God is Good.

Life has been crazy busy..
School is a challenge...
Babysitting a balancing act...
Health challenges a constant drain...
Foster care an emotional journey...
toilets overflow..
kids are defiant..
kids constantly need fed...
kids constantly make messes...



But we are fighting to thrive in this:
We have friends who inspire and encourage
We have Godgiven breaks on the tough days
The knowledge this is only for a season
The strength that comes from God.
The peace that surpasses understanding.

The blogging will be on the back burner for awhile as I work to find our place in this chaos.

Maquerade

  We were invited to our friend's 16 birthday! Miss C is our "Mother's Helper". She often goes with us on day trips and appointments to help me keep everyone corralled etc..she is an excellent helper, quiet, sees the need and steps in when needed, helps with big kids and little kids. Oh, I can only hope to teach my girls to be helpers like this!  

  

Fayth was delighted with her $2 Goodwill dress and received many compliments!

Lee wanted to go with a wolf look... this was about as dressed up as he will get. $5 Goodwill outfit

David wanted a white suit with a white tie. This was his compromise. Ignore the fact that he is wearing flipflops. We forgot to get him dress shoes. his was another $5 goodwill outfit. 

Elizabeth had originally bought a purple dress and a beautiful shear lace sweater.  $4 outfit...
But then I found this blue dress for $2. She chose to wear that with leggings we already had. 

The birthday party was at a local golf course. We left the littles with a friend so that the big kids and I could have a fun night out! I can not rememeber the last time I got dressed up to go out for anything other then church or court hearings ! 

We loved the message in a bottle idea...

The beautiful fancy table. We had to have a long talk about appropriate manners etc.. I loved that my kids had this amazing opportunity to practice good manners and eating out. 

Lee was proud of his table manners and mom was happy that all those times of teaching did really reach his brain! 

Just so you know we didn't make perfection.. even tho it was close. :) 

The birthday girl and her friends! 

They played a game called musical balls. My boys won the prize! 

The Birthday girl herself!! 

Dancing... 

My kids were thoroughly disappointed that we had to leave early to pick up the littles, They didn't know all the dances but learned quickly! I had told them before we left, when in doubt, watch what  others do. :) 

It was a fun night out for us. We so rarely dress up and go out, this was a very special treat.

Homeschooling...

First official week of homeschooling full schedule. We have been playing around with the schedule and starting school for several weeks.

 I have 4 laminated sheets of schedules on my fridge.

List #1 has daily jobs that get done at each meal time, counters and tables cleared, dishes washed and dried and  floor swept! It helps us keep our living space under control.

 List #2 has daily school schedule. It lists what needs to be done each day in order to complete our school year in a timely fashion. This way the kids know what to expect and I am not forced to do much planning each day.

 List #3 has our daily home maintenance listed. This is a new one for us. I am working on maintaining our house without hiring help or getting stressed out. I list things that bug me if they are messy and each day each of the kids does a cleaning task, except for Wednesday and Friday which are our running days. I do major things like cleaning kitchen and bathrooms, one room each day. I also switched up our laundry so that I am doing the majority of the laundry and only doing it twice a week. 

List #4 has the public school schedules listed for Nesiah and Anna, our babysitting kiddoe. We need to do bus stop morning and evening for one, kindy pick up for the other! It takes careful scheduling to make sure we don't miss anything!

It is taking a good amount of juggling to balance everything but so far so good. We have even added in weekly trips to the library. However, we have had to switch libraries because Lee read all the acceptable books at our old library. Oh, the thrill of a new library full of books we have not read!!

Several exciting things we are doing with school right now..

Postcard exchange! We signed up with this facebook group to exchange postcards with other families in the US. We should be receiving 5 postcards from 5 different states each month for 10 months! We also send out 5 postcards to 5 different states each month. There are so many things to be learned through this!! We got our first postcard today, from Hawaii!! The kids were delighted!

We are also doing co - op which is new for us. We decided to skip choir and running club this fall and try co op. Co-op will give the kids socialization with kids that live in our area. It will also be an opportunity for them to learn things in areas that I struggle to teach. 

We are also incorporating some of the easy peasy online homeschool curriculum for music and art. The kids are liking this. Somehow they end up spending lots of time digging around on the websites linked to EPOHS. I love when they love learning.

I am hoping this year will be a year of learning new things on a new level. As my kids get older their interest expand and it takes more effort to meet their levels of curiosity.