Oh my wonderful girls. That’s right!!! Announcing: EDEN ROSE. Due July 11, 2014 (though we’ll most likely meet her around July 4th). Our cup runneth over. We are blessed and thrilled beyond measure!!!!! – Adoring our clean sweep of little ladies. 😉
Continuing Right Along
I took the afternoon to finish Rachael’s Kindergarten lesson plans for the year. Yep, friends, for the YEAR.
I was thrilled to organize the remaining 18 lessons into 6 day bundles per lesson (dividing out each subject’s work and bundling them together by days). So pretty much now if I die someone can pick up my teacher book and teach Rachael the remainder of her Kindergarten year (P.S. No intent on dying, just happy to get this completed).
I also calculated out the days we have completed of school (I wasn’t tracking it before – oops) and have a game-plan for the remaining school year’s required days.
Just trying to get more organized here so I can
a). Not have to lesson plan each week.
b). make it a habit to track school days so…
c). I can have a written record should I need to prove the days we have homeschooled [With no idea where God will take us in the years after Matt graduates, I wanted to be prepared to meet other states’ stricter homeschooling requirements should we end up moving there.]
and d). Be more pro-active in planning fun things during our school year based upon future weeks’ themes.
It feels good to finally get a grasp on advanced forward panning for Rachael’s school year after just struggling to get into a regular school groove post-boys.
And it’s also been really exciting to make some changes in organization of educating multiple children in multiple grades, while balancing a baby on my hip (Hannah’s no longer taking morning naps).
I really like our new groove. And I’m excited and less stressed about the remaining school year.
Abi’s coming along quite well in her first year of preschool. She;s picking up things quite quickly thanks to being a byproduct of a homeschool listener. The alphabet and numbers are coming much more naturally to her and I’m excited at the increased fine motor skills in tracing and writing her own name.
And Rachael is really coming into her own in her Kindergarten schooling. It’s fun to watch her take confidence in developing the skills that began a looong (relatively) time ago when she first learned the alphabet. It’s also really neat to watch her manipulate her knowledge to apply it in different settings. And it’s downright fun to encourage her as she is beginning to read. Very…. very… slowly… she has begun sounding out words… one…. at…. a… time. And then her memory kicks in and she puts the words together into a sentence. It’s also fun to see her reading comprehension growing through a really fun workbook I picked up for a buck (Yay dollar store find!). She has enjoyed hearing the princess fairy tales and then learning to write sentences to answer the questions following the story.
I must say, I really enjoy homeschooling. And now that I’m more practically organized, I am enjoying it all the more.
I look forward to the wonder and excitement of the remainder of the school year. =)
All Trimmed Up
Yesterday I decided to trim Ms. Squirmy’s hair for the first time. She was starting to have a mullet of separation between the sides and the back (the greatest challenge for little girls growing in hair) so I figured a little trim could help even it out more. Then lay the challenge before me of how to get Ms. Busy semi-still. A buckle-in booster seat provided the perfect opportunity as well as a few highly loved toys, pacifier, and a little PBS.
Here’s a look at how long the back was prior to her cut.
Within 15 minutes, I put in some layers (since hair grows in layered anyway) and trimmed a total of an inch and a half off the back. But since she’s a squirmer, I trimmed it off in quarter of an inch segments so as not to make a drastic change that couldn’t be evened.
She was super squirmy post-cut so the pictures are the best I could do while letting her free.
Here’s her new cut, right at shoulder level.
Despite some being tucked behind her ear, this is the best pic I got of her newly evened out hair.
And since I’m still wanting the top to grow out instead of bangs, she’ll continue to sport her clips and pigtails.
And of course I saved some clippings for the baby book. 😉
I trimmed the older girls’ hair too. Rachael’s is unnoticeably different, but healthy. She continues to announce that she’s growing her hair out like Rapunzel.
