My sons,

Today you chose to get dressed in your matching shirts from Grandma and Grandpa, because you like each other and want to be like each other. You're buddies, playmates, built-in best friends. It's not always like this, of course. Sometimes you fight and argue and cry that you're getting left out. More often than not, though, you find life more fun with one or both of your brothers by your side.

I want this for you, this friendship of the heart as well as kinship of blood. When you grow up, life is lonely sometimes. I can't help but think that having your brothers be your friends, too, will help a little.

So love each other. Choose kind words. Encourage each other to do right, to do better, to have fun, to explore life together. My mama's heart says to keep each other safe, too, as you do all that.

                                                           Love,
                                                           Your sentimental mama

Eleven ... when did that happen?

While I was pretty certain that Ethan just turned four the other day, I find that he is now ... eleven. He requested a turtle cake, although thanks to some miscommunication he got a regular turtle and not the sea turtle he had envisioned.

We took his cake to Grandma and Grandpa's to share the celebration with Avy, and Grandma knows how to throw a party! Hats and noisemakers are not optional for a good party.

And neither are gifts, obviously! 

Happy Birthday, Ethan! We love you so much!

Happy Birthday, Ben!

Benny is FOUR now! We had his family party Saturday, and he was thrilled to finally be able to open some presents. (Although he thought we should just move on to the ones under the tree after he finished the birthday gifts!)

I think he likes it!

"Optimus Prime! That's amazing!"

"This is just what I've been wanting! A drill like Daddy's!"

He wanted a monster cake, and he showed us his monster face, too.

This one isn't so much a birthday picture, although that's Optimus Prime in truck mode. But this picture makes me laugh - Benny is there all neatly buttoned up in his church shirt (this was after lunch Sunday) while Alex has his shirt OFF and has changed into sweat pants. It just shows their personalities so well!

Benny and Dad coming in from getting birthday donuts and a square balloon.

Ben named his balloon "Happy Birthday Benny" and talked to it all day. It's hard to believe that he's four already, but they insist on continuing to grow up!

I used to be organized ...

As we near the end of the year, I start thinking about goals that I'd like to set for myself for next year. Lately, our need for a little more organization in our household has been on my mind a lot, but I'm not quite sure how to achieve it.

There was a time when I was pretty organized. I ran my home with a nifty-swifty homemaking binder. I deep-cleaned regularly, did freezer cooking, planned detailed menus after browsing through cookbooks, made my own cleaners, and enjoyed every minute of it. I even had time to exercise!

These days ... not so much.

What happened? Well, we moved to a considerably smaller house. We had Alex. We started our first year of homeschooling - and who knew there would be so much paraphernalia along with that? By the time the baby was six months old or so - about a year after we moved - I was kinda sorta starting to get things under control again. Then I got pregnant again - after years of infertility before Alex - who says God doesn't have a sense of humor? We started our second year of homeschooling, and the papers and books continued to multiply. We had Ben. We were just treading water for a while after that. See, Luke and I are both planners. Our idea of spontaneous is to plan something three days before doing it instead of three months before doing it. An unexpected (although dearly loved!) baby after all these other changes definitely knocked us off kilter.

We're to the place now where most nights the house is picked up and the kitchen is cleaned before bedtime, but that's only happened ... well, more recently than I care to admit. I still make my own cleaners, but I'm down to a couple of basic all-purpose recipes. I plan menus, but I do it at the library while the two little boys are doing story time, which kind of precludes browsing through cookbooks as I plan. If I do any freezer cooking, it's during the summer when I have a bit more time. And deep-cleaning ... well, let's just say if you come to my house, please don't look too closely at the baseboards! I have a list of what should be cleaned and how often, but it doesn't get done as regularly as it should.

And this is where you come in! As I said, I'm not quite sure how to get where I'd like to be with this. Will you share your best organizing techniques and time management tips with me? I've used a binder, 3x5 cards, a weekly calendar and a daily to-do list, all with varying degrees of success depending on the season of life I've been in, but I'd love to hear about what works for you (and why) even if it is one of those methods.

So, please - hit me with your best suggestions!

Sense of style

I'm trying to pull together pictures to do a calendar for a Christmas gift (act surprised, okay Mom and Dad?), and I'm finding so many pictures I should have posted and didn't because ... well, life gets in the way. But this one just makes me laugh - Ben decided he should have a necklace, and made himself one out of paperclips. See how nicely he matched it to his shirt?

