'm grateful my girls have this family.  I think I've mentioned this before in my writing but if not, I'm sorry. This family that isn't afraid to have fun, a family that accepts you as family, no matter how you got there, whether by blood, by marriage or by adoption and who accepts the prodigals back with open arms.  It's pretty amazing, really.
After the reunion weekend was over, we spent the next three days at my cousin's.  The kids had a great time together and Christian's most memorable moment was going out shooting with my cousin's husband (although, he really could have used a slather of sunscreen) and the girls went mini golfing for the first time.

 The flight home was a bit of a disaster, but we survived.  When we got to the Denver Airport, we were greeted by a very long check in line.  By the time we got to the front, we were 15 min too late to check in (they cut you off 45 min before your flight. So we got more more meal with my cousin, Laura before we came back to the airport to fly out at 5:00pm (our original flight was at 1pm).  The girls were exhausted, but they did fine.  While it's good to be home, it was very hard to get back to reality.  Missing everyone already.  Hope they plan another one soon.

How Does Your Garden Grow. . .

We've finally been able to get ourselves together in the last several months and get our backyard put in.  A few years ago we got started on it, put in pavers, planted ground cover and planted grass.  Unfortunately, that all went south in a few months after we realized that Bermuda Grass sucks.  We were incredibly unsure about what to plant and how and it just didn't go well.  The grass crept into the pavers and chocked out our ground cover and to make things even rosier our there, a gopher decided our yard would be the perfect solution to his civil engineering problems.  It got so bad out there I was embarrassed to look at it. Christian and I were agreeing on how to deal with it so we just didn't deal with it.  Not terribly healthy, I'm sure, but it's the only way we could "handle" it in our crazy lives.  I shut my sliding door, shut my blinds and tried to forget I even had a backyard.  We became "that yard."  Periodically, I would allow Claire to play in her sandbox on the patio slab but I didn't even want to look at it.
But over the last few months we'd be able to save a little money with Christian's new job and so the topic of the yard was brought up again.  I contacted an old friend from high school youth group (a name given to me by other friends from high school) and he came out, looked at our original plans, had a friend of his out to look at it, gave us an estimate, we discussed it and we agreed.  The set to work on a Monday and were done by Thursday that same week.  No. Lie.  I was in heaven.  It was done.  

Right after planting our garden!

One of my big dreams when we bought our house was to grow my own vegetables and fruit as well as some herbs in my own garden.  As part of our yard plans we had space for me to start planting my own veggies and herbs.  The landscapers already put in a few dwarf fruit trees: lemon, tangelo, orange and grapefruit.  So far, the tangelo and the grapefruit have started to grow fruit.  We still wait for the others to start.  I wasn't too sure what to plant in my own garden.  I knew what I wanted but wasn't sure I could really keep anything alive or if this whole, "Sarah has a garden" thing.  So since it was my first try, I went ahead with plants instead of seeds.  I bought mint, oregano, sage, parsley, cilantro, dill, rosemary, basil and green onion.  I also got a couple Roma tomato plants, zucchini and stawberries.  So far, everything except the cilantro is thriving.  I've learned a lot.  I'm learned that zucchini is a big bully and I have to keep it cut back but I'm happy with the fact that I have enough zucchini in the freezer to keep us supplied with side dishes for a long time.  Our tomato plants are huge.  One plant knocked over it's cage and I had to prop it up by hammering dowels into the ground.  It's so fun to watch the tomato plant burst with green tomatoes and then watch them turn red enough to pick and eat.  I like growing my own food. I like going through a recipe and making sure I have everything on the list before I go to the store and being able to check off herbs and vegetables that I already have in my own yard. I just wish I had room for more!

But things really took off when we were on vacation.  We came back to a thriving garden, ripe tomatoes and a zucchini bigger than any I'd ever seen!  We are having so much fun and feeling so blessed by our yard and our little garden.  

Sunny Celebration

Ashlyn can ride!

Love them.  Lots and lots. 

Claire's very favorite color is yellow.  You ask her what her favorite color is and that's what she'll tell you.  Yellow.  It's sweet, really.  Her name means, "Bright, illustrious" and I guess it fits that she picked the brightest, happiest color on the spectrum to be her favorite.  So when deciding what to theme the girls' birthday party this summer, I knew I had to go with something yellow.  So "You are My Sunshine" it became.  

Claire and her Grandma Christie

Most people who know me know how much I love Pinterest.  I found several cute ideas on Pinterest, of course, but for the most part, I just raided Party City's "yellow" section and made sunshine cupcakes.  We used yellow flowers for decoration (yellow daisies and sunflowers) on the tables.  Usually, we make all the food but my school schedule has been so crazy this year, I found out that Stater Brothers had a GREAT deal on a HUGE sandwich.  We ordered two of them.  Claire is at the age where she has a lot of friends and for the past two years we have invited, mostly, friends of ours with kids who play with her. Luckily, for now, her friends' parents are our friends.  Ashlyn, although, significantly less aware of what was going on, seemed to enjoy herself, for sure, although, her breathing wasn't the best the entire weekend.  On a side note, I'm worried about Ashlyn and her lungs.  Praying all the time that neither of them have my asthma. . .  She picked at her lamb smash cake, the lamb cake her grandma, her momma and her sister all had at their 1st brithdays.  But overall she did well and even met a new friend, Beckett :-)

Claire and her sunshine cupcake

Ashlyn and the smash lamb cake made by GG

We'll probably continue to have their parties together since their birthdays are so close.  We'll probably do it until it matters to one or both of them but not they love each other very much and to them, birthday is "our birthday."  Happy Birthday, my sweet twins-two-years-apart!

After the party.  Princess yellow fairy Claire :-)