Sometimes....

Sometimes you put together a really great outfit or hairstyle and you want to take a picture of it.

Sometimes, you're jumping on the trampoline, but when you're mom snaps a picture it looks like you're sitting on the fence.

 Sometimes you are loony and stay up WAY to late, so you're mom starts snapping pictures to pass the time.

Sometimes you paint your chicken coop rust-orange and teal, just because.

Sometimes your day lilies start to bloom and it makes you happy.

Swim Team

Lincoln and his friend Max at the Spanish Fork meet

Lincoln's doing swim team this year. It's been really fun. I was never really into swimming as a kid, but after going with Linc to a couple of his meets, I'm totally hooked on it. It's such a cool sport. I love the atmosphere, and the faced-paced-ness of it. And most importantly Lincoln is enjoying it too. I think it's a good sport for him.

His favorite events to race in are backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. He isn't a big fan of freestyle, unless he's swimming it on a relay team.

Waiting in the bull-pen.

Swimming freestyle in a relay.

Backstroke is Linc's favorite. He's placed third in it in both meets we've been to so far.

The team pic. Yes, I'm cheap and just snapped the shot over the photographer's shoulder. Lincoln is on the front row, third from the left. 

We still have 3 more meets before the county meet at the end of the season. What a great way to spend the summer. I'm hoping that Ivan and Adelia want to do it next year too, they learn a lot, it's a good life-skill to have, and it's WAY cheaper than swimming lessons. :)

Poetry Unit

Yay! The time has finally come! I pre-ordered the book Explore Poetry! With 25 Great Projects, and then day-dreamed and drooled over all the fun things we were going to get to do out of it. And it's finally come! And we started right in. I love it already.

This was such a nice break (for me) from Math and Science, I could have cried. Oh the joys of literature! My heart has found it's happy place. And maybe, just maybe, I can bestow some of my love for this subject onto my children..by force, if necessary. Ha! (Fat chance.)

The first thing we did was talk about what poetry is exactly. The book gave us some awesome examples of poems, and we dissected them. It was glorious!

AND....I think Lincoln actually enjoyed it a little bit. We were reading a excerpt from The Odyssey, and looking up some vocab words in the glossary to try and figure out what the story was that the poem was trying to tell us. And Lincoln got really excited about it (I think because he's read an Usborne Young Readers version of The Odyssey, and likes the story) and wanted to look up all the words, not just the ones I'd assigned.

We also made Poetry Journals, because in later chapters we'll be writing poetry of our own.

Later in the week, we talked about different kinds of poems. Then we focused specifically on acrostic poems. Each person brainstormed the letters of their name in their poetry journal, until they found things that they were happy with and made them into a finished product to hang on the wall in the school room.

I about busted a gut laughing at Ivan's. I don't know if he was being funny on purpose, but his poem is so hilarious.

It's like he's saying, "Normally I'm really good at art, but I don't like this poetry stuff." But in saying that, it's actually a really clever poem. Which means he IS good at the art of poetry (whether he's trying to be or not), and so it's an oxymoron. And it makes me so happy. And I laugh whenever I read it.

Next time we're doing "Found Poems" I think. I've never done one of those, so that will be fun.

Native American Cultures: The Southeast: Birch-bark Canoes and Clay Beads

So I backed up in our Native American Culture studies. I hadn't covered them as thoroughly as I wanted to, or done as many of the projects as I wanted to.  I went all the way back to the Southeast region. We reread the chapter, and I created a vocabulary activity to go with it and had the boys do that and glue it into our notebooks.

Then for a fun activity we made birch-bark canoes. We cut them out of paper and "sewed" up the sides using yarn, but talked about how the Native Americans used animal sinew. Then we melted wax and smeared it to the bottom. I was supposed to use paraffin wax, but I didn't have any on hand, and the thought of dragging five children to Wal-mart for wax made me want to rip my eyeballs out. So instead I just burned a candle during quiet time, and used the pooled wax to smear on the bottom of the boats. It worked, except that we didn't have enough wax to go around, so the entirety of the boats didn't get covered, which means they didn't float as well as the might have otherwise.

BUT, this didn't end up being a bad thing, because we talked about it. Why the boats sank when the water touched the paper, but not the wax. What else might have been done to keep the boats level and floating, etc. So all in all it turned out to be a nice stroll into the scientific method. Sort of. :) The kids were happy, that's all that really matters.

A few days later, we made beads out of clay like the Seminoles. We read about how Seminole women wear so many beaded necklaces that you can't see their necks at all. When the beads dry, we will paint them and string them into bracelets, or maybe necklaces if there are enough beads.

Lincoln is also reading the book Soft Rain by Cornelia Cornelissen, which is about a Cherokee girl who has to walk the Trail of Tears with her family. He's not super thrilled about it, because it isn't "his kind of book", but oh well. :) It's not along, and it goes with our unit.

