My Yearly Post

I haven't posted since last August and so much has changed!  We now have another little girl who looks almost exactly like Ladybug in my sidebar ;)  Seriously, twins born 2 years apart!

I sometimes think about blogging.  I think it would be great to document our journey and special to look back on it, but...time.  Not my strong suit.  Time management is something I struggle in!

SO, to update:

Little Girl is 5 now and getting ready to start part time Kindergarten in a couple weeks.  We are going to do some homeschool  in the afternoons.  We are using My Father's World Kindergarten curriculum.  Mr. Man is tagging along as he sees fit.  We do this during the 2 little girls naps.

Mr. Man is 3 and going to go to preschool 3 days a week at the same school as his big sister.  On his mornings off (2 days a week), we are going to do some before Five in a Row which I am so excited about!  Ladybug will be tagging along as she sees fit.

Ladybug is 2 and we will doing Tot School while the biggies are in school.  We are using a combination of Letter of the Week Preparatory Curriculum and this new website I found called Let's Tot School.  I used Letter of the Week with Autumn.  The emphasis isn't actually on letters (misleading title!), but it has a weekly theme and I use the theme to find fine motor activities and fun books.  It really is a lot of fun!  Between LOTW and the Tot School website, it will be about 30 or 45 minutes a day of "mommy and me time"...I think.  We haven't started yet so we'll see.

Then we have a new little miss!  Maybe Little Miss should be her nickname on here :)  She is 10 weeks old and a sweet, snuggly thing.  She will be just held a lot and kissed a lot and hopefully will be awake during some of our read aloud time.

I sure do love my little family.  It's stressful at times and my house is pretty much always messy, but I try not to let that get me down.  It's a season.  Before I can blink, I will have big kids doing all my household cleaning anyway, right?!  My husband will be deploying soon and I can't really let myself think about that or I cry.  But ready or not, it's happening soon.  Even so, I am blessed to be his wife and so blessed to be a mama.

update

It has been so long since I've written a post.  8 months or so.  My baby is now a toddler and my toddler is now a little boy.  My little girl is still *kind of* a little girl.  But, kind of not so much.  My husband said to me tonight, "I get the impression that you don't enjoy Autumn as much as the others".  And I, in true Meg fashion , let him fall asleep and then came out to the family room to cry.  I know it's not rational, but I always feel like I could do so much better by my family.  I always feel like I never do enough or I'm not patient enough or fun enough.  It's a vicious cycle, I know.  I've read those mommy guilt blog posts.  It's true I haven't enjoyed her as much lately.  She has been so cry-y lately and we have such opposite personalities.  So it would seem.  Although, that's not really true.  She is more like her daddy, for sure, but actually all 3 of us have quite a bit of crossover.  Sometimes, I forget she is only little.   She seems so old compared to her siblings, but she's really just little.  

We got our sweet bulldog back from my in-laws.  She's like a fourth child to my husband.  I'm pretty sure Chris has been walking around with a hole in his heart.  I'm glad she's back.  She does fit in nicely.  Eliza is her buddy.  She follows Bella (the dog) around everywhere and hugs her and kisses her.  So sweet.  Autumn is all about our (newish) cat Macy.  Macy showed up on our doorstep in Oklahoma on Thanksgiving and wouldn't leave so we kept her and named her Macy Cranberry (I just love her Thanksgiving name!). 

I am homeschooling Autumn this year.  I don't know what that means, exactly.  She's only preschool age so maybe it's not really considered homeschooling.  We chose not to send her anywhere and I am doing purposeful educational activities with her at home.  

I wish I were more decisive.  I wish I were more analytic (analytical?).  I wish I could grab the future by the horns and tame it into what I want it to be.  I admire those people even though I don't especially get along with them, ha.  I say that, but seriously, all 3 of my best friends are D's (or Lions or North or whatever you want to call it).  Isn't that strange??  All 3 of my best friends were also valedictorian's.  Not me!  Not by a long shot.

It's late and Eliza keeps calling out in her sleep so I think I'll go snuggle her for awhile.  Lucky me :)  (I'm being totally serious by the way!  Snuggling your babies when they're babies is kind of annoying because you have to do it so much, but snuggling them every now and then once they start to grow up is so so so precious)       

Ladybug 9 Months

Ok, 9.5 months.  Ok, almost 10 months.  I also definitely missed 8 months.  Life is crazy, what can I say.

She is finally sleeping through the night!! And it is so very nice.  Words cannot express how awesome it is to get sleep almost every night.  She is sitting up, crawling everywhere, pulling up, and has tried to stand unassisted twice that we have seen.  I would be totally fine if she would walk soon!  That way we could all go outside and play and I wouldn't have to worry about her being on the cold ground.   Her sister and brother walked at 14 months and 12 months so we'll see...

