Random...

This will be a rather random post- but these are a few of the things I felt like sharing on here:

First, our darling little baby girl in a picture I've decided to name "baby girl camouflage"

On the learning encounters front, Savannah (and Liam by observing her) is learning how to tell time on a clock with hands, she can tell you what hour it is, what it means when an hour has passed, the notches for minutes and seconds, etc. Pretty exciting to get to see it *click* and to know she'll carry this skill with her the rest of her life. But that's what all us moms do, homeschooling or not, right?

She's also now knows the long and short vowel sounds for all of the vowels and how to recognize them in a spoken or written word. We've also been working on sight recognition for words and some spelling. And math, and games, and reading, the usual.

We also had a pumpkin painting night...

Didn't Nick do a great job? He hasn't been able to use is artistry much lately.

Savannah got to milk a cow. It is our friend's cow and they had a milking contest at their kid's birthday party. They are fairly new to our lifegroup but are already like family, and are such neat people! They even had a root beer drinking contest at the party! Isn't that fun? We will be babysitting this cow the week of Christmas on our land. Which means, if you know us pretty well we will be offering you LOTS of milk around Christmas time.

And if you take the milk (which they have given us some) you can skim it, make your own half and half, cook with the cream (aka heavy whipping cream), make your own butter and buttermilk. Like we did...


*Recipe and instructions for homemade butter from another awesome book from my mom Made From Scratch. We love it when family gets on board with our crazy-back-to-the-land way of life.

And if this is all grossing you out, you can just forget you ever read any of that- and proceed to read about how normal we are...

We went to our homeschool co-op family night at the Parkhurst Pumpkin Patch. It was so much fun to spend the evening at such a fun place and hang out with so many awesome families. Our group rented the place out after hours and we had fires, roasted hot dogs and s'mores, went on a hay ride, and did all the other pumpkin patch fun stuff.



This is Levi, he was born a few months before Felicity, along with 2 other little baby boys all in our lifegroup, all within months of each other. FINALLY we're introducing another baby girl in about a month. Felicity will have a girl friend! Thanks Knox's!! So all in all, we've had 5 babies born in the span of 8 months in our tight knit lifegroup family. We are having so much fun together. This is what it's like to really do life together in fellowship with each other and Christ. We are blessed.

Speaking of, here are all of our lifegroup kids, minus Abigail who is still in utero...


Onto the next subject, before and after pictures of our remodeled (or painted, carpeted and refurnished) reading/ learning room.

I would call it a school room, and find myself calling it that all the time, except what we do in there looks nothing like "school".

It's more like the place we hang out and pick books off the shelves at leisure and read them to our hearts content, with and without the kids. And where the kids learn their colors, the globe, shapes, letters, vowels, human anatomy, animals, different cultures, math- you get the idea. But it's always casual and fun. When an opening comes up in our day, where we are all in that learning state of mind, we find ourselves here, the kids and I, perched on that couch learning together, and spending precious time together.

And its also where we listen to Nick play his guitar in the evenings.

So, there you go, a few random things that have been going on around here. See you again in another couple of weeks!

Fall Happenings

Well, fall is upon us in full swing. Our basil plants are dropping their leaves, we haven't gotten to enjoy mowing in a couple weeks since the grass growth has slowed down, and we are fattening up the chickens with corn for the cold winter months.

On the upside, we are enjoying things like chamomile tea and Scottish scones with lemon and ginger ...

*recipe from A Homemade Life, thanks Mom!

fires in the fire pit, and smelling like a camp fire till we get around to showering, sorry friends..

gloomy, rainy days at the Omniplex (I refuse to call it "Science Museum Okahoma") teaching the kids physics on the sly (with our friends Clayton and Evan who came with us so their mom could have a baby)...


We have green onions, broccoli, lettuce, and carrots growing since they like cooler weather, and used some slivers of green onion on this yummy cast iron skillet pizza...

Fall 2009 is also the season where we said goodbye to Grandpa John.
He was Nick's great-grandpa and the kids great-great-grandpa. John was 97 years old and he was just simply ready to see his wife again. Sharp as a tack and incredibly sweet till his last days. It was a blessing to have him around as long as we did.

He is missed by many people.

It's been a while since I've posted, so below is lots of stuff that we have been up to regarding our "learning encounters". I'd be flattered if you actually read it, but understand if your eyes glaze over.

First, we finished our unit study on Grandfather's Journey. In addition to what we already studied, Savannah learned some new art concepts like contrast and reflection, and we did some artwork together that exhibited these techniques. We did lots of math and did some work on the concept of weeks in a month and multiplication with numbers of weeks and days. The kids learned some new vocabulary. We discussed more about Japanese culture, the differing landscapes from Japan versus America, talked about pollution and taking good care of the world around us, and how big companies are supposed to be respectful of the world we live in. We also noted and discussed the different types of transportation that was available during the time periods in the book.

The next book we explored was How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. I suggest every parent get this book and explore it with their kids. I have talked about it before in a post below. It is just one of those books that you and your child fall in love with together.

First, we explored Italy, France, England, Sri Lanka, Jamaica by doing lots (daily discussions) of talking about their geographies, cultures, native animals, vegetation, and landscapes. For example, semolina wheat (we even bought some) from Italy and the Italian language, jaguars, Indian elephants and kurundu trees in Sri Lanka, the Indian and Atlantic oceans, bananas and sugar cane from Jamaica, apple orchards in Vermont, a review of France and much more. We did a science experiment of making seawater ourselves and waiting for the sun to evaporate it and collect the salt- just like the girl from the book did with water from the Caribbean sea.

We did this on the only sunny day we've had in forever and it proceeded to rain the same afternoon, so we'll be repeating this experiment, but the kids get the idea.

We did lots of new vocabulary, pantomimed, subtraction, fractions (with baking measurements) which led to the making of this...

Nick and the kids made it (since I do all of the cooking around here, it was a special treat to cook with dad!)

We started it after Felicity was in bed for the night and did not eat it till 11:15 p.m., on a picnic blanket, in our room. It takes a long time to make an apple pie from scratch.

Look at all the places in the world we have "explored"!

In addition to our book studies, Savannah has been doing lots of kindergarten worksheets, and Liam has been working on learning, drawing and gluing shapes (since it's fun and he loves it). Savannah has also learned the concept of seconds and minutes.

The kids have also been learning lots and having lots of fun at our homeschool co-op.

I have to end this post on a "only a homeschooled kid can...." phrase

Only a homeschooled kid can wear an outfit like this to "school" and not get made fun of, which makes my heart smile. Savannah can wear her 60's wallpaper print blue dress, pink sweater, red leggings, white socks and glitter shoes all she wants around here (till we go somewhere). ; )