Abi, on the other hand, was a celebration day. With this last trim, her sides are finally the same length as the back. Bravo little girl, it only took 3 years and no scary haircuts to even them out. 😉 She’s my “more bald” hair starter in life.
Here after an over-all trim, you can still see that the back is longer than the sides.
wet
dry
I decided to go back in and take an additional inch off the back to even it with the sides. So I cut a total of 2-2.5 inches off the back and just a tiny bit off the sides.
Here she’s looking down so it doesn’t quite touch her shoulders.
And with a section of her hair growing in wavy, I trimmed that section a little shorter to allow her under layer of curls to come through.
I’ll add a picture of the dry finished product a little later since she was napping directly after her trim and I forgot to get one before bedtime last night.
But I’m really happy with how all three of the girls’ trims turned out. Rachael’s – unnoticeable but healthy. Abi’s – Yay for even! And Hannah’s – more bobbed and less mullet. SCORE!
In Job
After 10 days of wading through his “pushing it” moments, his “right on target moments” and his friends’ “poor theology” moments in Job, it was such a breath of fresh air to read God’s response this morning. There was no need to decipher or question and try to figure out the real message behind the Words. It was a clear-cut humbling as God explained only a fraction of his Omniscience and Omnipotence. Whenever you need a pride kicker, fellow Older brothers of the Prodigal son (I’m speaking to myself here too), jump into chapter 38 and 39 of Job. It’s just not possible to leave those chapters feeling mighty.
Yet what a great God that even in our righteous indignation moments, He stoops down to correct us because we have the privilege of being His kids.
The Privilege.
He doesn’t need us.
He wants us.
“Slightly off’ in so many moments, ‘a little too prideful’ in so many moments, sinful and ‘battling out this flesh and Spirit” us.
What a privilege to be His.
– Thanks for the reminder in Job.
Wordless Wednesday: Just So Abi
(Enough Said)
– I adore her.
So here’s our little secret that we’ve waited to share until we graced out of the first trimester. This is healthy, happy and squirmy Lil Baby 4 who is due to join our company mid-July 2014. We’re excited and thankful for this new delight and look forward to sharing baby’s kicks and movements together until we get to meet him or her on the outside. I am currently in my first week of my second trimester and am thankful for the hope and privilege of soon parenting another precious one.
P.S. Now you know one of the reasons behind my quiet blogging lately. I’ve been SLEEEEEEEEPING. This whole participating in building a human is exhausting work! 😉
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For those of you who know me personally and have noticed the “Christmas weight” I was putting on (man how my body was starting to give it away), I appreciate you allowing us the privacy of telling you when the time was best. We have chosen this privacy since Matt, being an assistant pastor, tends to put us more in the spotlight than others. Miscarriage is always a possibility, but some parts of pregnancy hold a higher chance of miscarriage than others. So we have made it our goal to wait out the largest miscarriage window (12+ weeks) in order not only to allow for grieving, should it need to occur, to begin as a private affair, but also since we don’t want to make the decision for your family on whether or not you need to discuss miscarriage with your children. See, if we shared early on in the pregnancy and happened to miscarry, it’d force you to have to explain miscarriage to your own little ones who may not be ready or mature enough to understand that reality yet. So thank you again for making the excuses to your kids, for those that needed to, and diverting the questions to allow us the privacy and the respect of your own household in sharing our joyous news at the best time. This time around, due to when the boys left our home, we chose to wait a bit longer than usual to have our second dr. appt. Therefore, my baby bump was growing and more and more difficult to mask. Thank you again for working with us in awaiting the announcement. Funny how 2 weeks of difference can start to give it all away after you’ve been pregnancy 4 times already. 😉
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For those of you curious at what the breakdown of our family will be come this new one’s arrival: Rachael will be 5.5 years old, Abi will have weeks prior celebrated her 4th birthday and our dear Hannah will be 2 months shy of 2 years old when we hope to get the privilege of meeting our newest family member.
Thanks in advance for your joyful prayers.