More stuff

I’m so impressed with myself for updating 2x in the same week. You have no idea.
So my son has become quite the little businessman recently. It started with him creating his own currency (because I wouldn’t let him play with real money), which led to a nice little discussion about counterfeit money. Now we’re using that money to buy and sell anything and everything. Not only are we selling stuff in a store setting, we’re paying each other to perform tasks – mostly those related to cleaning. This morning the boy actually rented a toy to his sister. Not bad.
This totally happened last week and should have been in my last post, but I completely forgot. So here it goes. We all know that Alex is a reader. Nothing new. But he’s picking up a book just for fun more and more often. So last week. He read 3 Magic Tree House books (about 70 pgs apiece) just for fun. This is in addition to 3 books of the same length he read as required reading. He read an entire book one morning before breakfast. Now we’re not making any comments about the quality of his mother who didn’t get breakfast on the table until 9:30 – that’s beside the point.
Moving on. This spring we’re trying something new. In addition to our flower garden we’re planning a vegetable garden. We’re not actually planning on eating our produce (the girls have an aversion to all things green). We’re going to donate all our produce to the local food bank. The girls are so excited. They went with me to get all our supplies, and helped pick out a few seed packets. As soon as it is above 50 degrees (and not raining) we’ll get started.
One last little tidbit to share… This weekend the kids are going to stay at Ms. Patty’s house for the whole weekend. They are sooo excited. I had a fun weekend planned scrapbooking with the girls, and Jory wanted to go visit family. So she and Mr. Jeff graciously agreed to watch our kids for us. Hopefully we are all still friends at the end of the weekend.

General life…

Well life in these parts has been pretty typical these past few days. Let me try to pull up some recent memories to record…
We had a pretty bad rainstorm awhile back. It left our yard pretty much underwater. Without actually having measured how high the water was, I’d guess it was probably about 2 feet deep in some parts. Deep enough to submerge some of my daffodils completely and make getting and out of the driveway an interesting experience. But not bad enough to do damage to the house, so it’s all good. The good news is we’ve had plenty of dry days since that storm and the water has mostly receded, so I have most of my yard back, the roads are all dry, and the park to our north is open again.
Spring is here. Well sort of. It’s still pretty cold at night, but starting to warm up nicely during the days. We were able to spend some time out in the garden this week. Uncovering new growth here and there, picking up sticks and all those other fun chores you do when it’s not quite warm enough to really get into the soil. Keeping a close eye on our daffodils, which are finally starting to make some progress towards being real flowers instead of little tiny green nubs poking out of the ground. The spring peepers have come out of hibernation and are singing to us from the swamps. They make me smile whenever I hear them.
School is good. We’re getting closer and closer to the end. We can almost taste the freedom. 7 ½ weeks remain. The kids are all working super hard, and blossoming right before my eyes.

Update on life

So what’s happened since my last post? Well I turned 30 for one thing. Wahoo… My birthday was full of lots of my favorite things. Lunch with friends, a hike in the park (even though it was FREEZING!) and dinner with my parents. Fun times.
So the first signs of spring are starting to creep in around here. The weather is warming up slightly and little green things are poking their heads through the soil. I’d say about 1/3 of the daffodils we transplanted last fall have started to sprout. Every time we step out to play the kids run around the house taking stock of what is growing and how tall it is. We can’t wait to get out there and get our hands into the soil again.
So school is going well. The end of the year is creeping closer and closer. We have about 9 weeks left. If we don’t go anywhere for spring break we’re looking to be done in mid-May. Which is good, because who really wants to be learning when you could be planting something or taking a hike. Not us. We recently moved up to the 2nd grade texts for Spelling and Math. I just didn’t feel like the 1st grade texts were challenging him anymore. So even though he’s slightly annoyed that I took his “easy” work away, he once again seems sufficiently challenged. Which makes this Mama smile.

Bad bad bad.