Baby Chub

I seem to be bad a blogging Rue's monthly mile-markers. Now that June is half way through....When I took her in to her 6 month appointment she was 100th percentile for height and 93 for weight. No wonder my back hurts!

She eats solids now like a boss. (And then crashes, haha!)

And she is the only child I've ever had to has successfully climbed out of her bouncy chair. 

She is not so fond of sleeping...during the night time. But she'll sack out just about anywhere else. Splash pad included.

And this swimming suit....sheesh, it was too big for her when I bought it, now I have to squeeze her into it, and it still won't stay down over her belly. Chub for dayyyyyyssssssss.

Love my Ruester!

A-MAZ-ING New Laundry System

Did I mentioned a few posts ago that I went to a homeschool conference? At that conference I went to a class called 8 Systems to an Organized Life (or something really close to that), and I got to listen to the lady named Becky Evans (who is super cute and also a professional organizer) talk about some systems that she uses in her home to be more organized. All of her ideas were great, but the one that seemed to be bathed in holy light with a chorus of angels singing it's praises was her laundry system. 

Why? Because it is so doable. And it's flexible (which is crucial for me, whenever I attempt to follow a schedule that requires me to do a certain amount of something on a certain day, I always fail and end up hating the system, because my days never look the same.), and it takes the majority of the work off of my shoulders and evenly distributes it onto the whole family. Win. Win. Win. 

I ran right home and told Aaron about it, and we figured out how to implement it into our laundry space. I didn't take a very good "before", because I was in such a hurry to get going. But I wish I would have. Just imagine this space, only with dirty laundry bins, a stupid plastic bucket full of junk, and an ironing board with stuff piled from hell to breakfast, so that really you can't see very much of this space. :) 

The set-up above, is just us setting the dowels between the block to determine if they are long enough. They don't actually go there. 

And here the bars are in place, we're just figuring out the spacing of laundry baskets, and deciding that we need one more rack on top. 

 Decided to buy black laundry baskets (because we could get them in a pack of 6, but I wish we would have gotten white, oh well.) and one more dirty clothes hamper. And here's the finished thing! Ta-da!

 So, quick over-view about how our system works...

-The three baskets at the bottom are for dirty clothes: darks, lights, whites. Each family member brings in their own dirty clothes from their room and sorts them into the dirty bins.
-My job as mom (or Aaron's job when he feels like it) is to run the dirty clothes through the washer, then move them to the dryer. When they come out of the dryer, I sort them.
-Each person has a black basket for clean clothes (Aaron and I are sharing a basket). I sort the clean clothes into black baskets, and leave them there. Every day (or so) each family member checks their black basket, they take the clean clothes to their room and fold them and put them away, and bring back the black basket.
-Not pictured above, but I also added a white basket on the floor for clean towels/sheets/blankets/rags/etc.

And that's pretty much it. It's genius because it's simple. AND the best part is that there are NO, ZIP, ZERO, ZILCH piles of clean clothes stacked sky-high all over my bedroom. That right there folks is worth millions. :) My laundry room is a happy place and therefore my bedroom is a happy place.

Now if only I could figure out something equally genius for the dishes....

The Foxgloves

It's hard for me to take baby-steps. I have such big plans for our yard, and such little funding. But today is Friday, and the Foxgloves are blooming, so things are all right.

Crank

Someone was being beastly today. No joke, she was so cranky. I didn't know what to do with her, so I took her outside and laid out a blanket for her in the shade while I weeded a flower bed. And poof! She was content. I guess she just wanted to be outside as much as I did. She was happy the whole time I was weeding. And just before I was done....

She crashed. I guess I'll just hang out in the front yard until she wakes up.

Short and Sweet, I love it!!

"Mom, I have an opinion about my hair. And I want it cut like this." -Adelia

Baseball is My Favorite Season

Adelia is playing kickball this year.

Ollie wishes he was playing. He brings his mit to every game. Darling!

A New Hike

Tonight for FHE we went up Hobble Creek Canyon and tried a new hike called the Left Fork Days Canyon hike. The trail-head starts at Cherry's Campground.

Even though it took for-e-ver to get this kid moving along the trail, I think he's adorable when he squats down to watch the bugs flying from flower to flower. He's so curious about the things none of the rest of us ever stop to notice.  Lovin' me some T2 today.

Aaron gave a good FHE lesson on Joseph Smith's first vision. It was really cool to talk about it surrounded by trees and nature, just like Joseph was when it happened.

And then Rue fell asleep...

And the sun was setting and we were losing daylight, so I had to carry Ollie down the mountain on my shoulders so that we could pick up the pace a little. Crossing the stream was particularly interesting with a wiggly two year old on your shoulders. :)

We'll definitely try this trail again. It was awesome, and we were in the shade most of the time, so it will even be good in hot weather.