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!