Bad blogger I know. Don’t remind me.
So what’s going on in our house? Too much. Lets see what I can remember.
We’ve been a little sick this week. Lots of coughing and nose blowing, but nothing too serious.
Last weekend - President’s day weekend I took the kids out to the lake house. My mom and I took our scrapbook stuff and we crafted up a storm, Alex shoved his nose in a book, and the girls played. Then we hit up the President’s day sales at a local outlet mall. We found quite a few steals at Osh Kosh and at The Children’s Place.
Last night was game night for grown ups at our church. We used to have game nights all the time when the congregation was smaller. But for some reason we hadn’t had one in a while. It was good to get together with friends, and just hang out. Play some games, have some snacks, and just gab. It’s so hard to socialize on Sunday mornings anymore, it was nice to just kick back.
I’ve started working on the church website. We were having a hard time keeping it updated with fresh information and pictures, so I volunteered to keep track of the Children’s ministry portion. However, people are already asking me to take pictures for other areas outside of children’s ministry to post on the site. Eek. Just hoping it doesn’t get out of control.

Cabin fever is setting in around here. We’ve had a few days in the upper 40’s and 50’s. We are itching to get out and dig in the garden again. We (ok, I) are anxiously waiting for our little daffodils to poke their heads through the snow. Counting down the minutes until we can go outside without our heavy winter coats.

Play time

So the girls and I were goofing off in the field house while Alex was at his gym class. Louisa asked for a turn with the camera, and here's what I got.

Better than any of the pics that I took that day...

General life stuff

More than anything feeling guilty that I’m letting this thing called life slip past without hitting the pause button to record a few moments.
The girls have had their birthday. No big party, just dinner with Grandma and Grandpa. They got many fun gifts. Perhaps one of the favorites was a sleeping bag for each girl. Everyone knows that sleeping bags are for slumber parties right? As part of their gift, the girls got to spend the night at Grandma’s. I’m not sure who had more fun, my dad or the girls. I’m still working on their 5-year-old pics, I managed to get a nice one of both, but they flaked on me when it came time for individual shots. So I’ll have to do some retakes here one of these days.
On Saturday there was a huge carnival at our church. The carnival committee asked if I would be a photographer for the event. So since I was “working” and no one in my family wanted to wrangle my kids through the mayhem, I went alone. It was kinda nice to be at a church function and be able to socialize without little hands tugging on me. Heck, it was nice to just be able to socialize at all.
In other news, yesterday was the first day freezing in weeks, so the kids finally got to make a snowman. It was also the first time I let the kids dress themselves and go out unsupervised. I generally go out with them still, but I had a lot of work to do yesterday. They did just fine, except for a minor mishap with a sled. Little by little, independence is creeping in.
Oh and a kid funny that I almost forgot. Driving to town, the kids are all being loud and obnoxious as usual, and Louisa is trying to say something to Jory. Well she had had about enough of Annie, so she hollers "Annie, stop errupting!"

right now...

I was looking through some pictures I took of the girls at their gym class last week, and couldn’t resist posting a few of my favorites.
So all is well in Peterson-land. School is going well. Tomorrow is our 100th day, so we’re excited about that. We finished the 1st grade spelling text last week, so now we’re working on a few high frequency words that he should probably know before we plunge into the 2nd grade text. He’s also transitioned from reading picture books to full-fledged chapter books – which is hard because nearly all the beginning chapter books are geared towards girls. But the girls are enjoying their “school work”. I love how when I announce that it’s time for school they excitedly run to the table eager to learn.
Cathy Gresham was here over the weekend. The girls turn 5 on Tuesday, so she came in for a little pre-birthday goodness. It was good to catch up a little, and let her entertain my children with an endless stack of stories.
We’ve had our fair share of winter weather this week. It all started with a system last weekend that dropped about 8 inches of snow on us, then we had 2 or 3 smaller squalls come through that dropped a few more inches. That piled on top of subzero temperatures has us looking forward to spring. We’re trying to make the most of it though; our lovely mulch piles on the annex have been fun for sledding and jumping off of. And here's one of Alex I just found having fun in the snow just for kicks

Snowed in

We're in the middle of a nice gentle snow storm. Nice little flakes have been falling on our heads for about 30 hours now, we're supposed to have about 12 inches when it's all finished. We were out in it earlier, sledding on the mulch piles. So here's Ms. Annie in the hat my mom made her for Christmas. And young Alex who had just jumped off a smallish mulch pile into a soft mound of snow. He's so impressed with himself.