October Highlights - Benny

Benny is a busy boy, like most almost-four-year-olds. He has been listening in on most of Alex's Five-in-a-Row stories and tagging along for the activities, but he's also been busy building forts, playing with the Playmobil toys, making Zoob guys, and throwing all the dress-up toys on the floor. He's quite frequently a cowboy, complete with his trusty steed, but sometimes he decides to be a super hero just to change things up a bit. He's also not napping except for maybe once a week, so he's been a regular ray of sunshine the last couple of weeks.

After Alex used the counters to add up Ping's relatives, Ben tested which would float.

Marker! Glue! Paper and scissors! This is heaven!

Woohoo! Sour!

Ben challenges me and keeps me busy, but I can't imagine life without him! I'm kinda glad we have two more years before he's officially in school.

October Highlights - Alex

Alex has been enjoying school, and has done something of a turn-around when it comes to some of his written work. He is flying through Explode the Code and is suddenly fascinated with math concepts. He's been carrying around a small whiteboard, a dry erase marker, and a container of counting bears so that he can devise (and write out) his own equations.

In October we "rowed" the books The Story About Ping, Madeline, and Lentil. He loved learning about China - he can now find China on a map and a globe. He counted out all of Ping's many family members (68!), learned about the way cormorants fish, and made a paper duck just for fun. France was almost as interesting, and he discovered that he loves coloring flags and doing mapwork! (He requested the mapwork because he sees Ethan do it.) We'd never read Lentil before, but he enjoyed it tremendously. He played the harmonica in the bathtub, colored the Ohio flag because the story is set in Ohio, and tasted lemons to see why they made everyone's mouth pucker up.

Oooh, sour!

~Falls dramatically to the floor to demonstrate how icky the lemon was~

We're enjoying Five-in-a-Row so much. It's a perfect fit for my wiggly, active little boy, and it's the perfect balance of planned-out-for-me and flexibility that I want from my perspective. So thankful to have found it!

I do have more pictures of Alex, but it's HARD to get good pictures of him because he never is still long enough. Here he is doing his after-dinner chores ... apparently it's easier to sweep with your arms pulled into your shirt!

October Highlights - Ethan

So the week-in-review posts haven't really been weekly. (Why yes, I do have a masterful grasp of the obvious! Thank you!) I am a bad mommy blogger, because I can't seem to manage *doing* things with the boys, taking pictures at the same time, and then blogging about it. (These people I live with think eating and clean clothes to wear are more important than blogging! Can you imagine?) Maybe if I conquer my time management issues, I will go back to the week-in-review posts. We have been doing school, though, so I thought I'd do a highlight post for each of the boys for the last month or so.

Ethan:

**decided that the middle of his spelling test was a good time to target practice with his dart gun. Mom was thrilled.

**is taking a break from doing his CLE math every day to do some intensive work on addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. He understands these concepts just fine, but he needs to build some speed and automatic recall with them. He's improving quickly, but if you have any good (fun) drill ideas, please leave us a comment!

**finished the first book in Geography through Literature (Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea). He gave a presentation to the whole family, narrating the book and demonstrating the route that Paddle (the wooden canoe and Indian) took out to the sea. Note the laser pointer - that was Dad's idea. He's a cool dad - I would never have thought of that!

He's also been making great strides in his writing, both in content and willingness to complete his assignments - especially when compared with last year. He's been writing various types of paragraphs - how-to, descriptive, comparative, and persuasive. (He is sad to report, however, that his persuasive paragraph didn't convince us to let him get a poison dart frog for a pet.) This week he took a break from the paragraph writing and wrote some poetry instead! He wrote a funny one about penguins and then this one about one of the Transformers.

Soundwave

Warrior fast, warrior smart

Evil robot with no heart. 

Warrior silent in the night,

Soundwave, ruling in the fight.

(I probably would have chosen one of the paragraphs or the penguin poem, but he's pretty proud of this one and asked that I post it instead.)

He's been reading a bunch. He enjoyed Hatchet, has finished the Redwall series, realized that the library carries Calvin and Hobbes, and discovered the Mysterious Benedict Society series.

He would also consider the two squirrels he shot to be highlights of this month, so I'll leave you with a picture of Ethan and Grandpa and the dead squirrel. Because really, doesn't every blog need at least one picture of a dead squirrel?

Tucking Daddy In

Luke usually gets home from work shortly before 7:00 am. He eats something and is in bed within an hour or so most days. This day he was waiting up to see Ethan, who had stayed with Grandma and Grandpa over Sunday night, but he decided to rest on the couch for a bit until Ethan got home. Alex and Ben decided to bring him pillows, blankets, and stuffed animals to make sure he was tucked in nice and comfy.

