Junior Camp

We sent three boys to junior camp this year. Three!!! When did three of my boys get old enough to go to junior camp? Ahhhh!!! They each had to help pay for their way becasue well...frankly, we're not made of money, and well, there's three of them. So they helped their dad in the Pyroboom business and used some other money that they had saved. They had a great time. We actually went to see them on Wednesday night for church, and Luke took one look at us and ran away as though he didn't want us there. ha! He's so my kid. I probably would have done the same thing. As you can see by some of the pictures, they had a great time!

In case you missed out

...on the announcement on facebook...... (This also proves how much of a slackard I've been in the blogging world. I never even posted the sonogram pictures from back in JUNE! How horrible is that?) He's a.k.a. Zak is due November 4th!!!

IT'S A BOY!!!!

His cute profile

One of his tiny feet
Face

another cute profile

The girls' b-day party

We had a birthday party for the girls' this year at Mickey D's. We had such a great turnout. I was so thankful to everyone who came and made their birthdays memorable.

Fourth of July

Well, it happened again! Eric outdid himself with his Fourth of July Fireworks Extravaganza this year. It was amazing. We made it safer by having it at a friend's house. They own a lot of farmland which made it much safer with the crazy amount of people we had there. We had well over 100!!!

Sky lanterns just like in Disney's Tangled movie - These were a HUGE hit!

Food time

Cornhole

The Carr's knew the local firefighters, and they came out....just in case.

Getting started

Four Wheelin'

Went to the Carr's house way back when and had a blast playing on the four wheelers!

School's Started

PS... Long post..and pictures ahead....a whole first week of school in one blog post

School started this last week. AHHHHH!!!! I have a 6th grader, 5th grader, 3rd grader, 1st grader, preschooler, and a toddler. (Of course, pretty soonyou can a newborn to the list too.) I'm working hard this year to be organized. I have most of our school plans done until Christmas which it totally unlike me. Hopefully I can stay on schedule. I'm trying to throw some preschool/toddler activities into it all. Not to mention we started a few new curriculums this week like SOS and Math U See. (However, we haven't been able to really do Math-U-See cause it's on back order. Whoops!) And we haven't started real history yet because we still haven't gotten all of our books. I know....I shouldn't have waited till the last minute to order them, but well...that's me. So far, it went smoothly this week, and I think we all enjoyed it. At least this is the first week I enjoyed the first week of school.

The girls working on dotting their I's with our new Do-A-Dot markers. I love those things.


I made my first sensory bin. It was school themed with letters, colors, school supplies, beans, and pom-poms, and some other stuff in it. As you can see Jakeb like it too. What's funny is that I saw even Luke playing with it the other day too, so it's good for all ages if you ask me.


Luke working hard on A Beka language


The boys got a new Science program, Switched-on-Schoolhouse, and I'm sure they like it a lot more than me teaching them science. It took us awhile to figure it out, but we got it going and now they're working hard at it.


Here's Blake typing out his spelling words in Microsoft Word. Afterwards, he was able to go to Spelling City and play some games. The boys are using a Keyboarding program to learn to type, so I thought by typing the words once a week, it would help in both areas. All three older boys made above a 92% on their Spelling Test this week, so see...it did help.

Klaire playing with her Guidecraft stack n sort puzzle


Kaleb working hard on his first grade A Beka Arithmetic. He did at least 1/3 of it last year, so that's why he's already so far in his book. I'm hoping to switch to Math-U-See for him later this year.


Here's our Pop-Beads that the girls were sorting by color. Klaire had A LOT of help with it, but Makenna aced it.

Here's Makenna simply working on her pop bead necklace.

The next day she did it by shape. I think she liked doing that better.

And well, I had to take a couple of pictures of Klaire playing dress up.....with the boys dress up stuff.

And here's how I found Klaire quite a few days...completely tuckered out form all the hard school work she had to do.

Here's she fell asleep while they were watching Leap Frog. How uncomfortable does she look? Crazy!

PS. Just so you know why there's more pics of the girls than boys.....they still let me take pictures of them. The boys fought me when I went to take pictures. That's why there is lovely pictures of the back of their heads. Here's proof of what they do when I take pics.

oh and one last thing. I've got a lot of catching up to do on the blog. I'll get to it eventually. I've got birthdays and lots of summer fun we had! Eventually I'll get around to that.

Memorial Day

The plan was to hook up the inflatable water slide we have, but after being in the shed all winter long...well...let's just say it had had better days. So we got a new pool. It started out in front yard, moved to the back yard, and then actually got moved one more time. These pictures are my favorite because they're when the kids were BEGGING me to take pictures. Yes, you heard me right....BEGGING me to take pictures of them running and jumping in to the pools. You sould see some of the pictures I have of them. I only posted a few.

It never failed Jakeb always had the best jumps.





Here was Blake most of the time. He didn't want to get in. He says he's not a "pool person."


Later that evening we went to watch Kung Fu Panda 2! Who-hoo! We all thought it was great, and we loved how they left it open at the end to have a third one. I think Blake was the most super excited one about it (which is funny considering he REFUSED to watch the first on for the longest time. In fact when we were once going to the theater to watch a movie as a family with our friend George, we all had to choose between Kung Fu Panda and Wall E, and would you believe that Blake influenced us to watch Wall E. Man, were Eric and George dying in that movie).

Go Blue!!!

We can't wait!

We're in trouble now

Look what Klaire figures out how to do. Even when I moved the dresser away from the crib, she could still get out!