Stuff

Well Alex is sleeping in this morning, so I have a few extra moments this morning as I wait to start my day.
Over the weekend I had a girls night out. I went with some friends to a movie/dinner/game night to celebrate a friend’s graduation from nursing school. Seems like most of my nights out revolve around scrapbook get togethers. It was fun to do something different.
We had a couple of days off of school last week. It’s funny how productive I can be when there’s no school and it’s to cold/yucky to be outside. There was much reorganizing/purging done. Feels good to let go of the clutter. During my time off I also took the time to get formal lessons planned for the girls. I like to start giving my kids formal “seat work” the January before they start Kindergarten. That way we can be properly transitioned into “school mode” by the time August rolls around. Alex was not the worksheet type, so we usually just played counting games or something for his “school” during those early days. But the girls think it’s “fun” to sit down with worksheets. So they’re starting with letter/number formation.
This week the kids are starting gym classes. Alex is taking a homeschool gym class, and the girls are taking something called Energy Zone which sounds like a combination of creative movement and letters/numbers/shapes. They are so excited. One of my goals for the year is to get the kids involved in a few nonchurch extracurriculars. Expand our social horizons a little.

Snow and ice

My mom has the kids for the afternoon, and you know what that means - play time. Here are some pics that I’ve been playing with from a recent ice storm…

Post Christmas post.

We kicked off our holiday week with a visit from some of our extended family. Some of my mom’s family came up for a few days last weekend. It was so good to see them again. It’d been a while since I’d seen my cousins. We had a little gift exchange, where I received a nice hat and scarf, which were promptly snatched up by my daughters.
Next up was a visit to Columbus. Our first stop was with the Alexander family, where my kids fell right into step with their kids all over again. Just like peas and carrots. And Cathy and I? Well, peas and carrots. So good to visit with them and see their house all decorated for Christmas. Good times. Our second visit was with some of my friends from college, the Smiths. They got married about 3 weeks after we did, Jonna and I tried on wedding dresses together. It was great to finally meet their cutie, Natalie (who shares my birthday!)
Christmas day? Well that was a flutter of twinkling lights, wrapping paper and hot chocolate. The kids got some great toys. The favorites were marble works (which was one of my favorites as a kid), some “talkie-hawkies” (walkie talkies), and some “comfy dolls” handmade by my mom. And Jory and I? Well we got lots of toys ourselves. Scrapbook stuff, a portable GPS and new lenses for my camera. Not a bad haul in the end.
Now the only problem is which toy to play with first…

Kid funny and other misc.

The other day I was cooking supper and there was a bottle of soy sauce on the counter. Louisa wanders over and says “Mom, you’re not using that soil sauce on the chicken are you?”
In other news, we are all about the paper airplanes this week. Alex received a book about how to make paper airplanes as an early Christmas gift. So he’s been perfecting his craft all week. He’s had a ball learning all the different styles, and creating his own unique creations. Some work better than others of course, but that’s part of the learning right? So glad that I can provide a learning environment that embraces paper airplanes, and sees them as a learning opportunity and not a distraction. I’m sure some teacher, somewhere is breathing a sigh of relief that she doesn’t have his fleet of paper airplanes taking over her classroom.
Alex’s 1st Christmas play performance was this week. Of course I was in the front row for his acting debut, camera glued to my eyeball. He delivered his little line perfectly, right into the mike. Proud mama.

Thanksgiving pics and general updates.

Well, since my children are still mostly asleep (at 9:30 - gotta love that), I thought I'd take a minute and post a few Thanksgiving pics.

I took so many that I love, so it was hard to pick. In the end, I went for shots of the cousins since my children are fairly well represented on this here blog. So we have Levi, wearing Alex's hand me down coat, and sweet baby Lance. As well as a group shot for Grandma P.

Currently…

Well I meant to do a big post about our trip at thanksgiving complete with pictures and the whole works, but frankly I’m thinking that’s not happening. So you get the 10-second version. We took the train out to Kansas City to visit with Jory’s family. We went there because it was sort of a central location for everyone, and most of us hadn’t been there yet, so it would be fun to explore. And it was. KC was a very fun little town indeed. We went exploring at the Crown Center, and shopping in the shopping district. We saw a fun cultural presentation about Russia at the Toy and Miniature Museum. The museum itself was also very fun. We had lots of fun playing with Grandma Peterson in the pool, playing board games, and getting in some cousin time. I got to meet my new little nephew, who is a cutie pie. It was very fun indeed.
Um… life here is a little crazy. I don’t have any of my cmas décor out yet. The children took pity on me earlier in the week and put out some “decorations” which mostly consisted of legos and action figures. If you look at it with your eyes half shut it could be a nativity I suppose. Whatever. No shopping has been done, no gifts, no wrappings, but I’ve got the hot chocolate thing covered, and the fire in the fireplace – oh yeah.