It's not every day I get to see him cuddled up with a snake and a penguin, so I was careful to get a picture of it.

Tuesday, the highlight of the whole day was the discovery of the new "suction-cup lizard". He's easy to use ... just peel his face back and stick him to any smooth, flat surface.

Then enjoy the noises he makes when you pop him off again!

Your little brothers will  not only laugh, they'll think you're about the best thing ever.

Not only that, but it's far more entertaining than something boring like math or writing!

Nap transitions, camera woes, and excuses

That time between when a boy needs a nap every day and when he doesn't need one at all can be so hard ... lots of crankiness and tears, and it can be so hard to stay awake when you sit down in the evening to watch a little TV!

Note Benny's mismatched socks. 

 We were going to have a picture of Alex writing his list of subjects to complete on the white board (like I do Ethan's). He was sitting on top of his desk, shirtless, and had "REED" written down. I grabbed my camera ... and the battery was dead. I sent Ethan for his camera (our old one) ... and its battery was dead. Add to that an SD card that just wouldn't read any more because it was so old, and we're left with the one picture I snapped tonight. (And a recharged battery and a new SD card, both too late for the cute pictures this week!)

So I haven't gotten several week-in-review posts up, any of our vacation pictures, or anything else posted. We have been busy, but there's also been some post-vacation funk going on. Fighting colds, fighting children, and unmotivated mamas add up to just the essentials getting done. That does include school, but no pictures of this week and I'm too lazy to look back over our records and list all that we've done. I have high hopes for next week, though!

Week in Review, September 4-7

I managed to take absolutely no pictures this week. Zero. Not even the ones of Alex and Ben listening to frog books with their stuffed or rubber frogs. So I'm just going to hit a few highlights of the week, and hopefully we'll manage a more thorough review next week.

Ethan completed his regularly scheduled work for the three r's. He made a Venn diagram comparing marshes and ponds as part of his geography assignments, categorized characteristics of angiosperms and gymnosperms in science, and read all of the frog books I got for Alex's theme this week. He also finished Heart of a Samurai and was thrilled to get Swallowdale from the library.

Alex actually enjoyed one or two of his workbook pages and suffered through the rest. He explored the math concepts of patterning, measuring, and counting, wrote me lots of notes, teleported and time-traveled with his own Trio creations, and learned about frogs and toads for science. The highlight of that theme was probably the frog egg ice pops he made with me. At the end of the week, he sat down to tell me about what he remembered about frogs. This is unprompted his narration:

They can jump. 

They have smooth skin.

Some have round fingers. They are tree frogs.

Some have webbed feet.

Some have claws for digging.

Toads have bumpy skin.

They're tadpoles when they're babies.

Baby frogs have legs and a tail and are called froglets. 

Frogs have slime.

At this point, I asked him if he remembered why frogs have slime. He thought for a moment, then said, "Because they're mostly for boys?" 

Ben tried to get Alex to run away from me so he could play pirates, listened in on most of our frog books, built lincoln log houses, teleported and time-traveled with Alex, and declined to wear a shirt most days.

They all started back at AWANA with our church, loved spending the weekend with their cousins, and had a blast at the Central Wisconsin Children's Museum with some friends.

Cousins

Shucking corn with Grandma, swimming, or just playing ... cousins are great! (And we wish we were able to see ALL of our cousins more often!)

Week in review, August 27-31

We had another great week of school! I tweaked our schedule a bit this last weekend, and it helped Alex and Ben's day move along a little more smoothly. Ethan continued with his AWESOME attitude, even {imagine me falling over right here} doing schoolwork in the evenings just because he wanted to!

Not that the week was perfect or entirely conflict-free ... you can probably imagine how well the day went that started out like this:

Jumping games aside, Ethan:

*completed five lessons in CLE 500, moving him into the second Light Unit. (We started this earlier this summer, so he's a little bit ahead of where he would be otherwise.)
*completed six lessons in Winning with Writing
*completed three lessons in Growing with Grammar (and likes only having grammar scheduled three times a week!)
*completed three lessons in The World of Plants - among other things, he gave a short presentation on why plants are important in industry, dug up grass to inspect the roots, and constructed a model plant cell (no pictures of any of that because I tend to forget to take them.)
*continued work on Geography through Literature. This week he studied ponds and sawmills, did more mapping, completed vocabulary work from Paddle to the Sea, and more.
*continued with Wordly Wise vocabulary
*blew through three more spelling lists with Sequential Spelling
*studied Georgia and New Jersey in his state study

*read lots of books. I forgot to mention this last week, but we're not doing a formal reading or literature program, he's just reading a lot and talking to us about it. This week his favorites that he finished were Swallows and Amazons and Rakkety Tam. He was thrilled to find out that Swallows and Amazons was the first in a series, declaring it "one of the best books I've ever read." Rakkety Tam is another book in the Redwall series, a long-standing favorite of his.