She still put everything (I mean everything) in her mouth.  It is so frustrating!  I just can't keep everything off the floor with a 2 year old and a 3 year old running around!  She will find tissues, pieces of paper, crayons, etc.  We pretty much have banned all toys with small parts for the time being, but they still leave stuff laying around (like tissues!).

She is eating pretty good.  Still doing mostly pureed.  She enjoys eating and has yet to refuse anything.  She is nursing maybe 4 times a day, maybe 5.  I don't actually keep track and it's liberating.

She is still pretty small, but now gaining weight the way she is supposed to so that is a relief.  We will take her again next month.

She still isn't very demonstrative.  Well, that's not quite true.  She smiles allllll the time.  She just doesn't laugh out loud very often, but neither did Autumn.  If you *try* to make her laugh, she will, not just on her own.  She does have an adorable laugh though :)  She rarely cries.  Pretty much only when she's tired or hungry, mostly tired.  She is a mama's girl.  I'm enjoying that for the time being.

She has started to get super wiggly on the changing table.  That's not annoying at all.  She kicks her legs up and pulls on your hands with her hands.  I don't know if I noted it before, so I'm going to note it now so it makes it into her baby book when I finally do it, but when she was younger she would constantly cross her ankles when she was on the changing table.  All the time, her left ankle would cross over her right.  We would have to unwind them a lot during changing!  That is a sweet memory.  

She has lots of hair and so far no curls.  50/50 shot with that.  She is a beautiful baby and I am so glad she is ours.

Too much flash (squinty eyes!), but look at those beautiful sister smiles!  

Don't mind the mess ;)

GLE Week 8 Q is for Quail

Curriculum found here.  This week we talked more about Moses.  He had a verrrry interesting life!  Lots to talk about.  We also talked about Qq and what sound it makes and what it looks like.  She knows all her capital letters and most of her sounds, so we just focus on the lowecase one most of the time.  Although sometimes for Q she said /k/ and sometimes for G she says /j/ which is especially tricky because sometimes G does make the J sound!



















We had that little pheasant-I mean QUAIL, ahem- on her desk all week.  Pretty cute little guy (I assume it's male since it's tail is super colorful).  Got him at Hobby Lobby.


 

We painted with feathers and went out and tried to make our own bird nest.  I think we made the walls too thick because it took all week to dry out (we used mud) and then it wouldn't even hold together!  Them birds be smart.

Tot School Letter Bb!  He actually started saying /b/ by the end of the week.  Today I started to show him T and asked what sound it made and he said "/k/k/k/.../b/b/b/..." Pretty funny!  However those are the 2 sounds he has learned so far (C and B-we did do an Ii week, but he never even got close to understanding /i/i/i/) so I'm pretty impressed!

Playing in his pasta bin with ABC Find It from 1+1+1=1.  He does really well with that so we do it pretty much every week.  He is pretty limited in what he can do without getting super frustrated so we keep it simple around here for my little man!  A perfect example is the school bus craft from No Time for Flashcards.  DISASTER!  He had a total meltdown when I glued the pictures down.  He didn't want to color the bus and he got mad at me when I sang the wheels on the bus song.  So I did the craft without him and then he happily carried it around all day! :)  

One thing Mr. Man will do happily all day long is read.  Autumn crafts way more than him, but he reads way more than her so go figure!  So far, they both have a healthy dose of appreciation for books for which I am exceedingly happy about.  

Caleb's books focused on the /b/ sound and Autumn's were just bird books I had.  None of them fit the theme very well, but we made do. 

GLE Week 7 I is for Insect

This week for our bible study/preschool at home, we talked about Moses and the plagues.  Curriculum found here.

Only a couple of pictures this week!

Our 10 plagues index cards.  For the 5th plague (sick livestock) we ended up putting pictures of farm animals on it.  The bottom picture is some activities we did.  Both the iguana with the Avery stickers and the big I with the iguana's glued on it came from 1+1+1=1.  The dragonfly is a paint, cut, and glue from learncreatelove. 

Books about INSECTS! (or, bugs!)

  Tot school!  I tried to just go with whatever letter Autumn was working on (in this case, Ii).  I have now decided to work with him on letters he already knows or is somewhat familiar with (the letters of his name for example).

Painting an egg carton inchworm.  Some printables from 1+1+1=1 and The Mommy Teacher. 

We were putting Avery stickers on the igloo, but they ended up all over his legs! :)

Finding I books that feature the /i/ sound was a challenge for us.  We basically had no book focus this week.  He also didn't really get "I".  The whole point in doing things with him is simply for exposure though and now he does see letters and points them out so I know he is absorbing more than meets the eye.  I think in his head he believes he knows all the letters and they are all called "E" :)