Mostly random

It kills me to look at the pics in the last post of us playing outside in tee shirts. How quickly the weather changes in these parts.
Checkers, checkers, checkers. I think it was a mistake to teach Alex to play checkers. He’s slightly obsessed with the game now. He asks everyone to play about 20 times a day, and the only one who ever obliges is Jory. Poor little guy.
We’re getting ready for a train trip to Kansas City for Thanksgiving. We’re meeting up with the rest of the Peterson clan. We’re very excited for another ride on the train, and to meet our new little cousin, Lance. Not to mention exploring a new city that none of us have ever been to. So lots of packing, baking, and Christmas gift-wrapping are happening in this house.
Yesterday I had a photo shoot with my friend Emily’s daughter, Eva. Eva’s birthday was last week and instead of selecting a gift for her party, I volunteered to do her 3-year-old portraits. She did super until my own children came in and got her all wound up. Mental note: Don’t take yahoo children to photo shoots unless absolutely necessary. When it is necessary, LOCK THEM IN THE VAN.
More random stuff: Christmas cards are done, make sure I have your address. We caught 2 mice this week (yuck). We got an inch of snow. And I think I’ve figured out how to help our children’s minister design our publications without using her stupid (I mean wonderfully terrific) software.

At the park

Last week was in the 70's around here. Which is really rare, to have a whole week in the 70's, this late in the year. So that coupled with a new understanding of how my camera works = lots of pics to share. So here we are playing at the park. Louisa's in green, the other two are of Annie. The photogenic child.

Playing in the leaves

More of my kids from the leaves.

Swing ones are coming. Perhaps.

Crazy times.

So the last few days around here have been a little crazy. For one thing it’s been in the 70’s since Friday. So of course we’ve been outside playing as much as possible, soaking up the last few hours of warm temperatures outdoors. Getting absolutely no work done. It’s all good right?
So let me think… Halloween was good. We made our trick or treating debut this year. The kids were so excited and nervous, they bombarded me with questions for days. Alex was a spooky planet (that looked remarkably like a pumpkin), Annie was a butterfly, and Louisa was a dragonfly. We went around in my mom’s neighborhood, and afterward the kids spent the night at my mom’s house. Fun stuff.
Saturday I had my first paid photo shoot with the Beam family from church. They wanted a 4 generational portrait taken with their new little boy. So I got some good family group shots and a couple of cute candids thrown in for good measure. While I don’t see myself going professional anytime soon, it was really fun, and slightly addicting. So I imagine I’ll do more in the future. If people ask, that is.
So I have a ton of pics to share, but frankly I don’t really have time to retrieve them right now. But some seriously cute ones of Alex in the leaves, and the girls on the swings at the park yesterday. Not to mention that cute little Beam baby.

Adventures in my world

It’s been a while. Suppose it’s time for another update. It was a pretty good weekend in our house. Saturday was Make a Difference Day at our church. They had like 8 service projects planned, plus they were serving lunch. So we went and had pizza with some friends, then we took Alex to the Senior Center to play Uno (the girls stayed and played in the nursery). Afterward he told me that when he’s a grown up he’s going to go over there every day to play cards. I hope he does.
This weekend we were glued to the TV watching The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. I had never heard of it, but Annie picked it up at the library, so I figured why not? Well it was an instant hit with all five of us. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a cartoon series from the 60’s and it’s FREAKING HILARIOUS. When you get a chance, go look for it on u-tube or something. It’s worth it.
That’s about all, we’re gearing up for a busy week around here. In addition to the normal humdrum of life, I seriously need to get started on my Christmas projects.

Scenes from my life

Playing outside recently, we have:

Alex and his missing teeth

Louisa strangling her brother

Annie playing under a pile of leaves