Alex:

*worked on fun thinking skills games with Mom - his favorite this week was Trucky.
*studied the water cycle. We read lots of books and also did several fun activities and experiments, including making a water cycle bracelet with glow-in-the-dark beads, making it rain, seeing water vapor on a mirror, and watching food coloring move through shaving cream to simulate rain coming through a cloud.

For some reason, this is the only picture I got of Alex other than the jumping ones.

As you can see, that last experiment was mostly a fun way to make a mess. I saw it here, and if you click through to the link you can see that they made lovely prints with the colored shaving cream with they were done. My boys? Made - and I quote - "swamp water". Alex narrated the entire water cycle to me at the end of the week, though, so it would seem he did learn something!
*played more math games
*once again turned his nose up at anything that came in workbook form.

Ben:

 
*made faces
*played with little cars
*colored a couple of pictures
*stuck popsicle sticks in slots in a box
*saved the world several times (I know this because he went around yelling, "Don't worry! I'll save you!")
*wore his shoes on the wrong feet on purpose

Together, they

*completed five more lessons in The Bible Study Guide for All Ages. They seem to be enjoying this, and I'm a little surprised at the amount of detail Alex (and even Ben) are recalling.
*played some strange game where they couldn't step on the floor of the school room (during school), so they had to hop around from crate to pillow to chair to crate and back again
*didn't wear shirts and showed me their muscles

What a name ...

"Ethan," I asked, "did you read this special feature on Carl Linnaeus? It says he's considered the Father of Taxonomy."

"Yes, I did," Ethan answered. "It was pretty interesting. I don't think, though," he mused very seriously, "that I would name my child Taxonomy."

Mom falls on the floor laughing, and Ethan looks very pleased at how well his joke was received.

Week in review, August 20-24

We've completed our first week of school! While I'll spend some time this weekend tweaking our schedule and possibly rearranging the schoolroom to separate Alex and Ben's desks, it's been a very successful week overall.

Ethan 
*completed five lessons in CLE math 

 
*completed four spelling lists from Sequential Spelling
*did lessons 1.1 - 1.3 in Growing with Grammar and decided he really likes having a workbook for grammar
*completed five lessons in Winning with Writing
* finished the first three lessons in The World of Animals, his first trimester science book
*completed the notebooking pages for the first two states in his state study
*finished Unit One of Paddle to the Sea in Beautiful Feet Books' Geography through Literature- he's really loving this course so far, and was disappointed that it wasn't scheduled for every day!

*completed his first "shop class" project with Dad - a side table to use while they are hunting together

 

Ethan's attitude was outstanding this week! He has shown a huge leap in his desire and ability to work independently, take on multi-step assignments with a cheerful, can-do attitude, and buckle down and do his work even if it's not something he enjoys much. I am so proud of him!

Alex

*worked on phonics with Mom and a whiteboard (we're loosely using AlphaPhonics)

*practiced phonics with Happy Phonics

*did bits and pieces of some handwriting and number writing

*enjoyed various thinking skills games with Mom

*turned his nose up at Rod and Staff's kindergarten workbooks, but did some anyway

*LOVED his Five-in-a-Row selection, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel 

A brand new sensory bin!

Drawing trees like Virginia Lee Burton's in the book

Seeing how steam can make things move

A Mike Mulligan cake (the Teddy Grahams are all the people who were watching)

 Together they did four lessons in The Bible Study for All Ages. We like that so far, but it needs some tweaking in how we actually work it ... pondering that this weekend.

Benny

* played, interrupted, rode his horse, shot bad guys, and generally was three. 

First Day of School, 2012

Today was our first day of school for the year! This year, for the first time, we officially have two students. Ethan is in 5th grade (and boy, does that seem impossible!) and Alex is in kindergarten. I not only remembered to make signs for them, remembered to actually take the pictures, and blogged about it, all on the same day! You may take that as proof that miracles still happen. You will notice, though, that my writing didn't show up very well on their little signs, so I've added captions to the photos.

Ethan, 10yo, 5th grade, 2012

Alex, 5yo, kindergarten, 2012

Ben, 3yo, play school, 2012

Our first day went pretty well. Hopefully that's an indication of how well our year is going to go!